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Your eCommerce Hosting and Customer Perception
Ecommerce hosting options that you choose for your ecommerce website have a definite effect on customer perception. In fact, ecommerce hosting solutions can make or break an ecommerce business. Reviewing ecommerce hosting providers and effectively evaluating and comparing the services and the quality of service they offer is one of the most important first steps you can take that will empower you to provide your website visitors and your customers with exceptional service. Providing high quality products or services through a reliable and efficient ecommerce website is unimaginably dependent upon the quality, reliability and capabilities of your ecommerce hosting provider.
There are a number of things associated with your ecommerce hosting that have an impact on customer perception and how your customers view your company in terms of professionalism, reliability and credibility. Some of the most important things to ensure when choosing ecommerce hosting options are security, speed, space, email services, and uptime. Of course, added administrative features like an easy to use control panel, access to server logs and reports, and the availability of software, scripts and access options, like FTP access for sharing files can be of importance for the effective administration of your ecommerce business.
The security features of your ecommerce hosting solution are paramount to building trusting relationships with your customers and making them comfortable ordering from you or sharing their personal information with you over the internet. Secure servers and encryption capabilities will improve your customers' perception and their confidence in your company. Without secure servers and encryption as part of your ecommerce hosting solution, you will undoubtedly lose business as internet shoppers are not generally willing to compromise their personal information or to subject their credit cards or bank accounts to potential fraud.
The speed of your ecommerce hosting servers is vital. People are impatient, that's just the way things are. If your ecommerce website is slow to load, website traffic will undoubtedly be driven away. As a result, you will lose business and the potential of your ecommerce website, in terms of profitability, will decline due to inadequate speed of the ecommerce hosting server. For an ecommerce hosting server to provide adequate loading speed, it should have at least a T3 connection to the internet. The space provided by ecommerce hosting services is also important, especially if your customers download data or files from your ecommerce website.
Make sure that you have the ability to increase space provided through your
ecommerce hosting plan if necessary for expansion. Also, if you are offering
downloads to your customers, be sure the ecommerce hosting package doesn't have
bandwidth restrictions that would hinder your customers' ability to download
from your ecommerce site. Email services offered through your ecommerce hosting
services should also be reviewed to ensure that they don't have unreasonable
limitations in regard to your email accounts. If you are unable to send or
receive large files, customer perception may be negatively impacted.
Reliable ecommerce hosting in terms of uptime is extremely critical to an
ecommerce business. When customers, or potential customers, are repeatedly
unable to access your website, they will definitely lose confidence in your
company and your professionalism and credibility will be questioned. While
existing customers may come back and make a second attempt to access your
website if it is down on their first try, new prospects likely will not give
your company a second thought. Downtime results in lost sales and lost clients,
plain and simple.
Having ecommerce hosting that is reliable and can actually guaranty at least
99% uptime is absolutely essential to your profitability and to your ability to
create positive customer perception which results in repeat business and
referrals.
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