If you have an existing site, or if you are just getting your business onto the web, here are some simple steps you should take to ensure you have a successful e-Commerce website.

Tip 5:

Stay away from virtual hosting. The cost of quality hosting and professional support is nothing compared to the cost of your site going down or having broken links and not knowing about it.

Just about as bad, is having to pay $80 - $120 per hour for technical support to fix broken links and other problems because your host does not have the skills to provide in-house technical back up of your site, and believe me the best of websites get glitches all the time.

Tip 6:

Talk to your web developer about optimising your key pages for the search engines and how you can add quality out-going and in-coming links to your site. It can be expensive, but for some organisations it will pay off in a big way, particularly if you use professional real-time web tracking to analyse your marketing activity.

Tip 7:

Keep adding informational content to your site. New content keeps your site fresh and interesting for people who re-visit your site...and a big bonus is it stimulates the search engine spiders. When they see fresh content on your site they automatically make a note to return soon and spider the site again. They absolutely crave new informational content.

Tip 8:

Beware of turning your site into an online brochure - viewers get annoyed by online brochures, they may be interesting in print, but they just don't work online. When a client insists on having brochures on their site, we normally place an icon on the page enabling them to download the brochure in PDF format.

Tip 9:

Make sure there is provision on your site to gather names and email addresses automatically. Building a list of opt-in names of people interested in your products or services, and keeping in regular touch with everyone on your list, will pay HUGE dividends in the medium to longer term .