The classic challenge of integrating the online sales channel with your business
Publish a comprehensive catalog that is truly practical for users, making searches and comparisons easy.
The catalog of your products and services is a fundamental element when you bet on selling on the internet.
It must be really practical for users: it must facilitate searches, clearly show all the characteristics, include user manuals, etc.
It is a good idea to include a price and offers simulator, which allows potential members to have a cost estimate for one or more options. This is a growing demand today.
If possible, you should even facilitate the comparison of features and prices with the products and services of the competition.

Include your members' comments, especially positive ones.
Today buyers look first to what those who have already bought say, what their experience has been, their degree of satisfaction, whether or not they recommend the purchase, etc.
That is why it is very important that your online channel has a section where your members can tell about their experience, especially if you have confidence in your company and your products and services.
This section should be reviewed more often than usual. You have to confirm that the comments are positive and look for the negative ones, trying to find out and solve as soon as possible what the problem has been. In addition, you have to take the appropriate measures so that it does not occur again, thus improving your quality levels.

It facilitates the registration of members, the creation of profiles, accounts and groups.
Registration in your sales channel should be very simple, very fast. One of the best options is to allow a user to register with the username and password of their favorite social network. That is the most common in most online stores. Obviously this process will include all the security meausers to make sure that the process of registration and login are safe for the user.
Once registered, you must give users the opportunity to generate a profile and an account, with all the details that they want to incorporate. The objective is to get to know them better and, thanks to this, to be able to refine more with short-term proposals and offers and even with the definition of the long-term portfolio.
It may even make sense to provide their own space for some of the members, where the degree of interaction is greater. Even better would be if this collaboration was carried out by groups of users, both among themselves and with other users.
Also it should include a personal area where users can update their personal and private data.

Manage the complete sales cycle: Prices, orders, offers and discounts, payments and invoices.
Your eCommerce solution must manage all aspects of the sale, starting with prices and the various offers and discounts. If your products and services are complex, you should provide at least enough information so that potential customers can get an idea of the costs and request additional information, if they wish.
It must also allow customers to place orders and the system to collect them automatically, sending them to the appropriate department for a course.
One of the most important elements is online payments, which can be made from the website itself, linking with a payment gateway and managing the high level of security that is necessary. Invoices will also be managed: their generation and delivery, in the most automatic way possible.
The best option for it usually is the implementation of a CRM solution that allows to store the information and work with it easily, integrated with the rest of our system and includes the option to automate processes via BPM’s (Business Process Modeler).
All of the above tasks must be accessible from a mobile device, which is the preferred option for customers right now. This step is not easy and experienced support in this field could be useful.

Get your customers to always see the same company.
It is important to ensure that your customers do not “get lost” when they enter your website, that they perceive the same company as if they approach a store or if they call by phone.
For this it is necessary that your eCommerce module is perfectly integrated with the rest of your computer systems, that it works in coordination with the rest of the company.
For example, the inventory of your online store and your physical store must be synchronized, it cannot be that the availability of your products is different depending on the channel through which the customer accesses.

Make your view of customers unique too.
Another important aspect is to connect the information of your clients online and offline, which is not easy, since clients do not always identify themselves properly.
If you manage to have your customer information centralized, every time one of them accesses your company through whatever channel it is, you will be able to access the history of contacts and sales and, therefore, give them personalized and satisfactory attention.
This aspect is especially relevant if the customer’s contact occurs due to a complaint or claim. In this case, being able to have the history of all customer interactions with us, including details of the products purchased, allows us to dedicate the most appropriate effort in each case. A good option for it it’s the management of tickets or requests through an unique area.

Manage your physical store and your online store in an integrated way
When we add an online store to our business we are incorporating another space that the customer can use as they see fit and not necessarily as we had planned.
Some customers may prefer the new channel and make all their purchases online. But it may also be that others prefer to use the website as a source of information and then go to the physical store and buy “spot on.” It may even happen that both types of customers want to leave their comments on the network.
That is why we must integrate information systems and manage all spaces jointly, being flexible and allowing clients to use them freely, each one as it suits them best. This way we will make them more comfortable and, of course, buy more.
In both cases it’s convenient to make a good managament of the leads generated, being able to automate the system so the associations are made the way we want and reflect each stage so we can place our efforts in other areas.
