First Steps in Promoting your Online Store

How to prepare your online store for promotion and start getting sales

By Prom Qualy, Marketing analyst, Qualiteam Software

Technical side of maintaining an e-commerce web site is just a part of a successful online business. No less important is to let potential customers know about products and services you offer and achieve regular interest from targeted audience.

This guide outlines the most important steps in promoting your online store. While most of ideas presented here may be considered useful for online stores in general, out guide is based on X-Cart, one of the leading shopping cart software products available on the market.

Prepare attractive product descriptions and images

First of all, you need to present your product catalog to the potential customers in a way which would attract their attention. Tools and features for flexible product configuration and in-depth product specifications available in most shopping cart software include detailed product images, product options and variants, extra fields and META tags.
Try: When you are uploading new products, make sure the product descriptions have a good keyword density.

Also try to use your keywords in the product title and META data. When uploading detailed images, add keyword-rich content to the ALT area and use keywords in the image name.

Consider using X-Magnifier add-on for viewing and zooming high quality product images.

Provide discounts and special offers to your customers

Many customers are attracted by lowered prices and sales performed on some occasions. Consider the possibility of configuring special prices for various customer groups and provide purchase discounts based on configurable conditions.
Try: For even more flexible discounts and bonuses configuration, consider using various condition and reward types combined with each offer.

Prepare your pages for indexing by search engines

Successful search engines indexing depends to a great extent on the URL format used on web site pages. Therefore, keyword-rich URL format is an important factor for consideration. For example, X-Cart provides a convenient feature called HTML catalog which allows to create the search-engine friendly version of your web site and generate SEO-friendly URLs for categories and products.
Try: Make sure your HTML catalog is located in the root directory of your web site so that www.yourdomain.com goes directly to the front page your catalog.

To avoid possible duplicate content issues, set up the robots.txt file in order to exclude the unnecessary content from indexing.

Configure the statistics tools

Measuring results of your marketing efforts from the very beginning is very important for analyzing results and making further improvements. Make sure to configure sales analysis & tracking tools allowing to get the solid view on your sales dynamics and make a closer look to details for the specified period of time.
Try: Google Analytics provides powerful tools and reports for visitors demographics, improving search engine marketing strategies and tracking the achievement of e-commerce goals. Speaking of X-Cart, you may use X-Cart's built-in Google Analytics integration module.

List your products in external catalogs

One of the main sources of targeted traffic for your e-commerce web site are shopping directories and price comparison catalogs where customers search for specific items they're interested in. Including information about your products into such directories is another way of traffic generation worth considering.
Try: For example, X-Cart is equipped with the built-in module for automated submission of your product catalog into Google Product Search directory formerly known as Froogle.

Dmoz.org provides a comprehensive list of price comparison catalogs.

Start your own partner program

Online partner programs are a great way to boost your sales since they make other web site owners lead traffic directly to your online store and make promotional efforts themselves.
Try: Use X-Affiliate add-on for X-Cart which provides flexible features for managing your partner programs, commissions and promotional tools.