The easiest and most effective products to sell online are intangibles – items you never have to have mailed to you or touch in anyway, such as insurance, downloadable software, or music. However, most of these products aren’t unique; a customer can easily go to the next website and buy the identical item, often for the same or a lower price. How can you effectively sell these items from your site, instead of losing customers to your competition?

Keep it personal: No one likes a sterile website, and they’ll forget it fairly quickly. An insurance company recently saw its online sales double when they replaced their old staid and sterile site with a soothing butterfly-logoed new site, complete with beautiful mountain scenery and soft colors. That doesn’t mean you should do the same thing; instead, you should consider your customers. If you’re selling insurance for Harley-Davidson bikes, design your site with black leather and chrome in mind. If your customer base is primarily college students, theme the site accordingly. The point is that the customer should feel at home.

Provide unique content: This is the one item your customers can’t get at another site, and it’s information and personality, the same thing that once determined the success of one insurance agent over another. Unique content is something that you should accumulate over time, with a fresh article or two every week, or by maintaining a blog. After developing this kind of information, you may even want to put it together into an ebook that you can share with your customers. Look at it as a marketing tool, the same sort of thing you once did with brochures and sales letters.

But content isn’t just words. Several years ago, one of the new upstart mortgage companies put a loan amortizing calculator on their website, which was quickly picked up by the site Realtor.com. It was a whole new way of looking at online customer service – the customer got a simple do-it-yourself tool to investigate how to arrange his finances, making what used to be an esoteric process transparent. Today, almost every mortgage company and bank provides an amortization calculator – they wouldn’t have survived online if they didn’t.

Skip the Hard Sell: Customers today don’t want to be sold to. They feel, generally rightly, that if you’re hard-selling a product to them, it’s to your benefit and not theirs – and they will go to a different site. Especially since with intangibles you’re usually selling the same thing several other people are online, you can’t afford to allow customers to skip you like this. Just don’t do it.

Provide little extras: There are certain things that have become standard when selling online. For instance, if you’re selling your own software, a free trial version is almost expected. You can’t afford to not do this. If your customers ask for something and you can think of a way to provide it that won’t impact your bottom line, you should do it. This is how the little companies become the eBays of tomorrow.