So you think you know your customers; would you be willing to bet on it? If you’re falling for these 5 common myths about your customers, you are betting on it. You’re betting the time and money you’ve invested in your business, and you may be betting on the wrong things.

1. Your customers are just like you
This is by far the most common mistake I see business owners make: they assume their customers are just like them. If only I had a dime for every time I heard an entrepreneur say “I would never _____ so I don’t ______ with my business”.
I recently wrote about adding social share buttons to my order confirmation pages. Several Etsy sellers were quick to protest that they’d never share what they buy with such a widget. Does this mean their customers wouldn’t do it and give them tons of free word of mouth? All I can say is I got this idea from Amazon.com, the largest online retailer. They’re #1 for a reason and they thought this type of feature was worth putting on their confirmation page. That alone makes this feature worth testing.

What to do about this
Don’t ever assume your customers think the way you do. The most reliable indicator of customer behavior is customer behavior — that means you have to test everything. Test new features and see what percentage of customers use them. Test new products and see how well they sell. Test different price points and see which ones are successful. Google has provided a terrific free tool, Google Website Optimizer, that allows you to actually test different versions of pages on your site.

I like to keep abreast of tons of online commerce sites like Practical Ecommerce and Get Elastic (you’ll notice I often feature my faves on Friday link lists). When I see an idea that looks promising I always test it out, regardless of whether the idea would work on me as a consumer.

2. Customers do what they say they would do
This is an easy trap to fall for. You’ll innocently ask on Facebook “Would you buy this in red or green?” your customers say red, so you order 100 in red and 20 in green. Sure enough you sell out of green in 2 days and you’re left with too much red.

There’s nothing wrong with asking customers for opinions or feedback, but don’t take what they say as a reliable indicator of what they would actually do. Testing in the real world is the best way to get an accurate answer.

What to do about this
Always test things before you invest heavily in an idea. When we’re trying out a new product at Ex-Boyfriend, we’ll usually pay more per unit to produce a smaller number of something new to see what sells best. Then we’ll invest in more inventory for the best sellers at a higher volume for a lower cost. Sometimes we ask for customer input, but we also listen to our gut a lot.

3. Customers speak your language
Nothing makes me crazier than maker-speak on product pages geared to customers. The average consumer doesn’t know what the hell cabochons or giclee means. They’re shopping with you because they don’t make their own prints or jewelry or bags or whatever you sell, so don’t use words they won’t understand. Your customer is not impressed that you used a toggle clasp for that necklace because she doesn’t know what it means. You’re better off writing “Includes a super secure locking clasp that won’t accidentally open, so losing this necklace on the go is never a worry.”

What to do about this
Ask a friend or relative to take a look at your product pages (make sure it’s someone who isn’t in your industry). Ask them if they see any words or descriptors on your pages that are unfamiliar to them. If your Aunt Sue or your next door neighbor doesn’t know what your product pages are talking about, your customers probably don’t either.

4. If they want to buy it, they’ll figure out how to use your website
Crappy user interfaces are another peeve of mine. I hate to see a product page where I can’t find the “add to cart” button, or websites where I can’t find the check out button. If your site is at all difficult or confusing to use, you’re losing sales. Don’t assume that your products are so great that your customers will suffer through a bad user interface to place an order. There’s too much competition out there, so your site’s usablity needs to be top notch.

What to do about this
Having fresh eyes on your site is a great way to see if your site suffers from this problem. To make sure my site is easy to use, I always give it a “mom test”. This means I call up my mom, who is probably less computer savvy than my cats, and ask her to buy something on a website. If she can’t figure out how to do it, there’s work to be done.

5. Customers read
Everyone is busy busy busy, this means they probably don’t have time to read every word on your site. Your job is to make sure the most important information is highly visible to customers, easy to digest and reiterated in key places. Customers are not going to read paragraphs of text, so if you’ve written your terms about ship times, returns, etc. inside a novel your customer probably never saw it. Customers look at pictures and headlines, customers skim.

What to do about this
Make sure your website is skimmable. You’ll notice I do that here on Smaller Box, you can usually get the gist of a post I’ve written by reading the headlines and then read the entire thing if you’re intrigued. This means my content can be a quick snack or a full meal, depending on how busy you are, but you’ll be able to get info you need either way. You can do this with your product-based website too and here’s how:

• Put as much info as you can into bullets. Bullets are great for product descriptions.
• Use bold and headlines for really important information (i.e. Return Policy should be a bolded headline, and then how returns work can be written in bullets or a few short sentences)
• Reiterate information in key places (i.e. put delivery time frames on product pages, check out pages and confirmation emails. Your customers are looking for this information so don’t make them dig for it, put it every place they could possibly look so they’ll see it right away)
•  Use images instead of text whenever possible. People are drawn to photos, so if your bag has interior pockets with zippers it’s important to put this in your product description AND show a photo of the inside of that bag.

