Starting an Online Business For Dummies®, 6th Edition

Chapter 6. Making Shopping Easy on Your E-Commerce Site

In This Chapter

• Knowing what makes online consumers push the Buy button

• Making your e-commerce site more usable with some digital Feng Shui

• Taking stock: Sourcing, replenishing inventory, and fulfilling orders

• Adding bells and whistles to your site with hosted applications

• Letting others know who you really are with a personal certificate

• Protecting your customers' data (and your own) with passwords, firewalls, and backups

Walk into any Wal-Mart or other megastore and you're likely to feel overwhelmed with the sheer size of the place. Not to worry: Wal-Mart makes life (and spending money) easier for their shoppers by having an employee greet you at the door, ready to give directions, and by carefully arranging merchandise in aisles where management thinks you'll find them easily. Online businesses work much the same; in fact, shoppers want to move even more quickly and easily through an online store than a brick-and-mortar one. Your job is to make your sales items easy to find and purchase, and to make customers feel secure so that you're paid promptly and reliably. You also need to protect yourself financially and guard your business data. In this chapter, I discuss some technologies and strategies that can keep your data secure and make your customers feel at ease, too.

Fostering a good atmosphere for e-commerce is also a matter of presenting your merchandise clearly and making it easy for customers to choose and purchase it. Making ...