If you ever wonder how to create successful e-commerce sites, we can wrap-up and conclude the things most successful e-commerce sites have in common. I have composed some thoughts on this matters for us to discuss below.

1. How the e-commerce sites organized, designed and developed?

   How the selling goods categorized? Is site easily navigated? How easy is it for visitors to find the stuff they’re looking for?

   Functional, excellent accessibility, clean, professional & good looking sites are highly desirable here. Having a good web development firm to do the job is a wise choice especially when you’re not familiar or only know a bit about developing web sites.

   Are stuff and category offered way too many and unmanageable that they overwhelmed plus scared visitors off? More often, selling focus for a niche market is more effective and profitable.

   How superior are the stuff’s images shot & displayed? don’t forget, the images displayed are the representative of the real products. You’ve got to have decent digital camera, photo studio and photography skills or let a professional photographer to do this job for you.
    

2. How well is the customers services?
   Top e-commerce sites were built on repeated customers buying. Repeated customers were satisfied buyers who do repeated buying because the previous purchases were okay.

   That’s said, your most potential buyers most probably are your previous customers. So, excellent customers services is a mandatory. Handle well shipping & handling, complaints on purchased goods, queries, special request, etc, and you win customers’ hearts which encourage them to buy more and tell good experience to friends more.
    

3. Do the selling stuff fit the sell-able goods for e-commerce sites?
   So far history taught us: books (Amazon, Barnes & Noble), digital music (iTunes, Napster), gadgets (Apple Store, Amazon, Circuit City), computers (Dell, HP, Apple Store), clothes fashions (JC Penney, Marks & Spencer, Victoria’s Secret, many more), software (Adobe, Microsoft), shoes (Zappos), jewelry (Blue Nile) and other more fit for online selling.
    
4. Do the selling goods target niche market?
   Find your ecommerce sites’ niche market, and provide complete (well, almost complete is fine) range of goods for this niche.

   Remember e-commerce sites with a niche target market which sell complete set of niche goods, mostly always better than wide range, non focus ecommerce sites with incomplete wide range goods.
    

5. Do the ecommerce sites offer a promotion, discount, free shipping or other advantages to online visitors?
   Promos, discounts & other buyer’s advantages work twice as effective on online shopping over the brick & mortar offline shopping.
    
6. Did the ecommerce site build a sticky & thick community?
   To sustain visitors’ visits ecommerce site better off built on top of potential buyers creating community and be in the middle of the conversation.
    
7. Steady Flow Traffic of Potential Buyers
   Traffic of course is very obvious, like other sites, required. To make good sales though, ecommerce sites need steady flow of not just any visitors, but more importantly potential buyers.

   Find out and get to know who are these potential buyers, where they come from, what are their habits, where they hang out, etc. This info will be very useful in ecommerce sites’ sales effort, including search engines optimization efforts.

   The key is focus to these potential buyers. Traffic of this kind can be obtained from amongs other :

   • good search engines ranking for some narrow, focus & specific search phrase
   • search engines ppc advertising like Google’s AdWord or Yahoo’s Sponsored Search which target relevant potential buying visitors
   • featured relevant articles
   • relevant link exchange
   • etc.