Ever hear the expression “dress for the job you want”? What it means is, if you keep showing up to the office in cut off shorts and ratty t-shirts, people will think you look like you belong in the mail room and that’s where you’ll stay. If your business is, figuratively speaking, dressed like a ragamuffin, it’s always going to be one. If you want to run a million dollar business, then fake it til you make it. Below are 7 ways you can make your business look like a big deal:

1. List your Phone Number
Real businesses have phone service. If you want to look like one, include a contact number on your website, ideally some place easy to spot. It says “we’re a real company, with real staff waiting to take your calls.” Even if you can’t man your phone line 24/7, have a professional voice mail greeting that implies that customer calls are returned in a timely fashion. (And then actually return the calls in a timely fashion.)

There are dozens of services that provide phone numbers for small companies. You can even get a free number from Google Voice (though it does have Google Voice branding on it). If you are willing to spend a little, you can get a toll free number for less than 10 bucks a month.

Bonus: Having a phone number ups your website’s trust factor, an important component of conversion rate optimization. People want to give their money to businesses that seem trustworthy. Having a phone number listed makes your business seem more like it can be trusted to take a credit card number and deliver products.

2. Have a beautiful web design
Not just any old website will do, you need a website that looks really great. Having an attractive professional website makes your business seem successful. It makes journalists more willing to write about you. It makes wholesale buyers more interested in doing business with you. It makes consumers more willing to trust you.

If you’re thinking “web design is hard” or “a web designer is expensive”, consider all the money and opportunities you’ll lose by having a terrible website.

3. Have great product photos
Great looking product photos are an extremely important part of your company’s image. Don’t bother with indoor lighting and a cheap camera. You want your photos to look compelling. Like a great web design, great product photos impress all kinds of online visitors from customers to the press.

If you want to take your own product photos, do some research to see how other people have staged photos of similar products. This will give you ideas on how to stage your photo shoot. Then be sure to work with proper lighting, so photos don’t look murky or gray. Finally, do some retouching in a program like Photoshop, so your photos look perfect.

If you’re not up for all this work, consider hiring a professional photographer to shoot your items. There are even photographers that specialize in doing product photography and will shoot your products for a pretty affordable rate, usually charging per product photo.

4. Merchandising
Merchandising products on your website in a variety of ways is useful for several reasons. It makes your product catalog seem bigger and it makes shopping for products easier. I wrote a detailed piece for Design Sponge last year on ways to merchandise a shop. You’ll notice a lot of bigger companies merchandise their online stores using the same strategies.

5. Publicity
Getting a mention from a major media outlet is not only a great way to increase brand awareness and give your sales a boost, it also makes your company look important. These placements give you credibility with both retail customers and wholesale customers, so they’re a valuable boon to your business if you can get them. Once you’ve scored them, you can use them on your website, adding logos like “as seen on” to product pages and your home page.

Not sure how to get publicity? Check this out, I’ve written a very detailed how-to.

6. Engaged Social Media Followers
Want to convince media outlets, wholesale buyers, competitors or potential new retail customers you’ve got an army of rabid fans? Of course you do, and social media makes that easier than ever. By truly engaging your fans on sites like Twitter and Facebook (instead of just selling to them), you can get them to talk to you and about you, thus making your fans seem like they’re crazy for you.

Some tricks that help:
- Ask questions that prompt responses
- In your product packages, include a note that asks customers to share a photo of themselves using your product on Facebook
- Take photos of fans at live events using your products and tag them on Facebook/share them on Twitter and Flickr
- Shoot videos of live events and interview your customers. You can just ask a couple of quick questions such as “what did you buy from [insert brand name] today?” or “what did you enjoy best about today’s event?” Then post to Youtube and let fans know they’ve been featured.

7. Product Presentation
If you’re just shoving your products into a mailer with an invoice print out from Paypal, STOP IT! You’re leaving the customer with the impression that you’re simply a transactional seller and not a real brand to be remembered. You want every customer who gets your package to remember it, so make sure your packaging isn’t an afterthought. This includes creating a stylish branded invoice and adding other little details to make your brand seem like a big deal. This can include hang tags, branded products or little freebies like branded vinyl stickers. These same rules apply to samples that go to the media. If your shipment looks impressive, it’s going to make an impression on anyone who gets it.

