For many websites, ecommerce is just products, prices, descriptions and an online shopping cart. The selling premise is that because you have it on your site, visitors will buy it. This implementation of ecommerce may get you started, but the rising sophistication and expectations of online buyers limits your growth.

What Competition?

When was the last time you took a look at what your competitors are doing online?  If it’s been a while since you even glanced you might be surprised at what you find.

It’s easy to measure the success of a website by how many sales you get if you do ecommerce or how many emails from the Contact Us form you get. If you do a little investigation you can see how many you don’t get.Abandoned shopping carts or Contact Us forms that were started but never submitted are good examples. But this is the surface stuff.  How many visitors contributed to the total traffic that came to your site and what percentage actually made it to the shopping cart or to the Contact Us is important as well.

Whenever I talk with companies about their websites and how they promote business, eventually the use of email comes up.  The use of email to promote business generally falls into one of three categories.