Three blog posts you should read before starting an online marketplace
Ahead of our “online marketplace” themed StartupQ8 Event this Monday, we wanted to share some excellent tips we found on various blogs that can help entrepreneurs maximize their online store’s performance:
Post one: 5 Retail Lessons For Ecommerce Sites, by Jim Stoneham on Mashable.com
Jim talks about how to bring the best elements of offline shopping to your online store. He advises to let people express emotions, having a platform to showcase trending items, and the importance of enabling 1-click purchases. On the latter, he has this to say:
Ditch the Cart
Pushing a cart around is a drag in the real world and online. Since social commerce product discovery often comes from within a social stream, it is all about spontaneous, one-off buys, not shopping from a pre-defined list. Enable your shoppers to immediately buy with one click rather than filling up a cart they have to manage and can more easily abandon.
It’s all about taking friction out of the system so impulses can result in instant sales. The iTunes store has shown the clear value of this one-click, cart-free approach.
Click here to read the full post.
Post two: 5 Tips for Connecting with Your Customers and Making More Sales, by Mark Macdonald on Shopify.com
Mark’s post focuses on how online marketplaces can increase sales. He shares various persuasion tools and sales techniques that can help increase your conversion rate. A part of his post discusses removing the customer’s doubts:
Risk Removal
Once you’ve got your potential customer in the right buying environment and emotionally connected to your product, the last step is to remove any risk with a solid guarantee. Every potential purchase comes with some risk for the buyer and adding a money back guarantee backs up the promise that your product is making.
Click here to read the full post.
Post three: 7 Usability Mistakes That Will Kill Your Online Sales, by Gregory Ciotti on KISSMetrics.com
Gregory discusses usability mistakes that can affect an online store’s profitability. He stresses the importance of headline emphasis, legible typography and taking read patterns into account in your page design. He has an interesting take on the “3 click rule”:
Relying on the “3-click” Rule
There is an unfortunate misconception out there among some UX designers that if it takes a user more than 3 clicks to do something, they’ll become overly frustrated.
While this makes sense logically, and web users don’t want to have to click around too much to complete a task, sticking to an arbitrary rule with no data to support it is not the way to go.
As it turns out, most users will not give up on something just because they’ve hit the magical “3-click” ceiling, and I’ve got research to prove it.
Click here to read the full post.
So there you have it: 17 tips from 3 experts. Join us at our monthly event to learn more and meet other entrepreneurs in our community. See the schedule and register to attend by clicking here.
