Wim Vos Automatisering

What if you make an amazing looking website! Lots of pictures with articles and prices, a cart and a way to pay?
Would that work? Let's go and have a look:

Many people tell me: Google sends people to my web store automatically?
My question is then: And how does Google know about your web shop? Uhhh

Search Engine Optimisation:
If you do not tell Google, Bing and other search engines about your web shop and your products, they will not be able to forward potential customers. Well, after a couple of weeks, they'll find you but it takes more than a year to index all products from an average web store without a little help from you. And all the time, they cannot forward searching customers to your web shop.

That's why you need to help Google and other search engines, by telling them about your products and where they are. This is done by having a Sitemap of all your pages in your store. This Sitemap lists all pages of your web shop in a document in your web shop.

Next, you tell all search engines where that sitemap can be found. This may include your webmasters account with Google, Bing and other search engines. Those search engines, in turn, help you with information and emails to improve and solve flaws in your webshop and any errors.

Ok let’s say Search engines have indexed your webstore optimally.
Well, your findability is now optimized and all your products are indexed by all search engines. And visitors come to your store.

Then what?
Then you better track what keyword that customer came in with, because that is where he or she is interested in. Which page did he / she visit first and what did he / she do afterwards?

A good web store keeps track of where the customer goes, learns the potential interests of the customer and advises the customer: with other similar products, allows comparison of specifications and prices of products and suggests products that are relevant to this product. Also shows additional products other customers bought together with this product.

If the customer moves the mouse to go to another website or wants to close the page, there is an option to show a last popup screen with benefits to buy from you, the ability to leave items in the cart for the next time around or a suggestion to subscribe to your free newsletter.

It is possible to remember all this information for a subsequent visit.

The free newsletter:
Customers should be encouraged to subscribe to the free monthly newsletter as much as possible. In this newsletter you can inform them about: novelties, product applications, new legislation, new products, etc. etc. A newsletter should be short and powerful and include links to your web shop.

Realise that if you send a newsletter to 10,000 customers (And you'll have such list together in a year), introducing a new product., and only 8% buys as a result of that product in your web store, you just have sold 800 products.

If a product is not currently in stock, the customer must be able to leave an email address so that he / she can be notified when the product is back in stock.
If your customer continues to watch a product for a longer period of time and cannot decide on the purchase, it is possible to show a popup offering an additional discount in the hope that the customer will go for sale.

It is important to offer the opportunity to comment or ask questions about a particular product and to use that information again by adapting its description to future customers.
There must definitely be a possibility of reviewing the purchased product, and as a thank you, you can give them a discount code for the next purchase of a product in your store.

Your customer has the legal right, to return the product a within 7 working days of reflection. Terms and conditions must be written and published. If a product returned it must be put back on the stock list on return, the customer must be refunded, and the bookkeeping is updated and discount codes cancelled. This can also largely be automated.

Trusted Shops membership
As a Webshop specialist, I advise against being a member of Trusted Shops or other so-called Guarantee securities.
It costs a lot of money per month and those costs are ultimately inevitably recovered from the buyer.
This makes products unnecessarily more expensive.
Customers realize this and subsequently buy less.
The argument that they push your shop higher in search engines like Google is marginal true and does not compensate for the loss of customers.

Customer Relationship:
If a customer decides to purchase the chosen product, a token could be given, This token is administered in the customer account, these tokens can then be used as a partial payment on following products that are purchased from your shop.
By supporting the customer in all of these ways, he / she will definitely want to return to your store.

At the office:
And then it gets busy, the parcels ned to be packed stamped and sent off. Where your shop started with 2 parcels a day, it soon became 20, 30, 100 parcels a day, a lot of administration work.

Therefore, the web shop must keep stock from the outset, your shop must check with the bank to see if the product just ordered has been paid?, then the sales voucher can be printed automatically, keep the accounting program up-to-date, send an email to the customer with the sales information along with the invoice. Print the invoice, print an address label for the parcel.
Then send an email telling the customer the parcel has been sent with a track and trace code. This can all be automatic, but must be set up first.

If a web store is multilingual, the above must be entered in multiple languages. And mistakes, whether language or technical, are ruthlessly punished by a customer with reduced trust. So we must exclude all the errors at all costs. That means testing, testing, testing and testing again.

Major changes to the web shop.
I often hear of successful web shops want to upgrade to different, more modern or professional shopping system software. It would be a shame to lose your product indexing with Google and other search engines in such a move. The address (URL) of each article then changes.
Therefore, a 303 redirect for each article must be set. When an article has moved, search engines therefore know that the old article address no longer exists, and what the new address is. They can then change the new address into their databases. Thus, after the move, the web shop will continue to flourish.

Of course, there is much more to know about web shops, and I'm happy to tell you all about it. The system I specialize in and which I am using is called PrestaShop 1.7 and is one of the most popular web shop systems, used by over 600,000 web shops worldwide and has opportunities that even I sometimes am surprised about.