Online retailers now measure in the millions, which means you’ve got to put in the effort to make
sure that you succeed. Some things, like providing many, well-stocked choices, are obvious, but
could you be missing out because you didn’t consider some of the following marketing tips?

Loyalty and Trust in eCommerce
If you build it, they will come, but will they buy? Gaining your customer’s trust and loyalty is as
important for online retail as it is for a brick-and-mortar store. You want customers to remember
your name, return to your store and recommend you to their peers.

How do you encourage this? Offer incentives like coupons, special sales and giveaways to
customers who return or follow your social network status. Provide coupons when buyers sign
up for email newsletters. Show testimonials from real people on your home page. Furthermore,
you can encourage visitors to leave reviews on Twitter or Facebook and retweet or promote those
reviews to show that consumers already love your brand, products or services.

Content
Content is important, and you want yours to be unique, so you’ll stand out from the crowd. Recruit
your PR and marketing departments to write content. Even developers can help create unique
product descriptions, blog posts, category descriptions and landing pages. Not only do you want
to add new content and use unique product descriptions, but periodic refreshing of your existing
content is beneficial, too.

Your Software Matters
Don’t just settle on an eCommerce program because someone told you to, because it’s cheap or
because your website host automatically installs it. You want a solution that’s going to work for
you now and as your business grows. If you plan to have a larger stock, you’ll need software that’s
scalable.

Many articles will talk to you about user experience, but as an administrator of the store, you’re
also an user. Your software shouldn’t just be bare-bones. Choose software that lets you edit pages
or products with a rich text editor that supports text editing, image and video uploading and link
insertion. If you want to keep a blog along with your storefront, a news or blog function that’s built
into your eCommerce software will go a long way. Finally, consider whether you’ll want to create a
FAQ or customer forum before purchasing software to power your store.

Tips for Working with Magento
Because so many people — more than 10% of the top one million eCommerce websites — rely on
Magento’s eCommerce software, we have a few tips for you as well.

1. Magento works well with a myriad of business sizes. You’re a small mom-and-pop store?
Magento will work for you. You expect to grow exponentially in the next few months? Magento
has you covered.

2. Thousands of extensions, including themes, are available for Magento. This allows you to create
a marketplace that’s as difference from the next, even though you’re using the same software.

3. Magento provides shop owners with the ability to create products in different price tiers, offer
discounts and offers unique to individual customers. This makes building brand loyalty and trust
easier.

4. Customer options are superb. Buyers can create wishlists, compare products and view detailed
order histories with Magento.

Whether you use Magento or an eCommerce plugin for WordPress, these general tips always
apply.

Citations:

• Photo taken from Flick with CC license. Author: intersectionconsulting

Ben Sawyer helped a lot of his clients to establish their online rpesence and improve their website’s rankings. You can visit Vandko Candles website to see how he developed his successful strategy for them. Here Ben shared with us some of his conclusions about content marketing for ecommerce websites, and successful tips abou it.