Bonus Tip for Wannabe Big Shots: A lot of small businesses who sell online take Paypal. It’s super easy and inexpensive to implement. The problem is, it makes you look pretty small time. Having the ability to take credit cards makes you look like a bigger company. If you’re a Paypal junkie, consider their virtual terminal product. It’s a nice all-in-one solution. This isn’t your only option, of course. A little research on merchant accounts will help you find plenty of other vendors that enable you to take credit cards online. And you need not completely ditch Paypal. Accepting both cards and Paypal is a great way to look professional and satisfy customers who have a preference for one of those two payment methods.

Happy Friday! Below are my recommended reads from around the web for the week:

• Fans, Friends, Followers and Why None of It Matters – I had to lead off today’s link collection with this one, because I loved it so much. It’s not about what the title implies, it’s really about how you choose the “experts” that you follow for business advice. I couldn’t agree with the author more. So many people follow others based on their existing following instead of the content of their writing, and as a result a lot of people not worth listening to get a pretty big audience. I have so much more to say about this but I’ll leave it to a post of its own, for now, check out the article!
• 7 Takeaways from the Optimization Summit – Get Elastic nicely sums up valuable usability advice for conversion rate optimization
• Marketing Strategies: Customer Engagement vs Traffic Generation – Megan writes a lot of great stuff over at Craft MBA but this piece is absolutely one of my favorites. Not because she recommends a couple of Smaller Box tools, but because she so eloquently explains what so many of her readers get wrong about marketing.
• Payment Gateways and Merchant Processors – Good read for anyone who accepts credit cards on their own site (or wants to).
• Are Keyword Density Percentages Killing Your Content? – Great article that explains how writing for search engines instead of humans sabotages your marketing efforts
• 7 Powerful Trigger Words You Can Use in Your Blog Headlines to Get More Eyeballs – Terrific copy writing tips!
• How to Write a High Converting Sales Page – More good copy writing tips, this article is focused on sales pages
• Why Your Customer Service Team Should Be Your Biggest Investment
• SEO Industry Takes a Stab and Deciphering SEO Ranking Factors – SEO experts don’t know the exact recipe for the special sauce that makes up search engine rankings, but this article discusses the experts best hunches
• Craft Show Checklist: What to Bring With You

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• Are Your Facebook Fans Fair Weather Friends?
• 51 Essential Link Building Tips
• Questions to Ask Yourself When Setting Store Policies
• Brewery Sells Stock Through Its Products – There’s been some buzz about funding your biz in the creative entrepreneur blogosphere. This beer company took an interesting approach, selling shares of its company stock with its product.
• 10 Phrases That Mean a Marketing Article is Useless – Couldn’t agree with this list more!
• Stop Obsessing Over Your Search Engine Rank – nicely echoes what I said recently about branding.
• 15 Questions That Will Change The Way You Think About SEO

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• 27 Things That Should be on Your Homepage
• Setting Your Policy of Free Samples for the Media
• 11 Product Page Testing Ideas for 2011
• Is Your Paypal Button Hurting Your Conversion Rate?

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• Should You Register With Search Engines?
• How Twitter and Facebook Improve Your Search Rankings
• Do Facebook Pages Generate As Many Click-Throughs as Twitter?
• Improve Your Merchandising With Photos and Video
• Google Webmaster Tools 101
• Why You Shouldn’t Focus on Conversion Rate in A/B Tests
• How Businesses Cope With Angry Customers
• Etsy Circles As Market Research
• SWEET DEAL: Google is Giving Away $100 in FREE Advertising

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• Ecommerce Executive Touts the Effectiveless of Remarketing Campaigns
• Tips to To Reduce Those “Where is my order?” Inquiries
• Tips From Meylah on Photographing Small Objects
• Innovative Sales Tips from Entreprenette
• Retargeting and What It Means for Marketers
• 25 Reasons I’ll Leave Your Website in 10 Seconds
• Are You Clear On Your Target Market (written for bloggers but ecommerce companies can still glean some tips from this article)
• Dealing With Difficult Clients

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

SEO 101: The “Long Tail” Defined

What Your SEO Expert Should Know

People in Photos – learn more about how using pictures of people affects response rate and sales

Link Building for SEO Beginners

Internet Marketing Checklist for the Holidays

10 Numbers Every Marketer Should Commit To Memory

Make Your Own Company Death Clock – How long do you have to succeed or fail?

