Face it, there are some times when being big, or at least LOOKING big, can be an advantage when you’re in business. Some of your customers and some of your suppliers think that BIG means more reliability, a better price and higher quality. WE know that’s not necessarily true, but if making your company look bigger brings more customer orders, you may want to consider doing the things that will provide that look.

One of the easiest moves you can make, though the cost can vary greatly, is to incorporate. Mary Jo’s Creations, Inc., has a more “big business” feel than Mary Jo’s Custom Dolls. Please consider the tax implications before you incorporate, though, and make sure that it is right for your business.

Another good opening move is to get a good graphic artist to design your company’s logo. Logo costs can range from inexpensive to “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it!” so shop carefully. Please bear in mind that graphic artists can be better at some subjects than at others. Even if your sister-in-law who does the cute logos for the local specialty toy businesses can give you a great break on price, she may not be the best bet for your computer software company. Take a look at the designer’s portfolio to see if any of the work shows a style that looks right for company logo.

A lot of sites mistake complicated for professional, even the very big retailers who are moving into e-commerce. If it takes a long time to load or has Shockwave or Flash, you need to make sure that it’s really related to what your business is offering. Sure, it looks cool but those three factors can send your customers searching for other places to do business since many of them do not have enough bandwidth or memory to have things run as well as they do on your brand new machine. Good web design that lets your customers find what they’re looking for quickly - ideally within three clicks - can make your business look professional. That’s a set of clues that they’ll equate with “big business.” Other options that make your small business look big include:

Have a good privacy policy posted where they can easily find it.
Make sure that your price is fairly competitive, unless your product is something that they can’t get from other merchants. It doesn’t have to be the best price, but it should be reasonably close.
Make it easy for them to buy once they’ve filled the shopping cart! Yes, you do need a merchant account if you are doing business over the Internet. Anything that slows your customers down or makes it more difficult for them to buy your product is something that you should examine and eliminate if at all possible.
Let them know before they check out if an item is in stock.
You may want to consider offering them a free gift with their first purchase to make filling out the billing and shipping information easier to swallow.
Offer them the opportunity to buy through a secure website, switch to toll free phone order or choose conventional mail order. A number of people still feel that e-commerce isn’t completely safe, a situation that was reinforced by CD-Now having thousands of credit card numbers taken from its site by a hacker who offered to return them for ransom. Let them know that your site, and their data, is secure. Then make sure that you keep that promise.
Offer them express delivery service, if they’re willing to pay for it.
Explain how you handle returns if they find the purchase unsatisfactory for whatever reason.
You may wish to consider offering online help. Make it easy for them to contact you by email, at least, and make sure you reply within one business day. There are a number of other customer care options that are becoming available, including having inbound agents at call centers keep your phones covered 24/7. That way, people can always get the information they need when they’re making a purchase decision. This may be too expensive still for many small businesses, but rates will continue dropping and minimum hours covered may drop as well.
Once your customers have placed their orders, taking care of them after the sale will really increase your long term profits because they’ll come back to you the next time if they had a great experience. They’ll also refer their friends, coworkers, neighbors and family members to your business.

Send them an email confirmation that their order has been received.
Inform them when it is shipped, which carrier it is going with and the tracking number (if any) so that they can check to see where it is themselves.
Check yourself to make sure that it was delivered by the carrier.
Send them a follow up email a few days after delivery to thank them for their business. Make it easy for them to get back to you if there were any problems because you want to resolve bad situations quickly.
Big businesses are using data mining techniques. That is MBA-speak for looking at customer information, purchase patterns and navigation of a website to tailor later offers to customers and get a higher response rate than they can from untargeted direct mail. You may not be able to use the most sophisticated and expensive techniques, but you can use common sense ones to make offers that your customers are more likely to buy. If you sell seeds, for example, you could look at which seeds your customers have purchased in their previous orders. Did they buy a lot of annual seeds last year? Were they mostly vegetables or flowers? You can put together a special offer that will make them more likely to buy this year based on what you know about them.

A customer who has once purchased from you is more likely to buy from you again. Repeat business is more profitable because your marketing costs are lower to retain customers than they are to get new ones. Some studies have indicated that, on the average, it costs 8 times as much to get a new customer as it does to keep an existing customer satisfied and ordering regularly.

Are you ready to make your business look, and behave, like a terrific bigger business? Do it and keep it growing, and you may achieve that bigger status by being a class act.

-Cindy Nemeth-Johannes