Posted April 4th, 2010
Your Website As A Storefront
When a customer walks into a brick and mortar store, they can browse through the shelves, picking up items, inspecting, and comparing prices before taking it to the cash register to pay.
Bringing your products online takes away the hands-on customer experience. Therefore, your site must be optimized to bring a personal, easy-to-navigate feel for visitors to your store.
Features to focus on would include the following…
- Plenty of content and product description like sizes, dimensions, colors and comparisons with other similar products. It must allow the customer to choose a product, get a clear pricing and shipping costs on the product, complete the transaction and get an order number, and/or invoice confirmation via email. Allow the customer to choose a shipping method.
- You must tell the customer if the item is in stock or delivered against order. Ideally, you should have an email contact or live help if the customer has a question. Most importantly you will need to respond immediately! If you want to provide your own live chat and help desk services on your website, specialized softwares are available for purchase.
- Be sure your customer service links are large and clearly marked. This enables your customer to find needed information quickly and without having to dig around.
- Provide an ‘about us’ section or a section about your policies. If you have privacy statements and customer satisfaction policies, your customer will feel better about shopping in your store.
- You probably want to have customer quotes and references on the storefront page, as well, to let your prospective client know that others are happy with your service.
- Provide an FAQ with information about your return-back policies, guarantees, shipping prices and insurance charges if any.
- If you are able to, offer a print catalogue for those customers who prefer paper to web pages.
- Do not annoy your customers by presenting products that are marked ‘sold’ or pages that say ‘under construction’ or ‘coming soon’.
- Do add new content frequently, so your returning customers will not be bored by seeing the same products they saw four months ago.
- If your site has got a date tag or has current references, be careful to change these references frequently so you don’t give the perception that nobody is attending or reading your site.
