The Basics of eCommerce Website Promotion

Promotion of an eCommerce website works on the same basic principles as promotion of a bricks and mortar shop; as many potential customers as possible should know about the services offered or products sold and there should be an immediate, obvious reason why they should use those services rather than those of a competitor. The obvious difference with an eCommerce website is that the competition is not only in the same town, area or even country but is comprised of every competing business with an eCommerce website. eCommerce Website promotion is therefore a complex operation but approaching eCommerce with the same principles as one would approach business in general will lead to a good understanding of the basics of website promotion.

eCommerce Websites: Know Your Market

The key to all successful business is knowing the market. Traffic for an eCommerce website consists of two groups of people; those who have found the website through search engines and those who haven't. Those who haven't will have visited the website because of an off-line method of website promotion eg. having been given a business card, or because of a direct on-line website promotion technique such as e-mail marketing. The visitors who have come to the website through search engines will have done so in one of two ways. In boths cases the visitor will have searched for a phrase relating to what they wish to purchase or find out about. These visitors are then split: the majority will visit the websites shown on the search engine results page (SERP) starting from the top until they find a suitable website and the rest will click on one of the 'sponsored links' to one side of the SERP. The first group of eCommerce website traffic described above is limited. It requires you to somehow directly give a customer your website address. The second group of eCommerce traffic is potentially vast and website promotion is how to access it. For further information, read our article on Targeted Website Promotion.