The web is a brilliant place to sell your products and services. However if you do not follow an integrated strategy incorporating good website design and marketing then you stand to lose lots of potential sales.
In the same way that a high street retailer needs to pay careful attention to lots of detail, many different things contribute to the success of a web based business. Here are the most important ones to consider:-

Location, location, location.
If you are serious about trading via the web, then your website must be easily discoverable by people who do not know it exists. The key element here is good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – without it your website is frankly as waste of money.

Clear Branding and Image
When people discover your website they are generally looking for a specific product or service. You have about 5 seconds before people decide to stay or disappear off to your competitors. What really matters is a clear first fold message. It needs to be clear what you are offering, and more than that you need to differentiate your business from the others. It should be clear Why You? – Is it Price, Quality, Service, and/or Unique Products?

Easy to find the products or services the clients want.
The website needs to be easy to navigate. People need to find your products quickly. Every extra click or delay means that several percentage leave without buying. Advanced product search functionality showing the product criteria available such as price range, brand, size, style and type gives good eCommerce websites the edge.

Advanced in-store marketing
Just like a high street shop, an eCommerce website should use special offers, promotions, best sellers, “beer and nappies promotions” to encourage people to up sell and add more to their basket. Additional functionality like “tell a friend” and “wish list” will also add new customers and orders.

Regularly changing your website
Adding new products, updating a news page, and regular special offers all attracts interest from visitors (and reassures them your business is thriving). It also is noticed by the search engines resulting in better SEO, and more new visitors.

The Checkout
Just like a high street shop, the check out experience needs to be efficient. A good website will make it easy for people to buy the products they want or make contact with your business. In an eCommerce website this process needs to be slick. There is a lot of information which needs to gleamed from the customer such as obviously the products they want, delivery option preferences, addresses, and credit card details. Customers are prone to impatience and any interruption to them will lose a sale. Checkout must be designed to reduce times. A good system enables the client to easily see how they are progressing and review what has been entered to date, and use previously stored data to save time.

The after-sales service 
Clients will need to track their orders, and a good eCommerce website will enable them to review their past orders and reorder.

Post Sales Marketing
It is an old adage that it is cheaper to get sales from existing customers then from new ones. So your website should collect existing client’s email addresses and encourage “just browsing visitors” (via an offer) to leave theirs. Then you must regularly email market via newsletters or special offers, to encourage further sales. A proper email marketing system with unsubscribe and campaign tracking needs to be implemented.

Key performance Indicator monitoring
Is essential in order to monitor performance, and enable you to tweak operations to maximise revenue, a good web based performance monitors system such as Google Analytics should be implemented. It enables you to monitor who is coming to your website, whether they are new visitors, where they are coming from, what pages they are visiting and for how long. You can see how many and what proportion put items into a shopping cart, and get an indication of what causes so many to disappear without buying. You can monitor the performance of specific marketing campaigns and see which ones give the best value for money.

Other Marketing activities
Just like any business you cannot assume that just because you have a website then people will find it. Advertising and PR is still needed along with any other relevant form of conventional marketing. With the web you have additional options such as Pay-per-Click advertising and backward links from other websites such as trade directories and media websites. Social networking such as Face Book, Blogs and twitter can all lead traffic to your website business.

Just like a High Street Retail outlet, there are many things to get right and regularly monitor and manage with a web-based business. The good news is that the costs are lower, and in a good web-based business all of the elements are in place for you easily manage operations.

Figure 1 below, successfully selling via the web Schematic

Figure 2 Monitoring Customer behaviour – an opportunity to maximise revenue

Figure 3 below. How mature is your web-based Business on 1 to 5?