Ecommerce is the selling and buying of goods and services over electronic systems such as the Internet. It’s more than just a payment system. Ecommerce also implies safe delivery of goods.
But there’s more, much more.
After all, the first sale is only the beginning of generating money online, isn’t it?
Therefore I want to describe the ideal ecommerce system. Although you can use it to sell tangible products, I will limit my overview to the sales and delivery system for downloadable, digital products, because that’s what we use most in the Internet marketing niche.
So, let’s see how an ideal ecommerce system would look like.
From the moment your prospect hits the ‘Buy’ button, she should be transferred to a secure online payment system, indicated by ‘https’ instead of the usual ‘http’. Fortunately most popular payment processors like Clickbank and Paypal do this automatically.
The payment should be instant and confirmed, so you know your money is safe. If you use PayPal, this implies you also have to implement the IPN feature that PayPal uses to confirm the payment.
After you made sure you received the payment, you should deliver the product to your customer.
But remember that the URL for the download link can be passed to the payment processor, so it can send your customer back to your download page.
Intercepting that URL to the download page by evil persons could result in theft of your product. So the call to the payment processor should always be encrypted.
If you’re a smart marketer, you should have your customer sign up for your customer list, rather then keeping her on your prospect list. So, after showing her where and how to download the product, you also want her to sign up for your customer list.
Lots of people only provide download instructions AFTER having their customer sign up for the customer list. I do not use this method, since it implies a form of ‘forced continuity’ and anything ‘forced’ isn’t good in my opinion. I rather persuade her to subscribe to my list or, even better, switch her from the prospect list to my customer list automatically.
Whatever you do, you should have your prospect on your customer list now.
Because now it’s time to make extra money with your back end products. All the people on your customer list have trusted you once with their money. They’re proven buyers. And easy to approach with your next outstanding offer!
Another way to make extra money from your customers is to present them with a ‘One Time Offer‘ (OTO).
The best time to present such an offer is during the download process, because she’s in a buying mood. Again, I would not force them to look at your OTO before they can download the product they’ve just bought, because they want instant gratification and it’s another ‘forced’ option, but you have to test that.
A great OTO can do wonders for your online income.
So there you have your basic ecommerce system.
But why do all that alone?
Why not have an army of salesmen working for you and generate even more online income?
You can achieve that by running an affiliate program for your products. And you don’t have to wait until affiliates stop by at your site. Since your client now is on your customer list, it’s easy to follow up with a message announcing your affiliate program. Offer a nice incentive, such as a 100% commission on the front product.
You can even build a better and more motivated affiliate team by also offering commissions on back end products too, but that’s up to you.
Providing great marketing tools for your affiliate army is an outstanding way to have them sell more, so you’d better give them these tools.
And the most powerful way of making money is landing some great joint ventures (JV’s). Having JV partners endorse your products to their lists can skyrocket your income, certainly if they have responsive lists. Therefore you should deal with them in a different, more personal way, increasing the incentives, so they’re more willing to work with you.
On top of that, you must split-test your sales pages so you can measure the effects of each an every element in there. Furthermore, you must use trackers on all of your links, to learn what works, what works even better and what doesn’t work. Presenting great conversion numbers can increase your chances to land a splendid JV.
Do this with all your sales pages and products and you’ll end up with an ideal ecommerce system.
I know of two outstanding resources that handle ALL of these elements.
The first one let’s you in control, since it’s a script that resides on your servers. It’s called Rapid Action Profits. A brand new and exciting version was released yesterday. You can get your copy with a huge discount when you click on the orange frog before clicking on the order link. But it’s only for a couple of days, so you better hurry.
