Here are a few of the best tips for achieving eCommerce excellence.

1. Make it Easy for All Buying Levels

Some people want to come to your website and buy right away. They want to land on your page, pull out their credit card and be done with the whole thing in two minutes or less.

Still others will want to come to your page and do a few hours of research.

Your site needs to be able to accommodate both. Amazon for example makes it very easy for people to order right away with its buy button above the fold. However, people can also spend ages researching reviews and related products to find the perfect thing for them.

2. Trust and Security

Trust and security is a big issue online when credit cards are involved.

Make sure you have 128-bit SSL encryption and that you have a secured server certificate. That means that your checkout page should say https:// rather than http://.

Also make sure your site is very well designed. Poor design indicates lack of trustability.

Finally, work on building your brand. That’s not something that can be done overnight, but absolutely plays a big role in conversions. Amazon converts 12% of their visitors into buyers – not because of brilliant copy, but because of a brand that’s built up over years.

3. Simplicity

It shouldn’t feel difficult to order from you. Try to take as many steps out of your checkout process as possible.

People who land on your site should at most have one or two choices. They can browse products or they can search. They can keep shopping or they can check out. They can pay by credit card or by PayPal.

Try not to overload them with choices. Avoid crowding your site with too many features. Make it very, very simple.

4. Return Policy

Make your return policy crystal clear. Try to be as generous as possible.

One place you can see the effect of return policies in action very clearly is eBay.

EBay is often filled with people selling very similar products for very similar prices. The margins are so low that it’s very hard for anyone to undercut anyone.

However, one area where certain sellers get an edge up is their return policies. Sellers with generous return policies will almost always outsell sellers with stingy return policies.

The same is true with eCommerce. If people know that they can get a full refund if they’re not satisfied, they’re a lot more likely to want to order. The risk to them is much reduced.

These are some of the top tips for achieving success in eCommerce. If your produce exceptional customer service, in the long run you’ll achieve exceptional results.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Both individuals and companies have mastered the process of systematically creating a viral buzz, to the point where they can just about engineer a viral campaign from scratch at any time.

Creating a viral buzz is an art, but it’s also in large part a science. Here are the most important components of creating a viral buzz.

1. Do Something Completely Off the Wall

Things that are interesting get “likes.” Things that are completely off the wall, completely out of the blue and completely original actually get shared and reposted.

The things that tend to go viral tend to be edgy and mildly not politically correct. If your brand supports that kind of marketing, you’ll have to consciously decide whether you’re willing to take the risk by launching these kinds of campaigns.

2. Write Down Your Crazy Ideas

Once you start thinking about wacky viral marketing ideas, you’ll probably start having ideas left and right.

It’s really important that you write these ideas down quickly and keep them all in one place.

It’s very hard to hold more than one good idea in your head at any one time. If you have three great ideas, chances are at least one will get left in the dust.

Write all your promotion ideas down, even if you won’t actually act on them for a few months.

3. The Viral Launching Pad

For a viral campaign to take off, you need to have a base of people who start using your product.

While nobody actually knows how many people need to see your site for it to have a chance to go viral, most viral marketing experts estimate it at more than 1,000 people but less than 10,000 people.

So how do you get 1,000+ people to see your viral campaign?

Of course, the easiest way is to have an existing user base. But what if you don’t?

The easiest way is to just pay for the traffic. High traffic blogs will usually be willing to make a guest post for a few hundred dollars. You could even just put up some AdWords campaigns. At $0.25 per click, 1,000 people will cost you just $250 to take a shot at launching a viral campaign.

If you have your viral launching pad of 1,000 to 10,000 people and you have a completely off-the-wall idea that people in the industry have never seen before, you’ll have a very good chance of getting a lot of exposure.

Failure. The mere thought can paralyze even the most heroic thinkers and keep great ideas off the drawing board. But is failing really that bad? We get an inside look at the mishaps of Honda racers, designers and engineers to learn how they draw upon failure to motivate them to succeed. From poor color choices to blown race engines, these risk-taking individuals provide an honest look at what most people fear most. Watch the film and discover the upside of failure.

First of all, and most importantly in my opinion, equity financing can bring highly valuable knowledge and experience on board. If you can obtain an investor with relevant knowledge or experience in the field of your start-up, or even just in general business, it can be one of the best moves your company can make. When an investor comes on board, they put their money on the line and take a vested interest in seeing your company succeed. You could stand to benefit a lot by having someone on board with enough knowledge, experience or connections to help your business get off the ground. That person or group could end up being your company’s most valuable asset.

Secondly, as mentioned earlier, equity investment doesn’t come with the nagging possibility of going broke and being stuck having to pay back a lender. Anyone who comes on board as an investor will generally do so fully understanding that they’ve assumed the same risk you have, which is that the possibility of failure is ever-present. Knowing this can be comforting in the start-up stages when things are unstable, especially if you’ve decided to go into business in a risky field. Keep in mind though, the riskier the business, the bigger a piece of the pie the investor will likely ask for in exchange for their investment dollars.

So there are definitely very real advantages to equity financing, and it very well may be right for you. The purpose of this series of posts was simply to get you to realize that debt financing also has a set of very real upsides. Neither debt nor equity is superior to the other, they’re simply different. As such, it’s important that you thoroughly investigate your options with both when looking for capital for your business. Don’t just jump on the equity train because it seems to be the popular choice. The benefits of debt (benefits of debt…that just sounds strange) may very well make it the choice for you!

