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Don't miss out on $18.6 billion in eCommerce
eCommerce
Jun 2010, B2B in Canberra Mag.
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Yes, online spending in Australia was approximately $18.6 billion last year! If you weren’t at the receiving end of eCommerce, it’s time to get your business geared up to reap the benefits.
Your online shop-front
Regardless of whether you are selling products or services, the first step is to understand consumer behaviour. When a customer lands on your website, you have eight seconds to capture their attention and get them involved. For example, you may wish to bundle your services together so as to make them more attractive to consumers.
Shopping cart and checkout
Once customers have found what they are looking for, the next step is to make the checkout process as easy as possible. It costs a lot of time and money to get a new customer to the website with only small proportion of these customers adding products to their carts and proceeding to checkout. You don’t want to lose customers at this point of the sale so try and avoid road blocks such as mandatory customer registration.
Checkout using payment gateways
Ensure that you provide your customers with peace of mind by displaying privacy and security information and logos. Credit card payment is the most common method of payment online. Payments can be made using a hosted gateway or an integrated gateway.
The hosted payment gateway is where a customer has to jump from your website to another website such as PayPal or your bank’s hosted webpage to process a credit card payment. If a business is new or relatively unknown, then a hosted gateway is a good way to establish trust with customers. It’s also a cost-effective and simple option.
A more sophisticated option is integrated or 3rd party payment gateway. This payment gateway allows a ustomer to process payment without leaving your website.
SSL certificates
SSL certificate is short for secure socket layer certificates. They are shown as padlocks on secure websites. Page information is encrypted before it is transferred so that it is difficult to hack. A reasonably good SSL certificate will cost more than $100 dollars rising up to more than $2500 per year, depending upon the brand you choose. Verisign, Thawte, Comodo, GeoTrust and RapidSSL are some of the best known names for SSL certificates. Site security is an important aspect of any successful eCommerce business. So, don’t go for a cheap or free SSL certificate.
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