How many hours and how many pounds did you spend last month to drive traffic and potential customers to your e-commerce website? And what will you spend in the coming season? If you're like most Internet retailers, it might feel like the balance of payments for a small country. Are you getting value for money and a good return on your investment? What are the other options to improve long-term customer value? Here are some practical tips for improving your e-commerce website to increase long-term customer loyalty with your products and your brand.

Tackle and publish Common Customer Issues
All the time you've spent compiling a comprehensive FAQ section should not go to waste. It's important that throughout the ordering process, common user questions and queries are addressed. Users might want to know how long delivery is expected to take, or if they have to enter extra information such as their date of birth, they might want to know why. Go through the ordering process and ask yourself at each stage: What questions might a user have? Answers to these queries should either be provided on-screen, or through a link. Take this a step further by cutting off issues at the pass. If you give your users an "account login area" to see account activity, this is the perfect place to highlight these issues.

Create Trust with Customers
Many consumers are still not completely comfortable buying online. They might be concerned about giving out their credit card number, or about not receiving the items they've paid for. It's therefore important that you acknowledge and dispel these concerns to put customer’s minds at rest. Try and think about the concerns customers might have at each step of the ordering process, and try to tackle them. Going out of your way to include information on your organisation and the people behind it is essential to success. Links to this information should always be included in the navigation of your site, but consider locating this information to a sidebar during the actual checkout process. If you're worried about cart abandonment - open up the link in a new browser window.

Success from Confirmation Emails
Once a customer has made their order, a confirmation e-mail should be sent straight away - no waiting until you can process the order. Confirmation e-mails should be brief and tell users important information such as the order number or tracking code. Including contact information for your “customer service department” might be overkill for smaller companies, but if you can manage, there is no substitute for conveying you are a quality company delivering quality products.

Remove surplus "non-sales" content
When shopping at an e-Commerce website, customers should always have a clear opportunity to buy a product on almost every page of the site. Having a page that just gives product details is not a great idea as that info should be combined on one product page with all the information a user needs along with a visible purchase (BUY NOW) button. You want customers to find what they want on the site easily and be able to quickly check-out without wasting any of their valuable time. Keep your articles, FAQ’s etc completely separate, but easily accessible.

Quality Product photos are vital
Shopping online is a lot different than the in-store experience because customers cannot see and touch the product, so it is best to show your users as many product images as possible. You want your customers to feel confident that they either found the right product or that what they are buying is of the quality they expect. Do not make your customers make an extra click to view photos that should be clearly visible on your product page.

Highlight your discounts and savings
When shopping at any high street retailer you will plainly see how well they promote any sales they have in the shop and this should be no different in your e-commerce store. Visitors to your website need to know that there are items on sale or that there are discount opportunities, making sure they are enticed to dig further into your store and ultimately make a purchase.

Customers Feedback
You should frequently do online searches on the name of your company and your specific domain name (or even set up automated news alert such as offered by Goggle) If someone has criticised your company on an online message board or blog, you need to know about it so that you can strategise on a response. A quick reply to explain the situation and offer a solution could solve the problem before it snowballs - or even turn a bad situation into a good one. Above all make sure your customers have every opportunity to give you their feedback.

Are all the visitors to your site are buying?
If you don't know how well your website is working for your existing and new customers it can be hard to decide how to tweak, update, and improve your website. Site statistics that track the traffic to your site, including when people are visiting, how they found your site and how often they came back, should be set up using some form of analytics software for your site. Currently, there are many free online analytics services that will answer all of those questions about your site's visitors.
Google has its own free analytics software available at http://www.google.com/analytics/. Once you start tracking your website visitors via analytics, you'll know where your customers are coming from and what pages they're visiting on your site, and more importantly you’ll be able to identify areas of your site that may be turning customers “off” – and therefore address these issues first.

Are you wasting your time working with the wrong e-commerce software?

If you have been selling on the web for some years, you may be selling your products via an e-commerce site using an out-dated ecommerce platform.
You may be fighting to make changes and wasting valuable, precious time trying to put new products on, change images, change prices, add discounts etc within an ecommerce platform that is not as intuitive to use as it could be.

With the continual development of newer, and better, ecommerce solutions available you should invest time and money in ensuring you have the best tools available. The right ecommerce package will not only save you time in administration, it will also help you make more money as well.

Shout about the good things your customers say?
When it comes to purchases, no one likes to be a pioneer. Customers like to shop where other people shop and they like to purchase from companies that others in their situation have bought from. Regardless of what your business is, you can benefit from testimonials - people talking about why they like your business and the positive experiences that they've had doing business with you.

No matter the size of your business, if you have a happy customer, ask them to give you a testimonial and add that information to your site in a prominent place.

Providing excellent service
A significant part of your success selling online will be your ability to provide first-rate customer service. If a customer emails a question about the products you're selling, you need to have a system in place to respond to customer questions and complaints promptly. The internet offers business owners an unparalleled ability to sell to people literally all over the world, but the internet also offers your disgruntled customers a wide-reaching platform to air their complaints. Buy far the best way to reduce customer complaints, is to offer customers great service.