A well designed website which have effective mixture of colors and remained like it over years, the company must have developed familiarity among its customers. Colors and design always let the customers to perceive about the product of a company. Loyal customers will feel a bond of consistency with the company; consider it like a home brand due to its consistency. Website’s style, design and selection of colors are so much important for the company because it determines the specific type of audience whom you are targeting. Different colors inspire the different set of audience. It does not make sense that you represent a baby product with black & red color background or any spa advertisement in orange background.

These are not the rules of thumb that must be applied but it is quite obvious that baby product should be displayed in soothing light colors like pink, white and sky blue. While mostly it is taken into account that blue, white and black background is safe for all kind of websites and the font size should be easily readable. Several times it is seen that websites have black background and writing color is white or vice versa which is the safe choice. All in all, simplicity makes the things go right.

There are several websites which that have flashy banners, logos, text styles, icons and whole landing page is overfilled with colors that give the page messy and non-professional look. Such websites look like advertising websites and people do not take it seriously because these websites do not convey their complete message. That is why mostly people close such websites within few seconds without reading complete message. And on the other side, search engines like simple websites more than messy and crowded pages. Make your site simple, clean and insert easy layout in it so that it will be user friendly along all descriptions.

Several times it happens that we keep on searching one domain name for long hours and we do not find anything in the end. I came to this clue that million entrepreneurs have captured billion of domain names. A parked domain mostly contains one page which indicates that the website is either under construction and meant for further development. There is no time limit for the page to be developed but the page must be revamped on yearly basis. This thing has made the whole system choked up and making the common people messed to find the particular domain searched.

The only strategy behind domain parking that entrepreneurs put some ads on the landing page and make some dollars from that domain when few people search that web address or click on those ads. It looks ridiculous that entrepreneurs have captured a complete domain and do not have any plan to develop it in coming years. Another issue that is related with development of page is payment of the hosting fee. Once you pay for the hosting services, the host will provide you enough space for the website and will fulfill your special requirements regarding your domain. Once host worked on the domain, it will be no more parked domain.

Another purpose for which people use domain parking is entirely for “reselling” the particular domain to the buyer for heavy fee. This was a good business in the staring days of internet when larger brands wanted to grab the particular domain names for business. Another purpose of parked domains is to redirect the traffic from a particular website that is quite similar to your web address like (for example) businesstoday.net to businesstoday.com.

I hope the purpose is clear now that why entrepreneurs emphasize to park domains. Your views are welcomed on this topic.

It is also true that we can get the better ideas while looking at illustrative examples of other ecommerce websites. Let me summarize few points to improve the effectiveness of an ecommerce website.

Homepage

The homepage should be excellent and well organized. A customer should not feel messed up at the landing page but the homepage should be very effective. All kind of content should be well organize, visible and easily accessible to clients.

Categories Outlook

Ecommerce websites are established for online sale mostly that is why the purchase process should not be complex such as entering a delivery address, payment method and then confirming the order. The process can be simpler like there should be a slight but comprehensive description under each product displayed along the option to “Buy” and break the purchase process into small portions.

Featured Product Photos

There should be a category of “Featured products” of the day or week that are hot favorite sold products of the time. These products should be categorized and highlighted with the images, these images should not be plain but from multiple angles and vivid description.

Automatic Confirmatory e-mail

Once a customer has placed his order, an automatic confirmatory email should be sent out to him that should be brief, straightforward and representative of company. This thing is quite minor but will enhance the customer’s trust and he would love to come again to have business with you.

Colorful Appearance

Last but not the least, the website must look alive, colorful and pleasant but at the same time it should be elegant with user-friendly features.

Most of the companies are already using Facebook platform for driving traffic to their sites or attracting customers to their brands and let them recognize the launch of new products. Businesses faced one problem in particular that Facebook is unable to accomplish transaction for those e-commerce sites on its own platform. This issue was resolved by Facebook in form of Payvement Application. Payvment is an application of storefront that directly deals with the transaction issues faced by e-commerce storefronts on Facebook.

This new application has brought revolution to Facebook storefronts and retailers were waiting for such applications so that they can transact directly with the clients. Storefronts owner can use this application and accept money from customers via PayPal account or through credit cards sanctioned via PayPal. I know mostly people do not take Facebook seriously for business purpose but there are several users who prefer to shop online and mostly users are registered on Facebook. There are several others e-commerce applications but Payvment is only application that allows Facebook users to shop from several online retailers and add all items in shopping cart, without leaving Facebook.

