Traffic is the basis of an online sales site, because without visitors, no sale is possible. And the more your traffic will be targeted (and therefore of quality), the better will be your conversion rate.
Depending on your sales and marketing strategy and your budget, you will have to define a marketing mix of paid and free solutions available to you.
Natural referencing
Google, but also yahoo,bing... you will have to be visible on the web through keyword combinations. The more you will be visible with general keywords, the more traffic you will get, the more your combination will be targeted (towards the product), the better your traffic will be. Of course, it is necessary to have a mix of the two, but it is important to know that websites that take full advantage of the tail effect can have about 90% of the visit share coming from the long tail (see more on Dynamic Remarketing).
Thematic referencing or backlinks
Create a maximum of links from third party sites to yours with sites related to your business. These sites can be webzines, blogs, directories, ... This type of referencing is long because it is not automatic. But the effect will be twofold: to bring you qualified traffic, and to participate in the improvement of the positioning of your keywords by the search engines.
Sponsored links (or commercial links)
Auction your presence on search engines. You choose the list of your keywords, your daily budget (which will not be exceeded) and the amount you are willing to pay for each click. This amount is called the CPC (Cost Per Click). The CPC is actually a bidding system; it means that if another customer has a higher bid than you for the same keyword, he will be better positioned. Links can be text, graphics (banner ads) or video.
Sponsored link programs are : Adwords for Google (91% of the market), Search Marketing for Yahoo, Ad Center for Bing.
The marketplaces
Some merchant websites (such as Pixmania, FNAC, Amazon and Rue Du Commerce) offer the product catalogue of other online sales sites. Thus, you sell your products on these high-traffic sites by giving them a commission on your sales. The ideal is to propose products with good margin rates (to be able to remunerate the commissions by keeping a sufficient wizard rate), or to propose recent and very sought-after products, in order to take advantage of the search trends on these sites.
Price comparators
You export your product catalogue to their site to appear in their search result. If an Internet user clicks on a product, he is redirected to the product's file directly on your website.
To be profitable on price comparators, it is important to be competitive (web users are looking here for the best price), and it can be interesting to make a selective export according to the comparators. You only pay according to the number of clicks (at the CPC).
The most popular comparators: Shopping.com, Pure Shopping (formerly Shopoon), Shopzilla, Kelkoo,, Le Guide, ... There are also targeted comparators that will be interesting to improve your click rate
Affiliation
Affiliation is a system of exchange between an affiliator (advertiser) and an affiliate (publisher) who agrees to display on its site the commercial offers of the affiliator in return for payment. The links to the affiliator appear in the form of visual elements (banners, buttons, etc.), text links, or a product sheet from the export of your catalogue.
The remuneration can be fixed (per display, per click, per double click), variable (% of a product sale) or per form (questionnaire, registration, etc.) This solution allows you to recruit customers, simple Internet users, requests for information, etc. without fixed charges.
Today, affiliation represents 10 to 30% of the turnover of Ecommerce sites, even 50% for some...
Emailing
It consists in sending a grouped e-mail to many contacts and is used for your prospecting, promotion, loyalty operations...
Provided you have your own email database (collected by yourself or purchased from a specialized company), the sending of newsletters, fast and can be expensive is very interesting because it is fully customizable and the tracking will optimize your database and the returns of shipments.
Social networks
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube...: 17 million Internet users of all ages are members of social networks, i.e. 49% of Internet users. It would therefore be a shame not to benefit from this potential.
Themed sites or a blog
Having a substantial editorial content has 2 objectives:
To have a large enough readership, but oriented towards your target audience so that your readers are potential customers and come back regularly to your site.
One of the effects of strengthening the long tail in SEO strategies is the implementation of backlinks with optimized link anchors.
Register on the forums and create online communities
If you are an expert in your market, traffic will certainly increase because they will know that you can get them what they need.
Knowing and tracking your audience accurately
Tracking allows to know everything about its traffic and sales. These measurements enable the creation of daily dashboards, which should be carefully monitored in order to be reactive and improve the least profitable levers.