After building and transferring many e-commerce sites it still amazes me that owners of e-commerce businesses are still wasting money in three basic ways. For fear of stating
obvious, saving money is same as making money $100 saved is $100 added to your profit margin. Here are three basic ways to save money on your e-commerce site and increase your profits. While they may be simple we know they are overlooked time and time again resulting in thousands of dollars in lost revenue.ABORTED SALES While most modern shopping carts come with many features, they all involve collecting of information from clients. Name, address, telephone number, user name, password, email address and so on. Yes we understand that these details are only required for first order but let's take a look at new buyers experience.
They have browsed your site and found a product they wish to buy, they begin checkout process and input all details above. Your cart then builds order and transfers them to paypal 2 checkout or what ever payment gateway you use. What happens next? "Please input your name, address, email, telephone number......" The result? Lost and aborted sales, surfers are lazy creatures we know that. In an ideal world your cart would have passed all those variables to gateway and user would not have to input them again, however because there are so many gateways and they all require different variables this is difficult.
So now you log in to admin section of your cart and see an order only to find there is no matching payment. Thje solution is simple, fire up your email program and send them an email. "We noticed that you placed an order for our xxxxxxx however unfortunately we did not receive payment for that item so were unable to despatch it. Did you have difficulty with our ordering system? Is there anything we can do to help you? If so please contact us in one of following ways....."
Taking a few moments to send them an email can recover sale, or at worst you can find out which part of your ordering system isn't working for them and have it worked on. If you have your own merchant account you could have them call you and take their order by phone. Customers like to feel like customers not numbers, fact that you took time to contact them to find out what was wrong will give them confidence in your store and may recover sale.
CHARGEBACKS The curse of any e-commerce store dreaded chargeback. We are sure you have all experienced it. You take an order, despatch it and a few weeks later get a chargeback. The result you have sent goods and have to refund price of product and pay a chargeback fee normally around $15.
Firstly make sure your payment gateway offers some sort of seller protection. aypal for example have a full seller protection policy. This is useful to prevent fraud. It is totally unfair that some dishonest people initiate chargebacks after receiving goods, however as long as your gateway has seller protection and you have saved order details and proof of despatch you can go someway to protecting yourself against that.
Surprisingly most chargebacks are not fraudulent, they are caused by seller forgetting who they bought from, especially if your registered company name with your gateway is different from that of your site. An example your company is called freds enterprizes but your website is widgetsgalore.com, client buys a widget and at end of month sees a charge to their card from freds enterprizes. They don't recognize it they contact their card issuer and chargeback.
