The Internet has opened up all sorts of possibilities. The fact that ecommerce is a multi-billion dollar industry is proof of the power of the World Wide Web. But, just as there is a good side to having an ecommerce business, there can be a downside to all this openness and accessibility. I’m talking about your online reputation.

Your online reputation is an important part of ecommerce. Unfortunately, there are all sorts of things that can cause online shoppers to post complaints. Unpersonalized and poor product recommendations, slow email response time and products damaged in shipping are among the complaints you might see. But these can be fixed by improving your customer service.

Other online reputation problems can be a little trickier. However, invespBlog has some great tips on bolstering a flagging online reputation for your ecommerce business:

Blogs

One of the main issues that can come up is that some might trash your ecommerce business on a blog. This could be a competitor, or it could be really dissatisfied customer. Either way, invespBlog offers this advice:

1. Comment on the blog post explaining your side of the story. If it was a negative customer experience, you could openly offer the blogger a refund, gift certificate or some other incentive to contact you themselves. This way, if people researching your company read the blog post, they will also see you are a company that cares and are willing to make it up to disappointed customers.

2. Keep working on creating content that will outrank the blog post long-term.

3. Stick it out. It’s not unusual for fresh blog content to rank highly and drop down after a couple weeks (when it slips off the blog home page), never to climb back again.

Online forums

If someone trashes your ecommerce business on an online forum, answer back, respectfully. Additionally, if it happens on your forum, you can earn points by not censoring and then posting reasoned and polite reply.

Steps you can take to protect your online reputation

• Update your page with high ranking content. invespBlog recommends that you create your own content that will trump other content. Press releases, company profiles, your own blog, articles, guest posts on other blog and social networking can all boost you, pushing negative items about your ecommerce business further down in the rankings.
• Watch your ecommerce blog for spam comments. Keep track of comments on your ecommerce blog. If the comment is spam, remove it. No one wants to read a blog that is always covered in spam.
• Track your online reputation. invespBlog points out that you can use news alerts to keep track of when things show up about your ecommerce business. This gives you warning, and you can address the issue ASAP

Tags: ecommerce blog, ecommerce business, ecommerce, online reputation,
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