In case anyone reading this is new to the topic of financing, a quick definition of each is in order. Debt financing is pretty self-explanatory. You need money for your business, so you take on debt to get it. The most common method is through a loan. In equity financing, instead of taking on debt, you essentially sell part ownership of your business to an investor. They give you the money you need, and in exchange they take ownership of a certain percentage of your business.

So why is equity financing so popular?

The main reason is that in a way it can be a bit of a get out of jail free card. If you take on debt to finance your business, and something goes wrong and the business goes belly up, you’re still on the hook for the repayment of that debt. With equity financing, the investors take on that risk when they decide to put money into your company. If your company fails, it’s a loss the investor(s) share with you, and you’re not obligated to repay them their investments.

Another reason is that the cost of borrowing is expensive, especially right now with banks being so reluctant to lend. If you are able to find a lender, which will be very difficult to begin with, the interest they’ll demand will likely be significant. This turns off a lot of capital seekers simply because they look at the cost of borrowing and how much interest they’ll owe the lenders, and decide they’d rather go the equity route, where they’ll owe no interest payments.

Equity sounds like the way to go! Or is it?

Well as with a lot of things in business, particularly in entrepreneurship, the answer is it depends. I won’t be so ignorant as to try and say one way or the other is the correct way to go, but I would like to advise that business owners seriously consider the DIS-advantages of equity financing before they decide to sell off ownership in their company.

Go to Part Two of Debt vs. Equity to examine why debt may be a much better option for you than equity.

While it is true that almost all consumers will make knee-jerk judgments based on their initial experience with a product, that doesn’t mean that all eventual purchases are based off of these reactions. There are definitely situations where a consumer will decide to buy based on a first impression alone, but this depends completely on a number of factors present in the overall buying decision, the most important of which is the risk involved.

Risk could take many forms. It could be financial risk where the consumer may stand to lose money if they make a poor buying decision, or it could simply be the risk of nothing more than being unhappy with the product after purchase, but risk is the key factor. For example, if I stop into a store on the way home and I want a magazine or newspaper, I’m not going to spend time researching the different options, carefully scrutinizing the content of each option, comparing several similar substitutes before deciding. I’m going to walk in, look at the covers, maybe flip through one or two, and make a decision based on very minimal information. Why? Because the risk involved in the purchase is very low. If I choose a crappy magazine, I’m out five bucks and a few minutes. Nothing to cry over. Because of this, I’m more than willing to make a purchase on a snap judgment. There are a lot of products that fit into this sort of buying activity but they all have one common factor. Cost.Products that people buy on whims and first impressions are almost always low cost.

For products like these, focus groups likely are a waste of time and money because they won’t truly reflect the way people judge such products in real life. If I’m a company that sells children’s toys, sitting kids or parents down in a room and asking them to thoroughly examine a toy and give me their feedback on it probably won’t give me much information that will relate to whether or not they’d buy that toy when they saw it on the shelf in Toys’R'Us. I’d probably be better off showing them a couple different packaging options for no more than a few minutes and asking them to point out which one they find more attractive. This would be a much better reflection of the actual thought process that person would go through when faced with a buying decision in store.

This does not hold true, however, for high risk purchases. People won’t make their buying decisions so easily in such cases. They’ll still make snap judgments, it’s human nature to do so. But they’ll go deeper than that because they know that if they do choose wrong, it will hurt them in some way, whether it be financially, physically or emotionally. This is where the value of focus groups becomes clear. Products that require a deeper level of thinking on behalf of the consumer are perfect candidates for focus groups as a form of market research.

When someone walks into a car dealership, the odds are one car on the lot will immediately catch their eye. Maybe they like the colour, the shape, the rims, who knows, but something will stand out and they’ll make a snap judgment. They won’t run into the office and sign a contract because of that though. The buying behaviour is completely different than it was with the toy in the toy store. The same customer that bought a $30 toy on a whim will think long and hard about a $30,000 car. Sure the shiny, fast looking red one may catch their eye and become their initial favourite, but upon inspection, they may find that the fuel efficiency is poor, or that their isn’t enough space for them, the kids and the hockey gear, or any other number of factors that will change their minds. There is risk. If they take home that shiny red car and something about it doesn’t work out, they have to live with that $30,000 mistake.

In a situation like this, a focus group is perfect because it will much more closely resemble how a consumer would analyze that product in the real world. If you’re trying to put out a new mini-van, but your focus group says that upon inspection there doesn’t seem to be enough space behind the seat or that they’d strongly prefer it to have this feature or that feature, you’ve just been given valuable insight into the exact thought process that consumer would be going through standing on the lot.

This is the guideline that should be taken when deciding whether or not a focus group is of value to your marketing research. The most important thing you need to determine is the amount of risk that is involved with the purchase of the product you’re researching for, and if it strikes you that the product is something that is either not expensive enough, or not significant enough, to cause a consumer to worry about making the wrong decision, and in turn put in extra thought, then a focus group may very well provide you with a whole bunch of data that does not accurately represent the real world thoughts and feelings of your target market.

What they say in the focus group is one thing, but its what they think in the store that counts. If you hold a focus group for the wrong kind of product, you may find yourself ending up with a whole lot of very expensive lip service.