Conversion Tips For Your eCommerce Drop Ship Business

Your ecommerce drop ship business can probably always use a higher conversion rate!

One thing that all entrepreneurs have in common is a desire to convert more visitors to buyers.

There are many ways to improve your conversion rate, and most of them won’t cost you anything except a little bit of your time.

Here are some handy tips to improve your conversion rate and help turn those visitors into paying customers:

• Be sure that your marketing strategy attracts qualified traffic. For example, if you sell ski equipment, don’t advertise gloves or mittens merely to drive more traffic to your website. You probably will get an increase in traffic, but it won’t be the right kind of traffic and few, if any, of those visitors will actually purchase anything.

• Trust is a serious issue with most buyers! In order to get a visitor to feel safe in buying from you, be sure to have safety and security symbols on pertinent pages. It isn’t necessary or even desirable to have these things on every page, but do have a clearly defined privacy policy and link to it from all pages, as well as Verisign, BBB, or whatever trust symbols you sue on your website. It is particularly important to have these symbols on the checkout page.

• Use a site search box and make sure it is accurate. This will not only allow visitors to find what they are looking for quickly, it will also furnish insight into exactly what visitors are shopping for and what keywords and/or key phrases they are using to search for those items. Once you know that, you can gear your copy and ad campaigns accordingly.

• Get reviews! Remember, people buy under the influence of others! Try and get some good or great reviews from various shopping authority sites such as shopping.com, epinions.com, bizrate.com and others, as well as from previous customers.

• If you are offering a wide variety of drop ship products, shoppers need to be able to sort them by relevant criteria...price, size, color, etc. Amazon has a great set-up for this type of thing! Look at their website for some good ideas about how to sort and define the search for your potential buyers. EBay has a good search define menu in theory, almost identical to Amazon’s. Unfortunately, their search functionality in practice, especially since the inception of Best (Worst) Match---is extremely poor. But you can at least so how theirs is laid out to get some ideas for how to let viewers sort a search. Just make sure that your search really works.

• Give a clear and accurate estimate of delivery time. People want to know this! In fact, many of them need to have a pretty good idea as to when to expect their order. It’s astonishing how many websites fail to provide this information and it’s quite irritating when they don’t. An irritated customer is not what you want. So furnish them a decent estimate and approximate date that they can expect to receive their merchandise. It’s also extremely helpful to provide tracking info. Don’t make them ask for it---email it to them. If you are drop shipping, make sure you can get tracking information so that you can pass it on to your buyers. Some drop shippers will do this for you, which is a definite plus.

These are just a few ideas of how you can beef up your online drop ship business, equally applicable to any internet business.

The economy may be faltering but the World Wide Web is still going strong! Improve your website and you will improve your conversion rate!