Tips & Facts

1. Communicate extensively with your (potential) customers before, during and after a transaction. This includes confirmation emails, web chat sessions, forums etc.

2. Be honest about delivery times and P&P. Most of the complaints about online retailers concern the shipping or posting process. Choose your shipping partner carefully.

3. Offer as much information as possible on your products. Provide photos, specifications, details, reviews and external links to make sure that the customer knows what they are buying.

4. Ship internationally. This is a common way of boosting sales. However, you need to be careful about not getting stung by scammers or fraudsters by extending credit.

5. Offer different languages. A controversial, yet-easy to implement, feature is translation. Google site translator allows you to choose between 25 pairs of languages. While the resulting translation is often approximate, it is better than nothing and is certainly cheaper and faster than having to get a full time translator.

6. Update your website as often as possible. This will almost certainly insure that your website occupies a good place in search engine results plus there's nothing more worrying than to read that an e-commerce website was last updated in 2005.

To learn more about selling online, why not read our related guides:

 Online banking

 Selling online

 Online transactions