Customer Service Scorecard

Accounting: Your Company’s Life Line

A Serial Entrepreneur Explains the Venture Capital Process

Beginner’s Guide to Google Webmaster Tools

The Importance of Testing Your Call to Action

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• 10 Ways to Annoy Your Customers and How to Avoid Them
• Is Google Wasting Your Money on Parked Domains? – an important read for Adwords users
• 10 Great Web Apps for Marketers
• 6 Cliches That Help You Understand SEO
• 5 Site Metrics Every Small Business Should Track
• What To Expect When Selling to a Department Store
• Email Marketing: 3 Best Practices to Ignore
• What Makes You So Special – an article to get you thinking about your USP (unique selling proposition)
• What to Do if Your Product Gets Copied – although I think many cases of “copying” are not actual copying, it’s still good to be prepared when the real thing comes along
• Inventory Management Tips from Meylah
• Choose the Right Ecommerce Designer – Thinking about getting your own ecommerce website? Check out this article for tips.
• What to Expect from Trunk Shows
• 10 Tips for Writing an Ecommerce Website FAQ

One of the toughest parts of working in retail is dealing with angry customers. Even though we do our best to make them happy, sometimes we can’t win. It’s important to be prepared to deal with wrathy customers so you’re not taken by surprise when they strike. Here are some our top tips that we apply when dealing with our own angry customers:

1. Be responsive
Never ignore an angry customer. Return their calls right away. Respond to their emails immediately. A fast response to a problem goes a long way, so make sure you’re not procrastinating when it comes to dealing with this type of problem.

2. Show some empathy
When a customer is mad, in their mind it’s them versus you. Coming to a resolution will go more smoothly if you can change the mindset to a problem you’re working to solve together. To get them off the offensive, let them know you understand their frustration. Thank them for calling the problem to your attention or taking the time to contact you.

For example, imagine a customer is angry that their order never arrived. You check the package tracking number and see the post office has screwed up. When you respond to the customer, you’ll want to say something like. “Thank you for taking the time to contact me about this issue. I completely understand your frustration. I checked the package status with USPS and it appears they’ve lost the package. Obviously this is very upsetting for me too. I will be filing a claim with them,  but in the meantime, I want you to have your products, so I will put a replacement package in the mail today.”

3. Do NOT lose your cool
People can be really nasty and inappropriate. They call names, they curse, they yell. There’s no need to stoop to their level. Whatever they say or do, it’s important to remain calm and pleasant. Refusing to engage with their boorish behavior sometimes even shames them into changing their tone.

4. Do not make them feel stupid
Sometimes a customer is angry and the mistake was on their part. Maybe they chose standard shipping and then got angry when the order didn’t arrive over night. Maybe they’re freaking out because they had to pay customs fees, even though it clearly stated on your website that customs fees might be incurred on international deliveries.

In these situations, the first thing to keep in mind is that people don’t always follow directions. They’re busy and distracted and maybe did not pay attention when they were shopping on your site. When we get complaints that fall into this category, we always apologize for the confusion and then explain the steps we took to try to provide them with detailed information. We close by asking them for their input on how we could do a better job communicating the overlooked information in the future.

5. Do not give in to unreasonable demands
Angry customers can sometimes expect you to bend over backwards to appease them. Emphasis on the bending over. This kind of thing is often associated with customers who are throwing tantrums. They expect their bullying aggressive behavior will intimidate you into giving them whatever they want.

If the mistake is on your part, you probably should offer them something to make it up to them. When things go awry on our end at our ecommerce company, we often do things like gift cards or free shipping. We don’t give away entire orders for free or hand over hundreds of dollars in product for compensation. You want to make sure whatever you’re giving the customer to appease them isn’t above and beyond.

At the end of the day, the most you really owe them is a refund on returned merchandise, and if someone’s truly being an implacable ass, sometimes that’s the best course of action. When we’re dealing with someone truly impossible in this situation, we’ll typically say, “I’m really sorry you’re not satisfied with any of the offers I’ve made to try to make this right for you. We’d be happy to refund your money in full if you’d like to return your order.”

6. Try to make things right
If there’s something you can do to appease the customer, and it’s not unreasonable, offer to do it. If their order shipped later than it should have, offer free shipping. If their product arrived damaged, offer to replace it free of charge and send them a coupon code for their next purchase.

7. The best offense is a good defense
If you know you’re going to have a problem, communicate with your customer as early as possible and let them decide how they want to handle it. If an item they ordered is out of stock, notify them immediately and ask if they’d like a refund or if they’d like to wait. If they want to wait, offer to ship their order for free if it’s going to be a long wait. If you know 50% of the clasps on the necklaces you sold are breaking, contact customers who ordered the item and offer them a free repair. Taking the time to warn customers about a problem before it starts usually keeps them from throwing a tantrum later.