Own A Website? What's The Single Most Important Aspect?

While operating an eCommerce business has some unique challenges, many aspects are identical for any company, however your business works. While your website design, search engine positioning, hosting platform and choice of shopping cart are all very important, there's one single factor that should rate above everything else - customer service.

If the level of service you provide to your customers isn't up to scratch, you're very unlikely to succeed. Word of mouth has never been a more powerful way of making, or breaking a business, especially in these days of social networking.

There's a huge choice of online retailers for customers, so you should ask yourself why they would specifically choose to order from you? What is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP - The single factor that sets you apart from everyone else)? Competing purely on price is unlikely to be an effective long-term strategy as customers will almost certainly be able to find the same item at a lower price on eBay or one of the large internet retailers.

While pricing should be competitive, focusing your business on price alone squeezes your margins and can make you look like a 'bargain basement' operation. This can seriously impair your ability to establish relationships with new suppliers and, in addition, may damage relationships with existing ones.

A more viable alternative may be to concentrate your effort on the quality of your complete service, rather than just the price. Developing trust and rapport with visitors so that they know they can trust you is a major factor in turning visitors into customers. Make it easy to contact you either by email, live chat or phone.

While operating a customer service telephone line can be expensive, depending on the business area you are in, it can work to your advantage. Operating a freephone customer service line has come down in price dramatically and is a great incentive. The majority of customers won't call, but find it reassuring to know that they can in the event of problems.

How about considering a postage-paid returns service? This may not be practical for every business but once again, goes towards establishing trust with your site visitors. By saying you'll cover the cost of returns, it shows you have faith in your product range (and if you don't, why are you selling these products?), and also means the customer won't be out of pocket in the event that their purchase isn't suitable. Rather than offer the minimum returns period you can, why not extend this to 90, or even a whole year? This is a great promotional gimmick and could become your Unique Selling Proposition. You will find that only a very small number of customers will send back items that are a year old, as most return them almost immediately, but this looks great from a customer service point of view.

Once you have a customer, this really is your chance to wow them! You should ask yourself "How can I really impress this customer?" with every order you send out. An upgrade on their shipping service, a free gift, or even a handwritten comment on their delivery note can all make a huge difference and get them telling their friends. The latter of these takes seconds to do and costs absolutely nothing - why not try it?

Once a customers' order has been sent out, you should send out a follow-up email a few days later, ensuring they have received their order and that they are happy with it. This is a great opportunity to ask for a customer review - always approve all reviews - the negative ones can be more valuable to you - if people are consistently posting negative reviews for a product, this really is something that needs addressing.

Another tactic that can work is to phone the customer to make sure their item was received - don't try to sell them anything during this call - just thank them for their order and ask if there was anything that could have been done better.

Doing business on the internet does mean it's easy to lose the face to face contact you have with a traditional shop, so it is essential to never forget that without customers, you don't have a business at all. Always try to imagine the customer as a living, breathing person, before you send any email or product to them and constantly ask yourself how you can improve the service to them. Being average is no longer good enough - it's the exceptional companies that succeed and prosper.

Carl Fraser is Managing Director of Totally Commerce Ltd, owners of http://www.TotallyShoes.co.uk - Retailers of leading brand footwear in the UK.

Totally Commerce Ltd also operate several other websites in different business areas.