Payvment has not all leisure offers for customers only, it allows retailers to sign up for this application and agree to offer discount to everyone who become “Fan” of the retailer on Facebook. You must be thinking that how retailers become agree to offer discount to their page fans? It happens because of the notifications system of Facebook, once the user becomes fan of page, notification is sent to his all friends by Facebook and people become more attracted towards the specific storefront and it is a clever tactic for the retailers that save their money to be spent on advertising.

Let’s construct a database of statements that people consider as the most important in generating customer satisfaction. I am going to start it with a general example, just imagine that you put a query on any business website regarding their product (functionality or design) that you are considering seriously to purchase. And you recheck the website twice, thrice or even more times in a week but there is not any timely response from them. What would be your response? I think you may not like to visit their site again or may defer the idea of purchasing the good from them. Isn’t it?

Therefore I think that a business should respond to a customer before time as soon as possible. Business Owners that consult me for improving their repute in business circle and I suggest to them deliver customer satisfaction through your website and improve the response as much as possible of your website. Now here comes the next question, how is it possible? When you improve the customer services it means you are depicting the best business practices and showing the internal processes of business are running smoothly. You can use number of ways to improve the customer satisfaction being online, such as:

Mostly customers are online now and they want to search the goods or services being online rather than going in the store. Therefore keep your website updated and keep your customers up-to-date about latest products and related queries. If they put any such query online, try to respond them within 10 minutes so that they will know that they are being listened. Next point is, make your “Contact Us” page available on the Main or Home Page of your website. Always encourage them to ask you more by writing “Contact us for further information”.

One advanced step that you can take is to provide your customers with the facility of online chat to provide in-time and better support in asking about anything related to your product and services. You can make “Feedback and Suggestion” page to take their opinion and being actively present over there. Another option is “F.A.Q. Page”, where you can provide comprehensive and detailed answer to such questions that can be asked by customers. If you can afford to hire experts, you can start forums or blogs page with your website’s Home page where you can understand the relevant issues and improve your performance and can give stated instructions to your customers.

1. Payment Options

Whenever you go shopping online, you would have often come across websites that don’t accept your payment option. That not only leads to frustration but you also tend to avoid that site without thinking that the site may have included the payment you option you opted last time. Merchants also loose customers because of unavailability of most used payment options. Even if your gateway service provider does not support a particular rare payment option, even then there are chances that some of the customers might be using those unpopular payment methods, which would eventually result into some revenue & profit leakages.

2. Circumventing frauds & providing advanced security features

Website attacks have always been on the rise and even a lot of bigger names have met with stiffer hacking attempts that resulted into loss of a lot of customers and made your site infamous for payment security. You should never ever compromise on the quality of security being provided by your web host. Good web hosts are PCI compliant and also give the guarantee of your payments being secured. Usually payment checkout pages with secure gateways also open with an https:// prefix, further securing your transaction details through the encryption provided. One key thing that really adds to the security of your transactions is that good web hosts always save your transactional details on their own secure servers rather then you in your browser cache or other temporary folder of your operating system which prevents any other software from getting your credit card or other important information without your consent.

3. Smooth sailing & pleasant memories

It is important to include only required information especially on the checkout pages. This will reduce extra burden on customer’s memory and will help him make decisions more easily. This will also ensure a shorter transaction time removing the unwanted hassle & wrestle the customers usually have to go through in online transaction processes. Feedback links should be on every page and customer service should be prompt. Customers online usually don’t have any kind of direct contact with the ecommerce site and it would be handy if you provide live chat facility as that will also have a significant impact on the customer conversion ratio.

Let’s check under the hood the misperceptions that people carry on with their analysis of conversion rates.

First of all, e-commerce websites have a lot of different variety of products available on their website. Each product has different price and profit percentage. If the sale of a very expensive product has taken place then the customer’s conversion into cash would be much higher. On contrary if most of the sales is through low cost products then customer conversion into cash becomes less attractive. Conversion rates are therefore difficult to calculate and some method of calculating different conversion rates must be devised in order to ensure that the conversion rates of customers represent the true picture.

As we have already defined conversion rate, in conversion rate we count every visit to our site as a potential visitor. Just for sake of example when anyone goes to an e-commerce website for a product, there can be many reasons for that visit. He may just want to check the price, make comparative analysis amongst different products, compare prices among different vendors, or is just looking at the features of the product. There can be numerous possibilities other then the intention of purchasing something for which someone might want to visit a website. It is therefore tricky to track the actual visitors who originally came to buy a product from a website.

