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E-Commerce Strategies
In order to do business successfully on the Internet,
you have to consider the following.
- You need an
e-mail address.
- You need to
promote your
business.
- You need a good name for your website -
URL.
- You need a
website.
- Get people to
visit your website.
- Invite people to
reply by e-mail,
fax or telephone.
- Register with search engines.
- Get statistics about
visits
to your website.
- Get an evaluation of the
efficiency of your website.
- Improve your website.
I E-Mail
To conduct electronic business successfully the first thing you
need is an e-mail address. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will offer you
one for free or for a modest fee. However, the e-mail address that you want my
already be taken. You need an address that is unique worldwide. So it may take
some searching and compromising to find one for you.
Occasionally, you may want to change your provider of
e-mail services. For instance, you may not like the advertisements that go with
a free address.
II.
Promotion
As with all business and commerce you will have to promote your
e-business and e-commerce. You can use all conventional means, ways and media.
However, certain aspects are specific and you have to consider them.
Some users and authorities take a dim view of so-called
scamming, i.e. flooding users with unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) messages.
There are already laws prohibiting such activities and others are in the works.
Contact your Internet Service Provider for more information.
III
Universal Resource Locator,
URL
The URL is the address of your website. It consists of
<name>.<domain>. Typical domains are ".com" for commerce, ".edu" for education,
".org" for organization, ".mil" for military, ".gov" for government, and ".net"
for network. These are all U.S. domains. The United States also has the country
code ".us" that is used occasionally. Every other country has a country name
such as ".ca" for Canada and ".uk" for United Kingdom.
NOTE: There are no general rules about the allocation of
domains. It is up to the registration agency to accept or decline a name. The
world is running out of popular ".com" names and they can be traded at millions
of dollars. As with e-mail addresses, your URL must be unique worldwide.
IV.
Website
The next step is to create a website and put contents on its
pages. When you surf the web you will see all kinds of web pages, one fancier
than the other. Do not fall for the temptation to make fancy web pages. You are
not out to win a web page award. You want to sell your products and services.
Make sure that advertisements for the products and services of others do not
overwhelm the promotion of your own products and services.
Websites are written in the HyperText Markup Language
(HTML), in one of its versions, or in similar languages like the Extended Markup
Language (XML). You want to write your website in a language that most browsers
can read, like the basic HTML. A browser is a computer program that reads the
contents of websites. The Microsoft Internet Explorer and the Netscape
Communicator are examples.
You want your customers and clients to be able to
register and to communicate with you to order your products and services, and to
pay for them by credit cards, etc. - all from the website. For that you need one
or several fill-in forms on your website. You can arrange to have the filled in
information sent by e-mail to any e-mail address of your choice.
V. Increasing
Hits and Traffic
It is essential that your potential customers and clients
visit your website to be exposed to your promotional efforts. There are several
ways to increase the traffic to your website.
(1) Use a Title of your site that conveys what
you offer. Search engines look for Titles and direct surfers to your site
depending on the text in the Title.
(2) Use META KEYWORDS in the head of your HTML text. For example:
<meta name="keywords" content="cat food, organic,
your name">
This is another kind of text that search engines look for. However, do
not overdo your META-files. Some search engines are programmed to reject web
pages that are considered being designed to manipulate search results.
(3) Add a META Description Tag to describe your site for the search
engines. Sample: <meta name="description" contents="The best place to find
organic cat food">
(4) Register your website with search engines. You can do this
individually with each engine, or you can use services that do it for you. With
several thousand search engines in use worldwide, registering with all of them
is a chore.
VI. Customer Relations
Management (CRM)
You have the option to encourage people to correspond with
you by e-mail. To get replies by e-mail you need to post your e-mail address on
your website, and/or have forms for replies, comments, ordering, etc. You should
encourage people to give you their e-mail address.
People will also reply by telephone and fax. If
you expect any reasonable number of phone calls you will need a Call Center. A
more up-to-date name is Contact Center. Because customers and clients will
contact you by voice, fax and e-mail, you will need a Contact Center, that
handles all kinds of contacts. Information about the caller, including history,
e-mails, faxes, etc. should be displayed to your customer representative at the
same time that he/she takes a call.
VII.
Register with Search Engines
Listing with some ten of the top search engines should give
you good enough service. Among the top engines are All the Web (Fast), AltaVista, AOL, Excite, Go.com, Google, HotBot, Lycos,
Microsoft's MSN, Netscape, NorthernLight, WhatYouSeek and Yahoo!. Note that
rankings differ with the ranking criteria used.
VIII. Hit
Statistics
You need to know how successful your website is, i.e. the
number of people that visit it and what they are looking at. Most Internet
Service Providers (ISPs) offer hit counters. Ask your ISP how to install
a counter. They are all different.
A hit counter typically displays the number of previous
visitors. If you do not want your visitors to know that number, there are
programs that send the information to you only. Other programs give you the
number of hits for each page of your site.
IX. Evaluate
the Efficiency of Your Website
You should evaluate the efficiency of your website. This can
be measured in the number of hits, as stated in Section VIII. above. The amount
of purchases, the listings by search engines, etc. are also part of the
efficiency. Continuously make sure that your site does not have any dead links,
that browsers will find it, that download times are reasonable, etc. T
X. Improve
your website
Use all the information you have collected as well as provided
by us to improve on your website. Again, we can further assist you in
making this endeavor successful.
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