More detailed e-commerce advice

Know Your Customer
Sales sites that try to sell everything will put people of. It's like giving someone a telephone directory and asking them to make a phone call. Even though the Internet is an anonymous electronic force, consumers want to feel as if the website owner knows about and cares about them as individuals. By understanding the type of person coming to your website you can give them what they really want. This way you are more likely to get a repeat customer.

Use editorial to support your sales
This is called "targeted content" can be the obvious reviews of books, new products, etc. But it can also be things like descriptions of fishing trips where you drop in links to products you actually used. For instance, if you caught a huge bass last weekend using a particular lure, you can drop in a photo of the lure, linking the photo and a text reference to your sales page where you actually allow the consumer to purchase that lure.

Detailed information
Once you know exactly what you should be selling to your customer, you can target your content to support those sales. Consumers, more than anything else, want information on products they may want to buy. And those who sell products depend on "buzz," people like you talking about the product's advantages and disadvantages, to get those products sold.

Develop a Reputation
The largest sales driver online is trust. The way to build good repeat business sales volumes is to develop a growing loyal customer base who know they can trust you. One of the best ways to do this is by writing excellent reviews. Another is by giving information away on your website. You must be able to write well to do all this, or at least contract with others who can write well and to your specifications. You also must be honest about the items you write about. If it's junk, you should be willing to say it's junk. You won't sell many of the poor quality items, but you'll gain something priceless: respect from your customers.

Grow your customer base
To do this, you must expand your communications outside your own website. You must be able and willing to distribute articles to other newsletters, websites, and content distributors who are willing to print your information and retain your personal name and URL in a resource box attached to the article.

Affiliated sales
Ideally your should take place within articles or in the right sidebar of your website, and when your customer sees the item you're selling, they should instantly want it.