Many Internet marketers work hard to bring traffic to their new, shiny website. But, unfortunately, getting a sale can be quite challenging for many of them. This could happen when the website fails to become an effective sales funnel. It’s pretty clear that online catalogues don’t work and they will generate nearly non-existent sales. Online catalogues success have been grabbed mostly by Amazon and other very popular e-tailers. It is still acceptable to include online catalogues in our new e-commerce website, but they need to be supported by other elements to help us gain more traffic.

Amazon built its reputation as an online bookstore and it has the advantage of being in the industry early. Newcomers in the highly competitive business need to develop their websites in a different way. Their websites will not only need to offer products, but also so much more, even more than Amazon itself. The landing page should match all expectation of online buyers and we need to have a presence on Facebook, YouTube and other social networking platforms. Encouraging consumers to return can be challenging, so we will need include features in the website that allow us to communicate with them continuously.

Some form of genuine human contact is needed and sales messages should be delivered with laser focus awesomeness. At the end of the road, we should include an impressive call to action, so we are able to close the deal. We should know whether there are some parts of our website that’s missing. There could be features in our website that may turn out to be highly ineffective. We should deal with proper marketing efforts and this could ultimately take more resources.

Developing an e-retailer website could be quite challenging and we shouldn’t waste resources by adding features that we don’t need. We should continuously look at our marketing messages and ask multiple honest questions to ourselves. We also need to study successful e-retailer websites in the market and we may come with the following conclusions:

  • These websites are able to speak to their target audience, both figuratively and literally.
  • These websites have many landing pages that are used to serve different segments of consumers. They are able to appeal consumers who come from many different perspectives.
  • Their landing pages are able to continue communication with people who come to the website and people are encouraged to know a little more.
  • Their landing pages weed out visitors who are not really interested with their products. This will minimize the waste of resources and the website can focus more on prospective individuals.
  • Their websites have string human contact elements with live chat and other types of call-center activities.
  • Their websites offer impressive sales messages that are associated with proper concerns, desires and expectations of their target audience.

In order to succeed in developing an e-retailer website, we should also include these elements. If we have built our own website, we should have a long and hard look at it, and consider whether we need to improve it.