5 Specific Ways to Increase the Amount of Visitors Turned Customers on Your E-Commerce web site By Matt Inglot Five specific ways that you can increase the sales that your online business receives through a more effective e-commerce website. 1) Show off Your Testimonials You have a product with satisfied users so show this fact off! People naturally want assurance that what you're selling actually delivers the expected results and they will only believe a sales pitch so far. Prominently listing testimonials provides the 3rd party opinions of satisfied users to your potential customer directly on your site. It helps if the testimonials provide specific benefits that your customers received and problems that you solved, rather than a generic "This is an excellent product!". If you don't have testimonials handy then start collecting them. Whenever you receive a positive bit of feedback ask if you may publish it in your marketing material. You can also simply request testimonials from customers that have let you know are highly satisfied. 2) Provide a Money Back Guarantee It takes a leap of faith the first time, but if you have an excellent product then it's difficult to go wrong with this technique. Money back guarantees are everywhere because they are highly effective at transferring the risk of the transaction from the customer to you. It allows the sale to be completed and the customer to use the product even if there are still lingering doubts about this being the correct solution. If your product delivers on its promises you can rest assured that virtually all your customers will keep it, and that the new sales gained will far outweigh having to give the occasional refund. Be sure to make your guarantee highly visible, particularly in areas on your site where the customer is deciding to buy or not to buy. You will completely defeat the purpose of this selling tool if you choose to hide it as fine print at the bottom - the unsatisfied customers will still find it and take you up on it, but you won't be receiving any new sales from your generous invisible policy. 3) Setup Referral Programs Rewarding people for bringing in customers and setting up formal programs for reselling a product could gain you a whole new sales force. There are a number of ways to do this such as providing incentives to existing customers to refer new business, setting up formal reseller programs, or having an affiliates referral system such as Amazon's Incentives are usually monetary but sometimes it is much more appropriate to provide extra service or simply some formal recognition (like a special ranking within your product's community forums). Money is not the sole motivator! There's no doubt that you should leverage the power of referrals but the trick is choosing the system that fits well with what you are selling. You don't want to implement a system that makes your customers feel as if you are bribing them, and you don't want your product sold through questionable channels. Give it some thought and perhaps experiment with a couple systems. It may even make sense to have separate programs for referrals from customers and for people who wish to be resellers of your product. 4) Addons, Tie-ins, Recommendations, Upselling, etc You've sold the customer on your product and they are ready to pay for it. At this point you have a tremendous untapped opportunity to increase the size of your sale and the satisfaction of your customer by a number of techniques for offering additional or better products. If a customer is about to purchase some coffee maybe they would like a new french press to make it in, or try a delicious new flavor for half price as a check-out special? Does the customer know that you offer installation of the new fridge? Or how about a special 15% off on the deluxe model? Two well-known online companies that aggressively utilize these concepts are Amazon> and GoDaddy