Q) How can you generate the most sales with your e-Commerce site?

Eddie Davis, senior director of Merchant Services, PayPal:

• Keep an eye on your competition. Tools such as Compete, NetPeriscope and Hitwise can help you monitor how they are doing. The more you know, the better you can position your business or site to take advantage of any opportunities that might arise in a changing competitive environment.
• Add customer reviews. Preliminary data shows that Web searches have become customers’ primary product and price research tools. Skittish consumers need to read reviews that boost their confidence in both the product and the vendor.
• Tune your keywords to consumer attitudes. With consumer confidence at record lows, the language you use on your site needs to reassure and comfort the consumer. As an online merchant, it’s imperative that your site’s language expresses good value.
• Test your templates. Instead of doing a major site overhaul, test your templates using heat-mapping tools such as Crazy Egg to check how users are interacting with your pages. With this type of information, you can improve your site’s performance without having to remake it completely.
• Review your metrics regularly. One of the most powerful features available in almost all analytics packages is the ability to compare data year over year. Use this comparative information to assess your program’s health and drive your marketing efforts. Don’t let the data mislead you.

Article appears courtesy of SCORE , Mentors to America’s Small Business. Get free advice from more than 12,000 volunteer business mentors in over 340 chapters across the nation at www.score.org. Eddie Davis is the senior director of merchant services at PayPal and is responsible for providing PayPal's payment processing services to thousands of small and medium-sized online retailers