To really start working on improving conversion rates, we have to look beyond the obvious data for a lot of hidden factors. For example, we can see the number of casual visitors on our site that never intended to purchase a product. We should also check out product wise conversion rates. This will help us give an idea of our star performers on our site. We should check our analysis on which pages the customers more visit on our e-commerce site. This will give us a pattern of an e-commerce customer and the way he looks at things. In fact our website statistics can play a very vital role in straightening our conversion rate ratios.

Unless we have are willing to work beyond the obvious, mere conversion rates won’t help improve our sales as well as profits for our e-commerce websites.

When you search for a particular item, you see a lot of websites popped out on the browser window. Earlier people believed that websites showing themselves up at the top of the search results will be the trusted ecommerce websites. This myth does not hold true any longer even if it did use to. The growth of ecommerce industry is so immense that literally thousands of websites are being added to the World Wide Web on daily basis. Therefore, never fall for such lousy and casual approach of shopping from any ecommerce site just because you found it in top search results.

The first effort to become secure is to make your own computer safe. As soon as you have installed an operating system, you should immediately install antivirus as well as good anti-spy ware software onto your PC. There is software these days which sits in your browser and monitors each of your activity. As soon as you log in with your credit card details, the software sends all that detail to a third party who had originally made the software. Installing right set of software tools will help you get rid of these kinds of severe problems.

You should also try to avoid transacting a credit card transaction on a wireless network. If you really have to use a wireless network, then be sure that it is password protected and cannot be accessed through other wireless networks without your own consent.

Whenever you are going to transact with an ecommerce website, always make sure that the prefix in the browser’s address window uses https:// instead of http://. An https:// connection with the server is a secure connection. It combines the SSL (secure socket layer) technology with it to ensure that during the data exchange between your computer and the ecommerce site network the data shared is encrypted. This encryption gives an added advantage to the data if anyone is able to have an unauthorized access to it.

Lastly but also very importantly you need to check the security verification of the site. Usually verifiably secure sites have a lock sign appearing usually at the bottom of your browser window. By clicking that link you can see the SSL certificate and also the certifying authority that issued that certificate to that particular website.

Have a safe shopping experience online!!

Before jumping into the characteristics of a good Word Press ecommerce plug-in we should first be clear in our own minds about the requirements that we have to fulfill through this plug-in. Here are some of the questions that you need to ask your self about the type of ecommerce site that you want to establish.

• What kind of products are you going to serve online?
• What type of themes and designs of the site will suit your product?
• What are the additional widgets that you must need in order to effectively sell the product?
• What is the type of audience that will view your site? Are they young or old, married or unmarried, etc?
• What are the purchasing habits of your targeted audience? This also includes the time they spend online for purchasing different items, their preferences about different products they purchase online and also the amount of money they are willing to spend online?

These are some of the basic questions that will help you make up a map of your customers preferences and select the best matched Word Press ecommerce plug-in. Word Press ecommerce plug-ins are not similar in many ways. Some are made for some kind of industries while others are made for other kinds of industries. This not only affects the overall design of the plug-ins but also the whole aesthetic and interface mechanism for the consumer also changes with that. Just Google Word Press ecommerce plug-ins and you will literally find thousands of them online. It will however become difficult for you to select those unless you don’t really have in mind what you want that plug-in to do.

Advantages

The first major advantage is improvement in the conversion rate of the customers who come to your site. It is a proven fact that more page checkouts not only take a lot of time and customers are mostly in a hurry. Secondly and most importantly they take away the confidence from the customer that it is safe to use this website. The more a website takes time to process the data, the worse it gets for the customer confidence.

As the new technologies like AJAX have been introduced, we can now built pages that are extremely easy to use. One page checkout would enhance the user experience which would result into repeat purchase. And repeat purchase is a very important asset for any e-commerce website

The time spent by users on an e-commerce is also reduced, which reduces the load on the servers for simultaneous users and also improves the time spent to transaction ratio in monetary terms. This is a winning situation for the customers, e-commerce entrepreneurs and their web hosts.

Disadvantages

The biggest disadvantage of all is that one page checkouts won’t work without JavaScript and AJAX. Usually JavaScript has to be enabled by the user otherwise the page won’t be displayable. This creates a huge problem for the website owner who can’t then do anything other then to provide an alternate option of a long check out.

This may also lead some customers to confusion as many customers are used to lengthy checkouts which lets them feel safe that they are going through process and there won’t be any problem in that. In this case they might think of it as a scam or something to trick them into.