There are two parts to selling on the Net. Getting people to your site, and selling to them once they get there. Both need a combination of technical and marketing skills. So either you need to acquire the skills, or buy someone in to help. The good news is that everything can be self-taught, but there are also plenty of reasonably priced practitioners around.
As with all new IT gimmicks, the technology tends to dominate. However, in e-commerce, this is the least of your worries. There are already millions of people on the web — in the UK , the figure is around 20% of the population. These people will shop online if it is easier or cheaper. The question is whether you can put a proposition in front of them which is attractive. If you can, they will buy.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the one thing successful ecommerce sites have in common is that they are well marketed. How you market your commerce site must be foremost in your mind and this means knowing who your customers are and understanding their needs.
The key to business success is to think of the customer. Your online shop will be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so the convenience factor will lead to more sales. People will also buy because of the couch potato syndrome. There are no parking problems or rainy days buying on the Net.
The first question to ask is whether your products and services can be sold from a web site. Probably the best way to assess their suitability for the Net is to consider their suitability for mail order — the same motivations and limitations apply. For instance, people use mail order because it is convenient — the same applies on the Net. For some companies the weight and price of their products make delivery charges too expensive to consider — the same applies on the Net. However, creating and publicising an e-commerce site is much less expensive than publishing and distributing a mail order catalogue.
For retailers, it’s often been said that there are only three key factors to consider when opening a store, location, location and location! On the internet, every web site is a click away from every other one, so it might seem that the argument doesn’t apply. This isn’t true. Setting up a sales web site is like ordering a new line from BT. Sitting by the phone doesn’t make sales, your prospects need your number first. So web site promotion is the crucial ingredient. If nobody visits, nothing will sell.
There are lots of ways of promoting your web site. The most basic is to make sure that your site address appears on every piece of paper that your business produces. If your web site offers an improved service to existing customers, you must tell them, maybe even through a snail-mail shot.
Ironically, there is some evidence that traditional marketing (advertising, promotion etc.) is more effective at generating online sales than internet-based methods. It’s crucial to integrate the promotion of your web site with the rest of your business.
The most attractive and convenient option for publicising your site is on the web itself. By definition, everyone who sees your publicity is on the Net and are a prospect. There are various ways of doing this. Favourites include:
One minefield to steer clear of is email blasts, known as “spam”. Any form of unsolicited email is illegal, and creates a very negative impression of your company.
My guess is that most people would define a good site as one that makes plenty of sales.
So how can we achieve this? The answer is so obvious that it’s painful, and so little practised that it’s agonising. It’s simply that a sales site should sell from the moment that you arrive. You’ve got to answer the question that everyone has in their mind when they get to your site. What’s in it for me ?
So sell on benefits. Why should people buy from you? Are your prices the lowest? Is your service the best? Do you have the largest range available? They won’t buy just because the design looks cool, although they might be put off if it’s so bad that you seem incompetent.
Here are some of more tips for a successful ecommerce site.
Now that we’ve addressed the marketing issues, we can look at the practical steps of building an online store.
If you really want to minimise costs, then do-it-yourself is the right way to go. Just expect to spend lots of time and effort. If you are technically literate and keen on computers, this can work well. It’s called combining business with pleasure. However, that’s not for most of us.
At the other extreme, there are companies peddling totally bespoke solutions. Unless your requirements are particularly complex, this is a no-brainer. Don’t do it. Bespoke solutions are for the ultra rich from the Times 100. You may need to find partners who can help you build a site, but they should use proven off-the-shelf solutions to minimise cost and ensure success.
There are also some generally low cost solutions based on “servers” somewhere on the internet. The benefit of these services is that using simple web-based wizards, you can have your company commerce-enabled in a few hours, using nothing more than your browser.
Such solutions can work well if you have a leased line at you disposal, or a very small number of products. The real problem is that to maintain your catalogue you have to be online and the browser interface is quite clunky when compared with your Windows operating system. The equivalent is the out-dated mainframe paradigm that is causing so much grief over the year 2000 bug. This is a case of buyer beware.
Most businesses would be cautious about leaving their customer and order information stored on a third party’s computer, at a remote location. And they would be right, as many of these internet start ups will not be here much after tomorrow. The key issue is to remain in control of your own destiny, and make sure that you control your own online brand.
There are a number of software companies who produce solutions, which are used by many web designers as well as being available for do-it-yourself. The market leaders include Actinic Catalog and Intershop. Any one of these can help your ecommerce efforts and will base their solutions on packages that have been developed over several years.
This way you get the benefits of shared development (hence lower cost) and also the learning experiences and debugged code already built into the packages. Each of these companies has partners with web design and web hosting experience so that a fully managed solution can be provided.
Some Internet Service Providers offer ecommerce solutions bundled with their other services. These often have a per-transaction charge, which is very unattractive for anyone who wants to make a serious profit. Be wary of getting tied into ‘one-stop-shop’ solutions. An e-commerce site incorporates connectivity, web hosting, software and payment processing. Being locked to one source for all of these is not going to give the best long-term value.
Everything comes with a cost tag, and the web is no different, despite what you might have heard. There are three key things on the cost front : minimise your up front expenditure which decreases the business risk, don’t scrimp on marketing and make sure that the deal you make to get online doesn’t steal the lion’s share of the profits.
You should be able to have a sales web site developed for you with 200 - 5,000 different products for between £1,000 and £5,000 plus annual costs of less than £500. The cost of marketing is on top of this, and depends on the target market, type of product and just how far that you want to go. However, it’s a useful rule of thumb that you need to spend more money on marketing than on the technology.
The internet does not provide a shortcut to an instant fortune. However, like many new technical developments, it does present some serious business opportunities.
It won’t be long before having an online sales capability is as ordinary as a fax machine, and it will be unthinkable to be without one. The only question is whether to leap today or play catch-up tomorrow.