In a hurricane even turkeys can fly. In retrospect, quite a few turkeys were caught up in the initial ecommerce vortex and most have long since crashed to the ground. Now that the storm has passed and the battered feathers have settled, what have we learned about what it takes to build an ecommerce business that can not only take off, but also maintain altitude over time?
Whether ecommerce can add value to your business depends on a number of factors.
To best understand how these factors will influence the success of your online store, it is vital to look at things from a customer’s perspective.
In ecommerce, if customers don’t benefit, then the supplier definitely won’t. But if you make life more convenient or lower cost for your customers, the result will be increased sales or reduced costs.
To tap into this virtuous circle, your goods must be suitable for selling on the net. Since sight and sound are the only mediums available, they must be sufficient to communicate enough information to your prospective customer for them to make a purchase. Products with a short sales cycle are generally better for ecommerce, although repeat purchases of almost anything can work. Specialist, hard to find goods can work well, and if you use mail order already, or people phone up and place orders for your products or services without any pricing discussion, you definitely have the potential to sell online.
So suppose that you could sell online, what benefits can you provide to your customers? The first possibility is price. Maybe by avoiding the costs of a physical location you can share this saving with your customers. Maybe by taking orders over the net, you can reduce your order processing costs and again share the benefits. However, in my opinion the greatest advantage of net sales lies in convenience.
Online, it’s much easier to find rare items typically only available from specialist suppliers. And “plumbing” products which are a necessary part of life but don’t give much joy to most shoppers can also benefit from the “click and I’m outta here” philosophy. Items which fit into this category range from groceries to toner cartridges.
Let’s say that you can benefit your customers by providing an online store, now you have to deliver it to them in an accessible way. The key is making everything easy to use. Being easy to use can break down into a number of areas such as the speed of the site, making it simple to find things and using terminology that prospects can understand.
The download speed of the web site is probably the first place to start. There’s nothing worse than waiting ages for a site to display. There are three aspects that affect site speed - the server, the design and the software. If your web space is cheap, this may be because your web host is sharing their server across hundreds of other sites, which can slow them down a lot. The best thing is to check the display speed of a few of the other sites that they host before you sign up. Design is also key. A good clean design is part of being credible, but not if this results in long download delays. The final point is software. It may be that by buying a well known package you reduce the chances of being caught out by slow software.
To have any chance of persuading customers to part with their hard earned cash, you need to be credible. We’ve already mentioned design in this context. Next on the credibility list is providing the fullest possible contact details. This should include full company name, a real human contact with maybe a picture, phone, fax, physical address, and branded email - not Hotmail or Yahoo emails. In fact, most of this information is now required under the EU Distance Selling Directive. The overall objective is to make yourself as real as possible to your prospective buyers.
Well crafted case studies or testimonials from customers may also be helpful here.
Recently, I was looking at buying my wife a “cherished” number plate for her car. Since I wanted to search for “KJB”, I looked in the paper and made a note of the web-sites of some possible vendors. On the first and best, regtransfers.co.uk, I entered “KJB” into the search field, and got an immediate response listing lots of available plates together with their prices. I went online rather than hunt through the numbers on the page. Why? Because it saved me time.
The point is that you need to consider how people will approach your store. Are they searching for a specific item or do they want to browse? The searching and browsing facilities on the site need to be oriented to the customer’s needs.
Like all other aspects of your site, payment is an opportunity to make things easy for your customers. There’s really only one important thing to say about payment, and that is that you should take credit cards. You may allow payment on account if you’re selling to other businesses, but for selling to consumers it’s the old Visa or Mastercard.
You can either get your credit card company to approve you to take internet orders, or you can sign up with a Payment Service Provider such as SECPay.
Finally, to implement your plans, technology is needed. The good news is that today there are numerous companies that can help, many with years of experience. For example, my company, Actinic, supplies boxed ecommerce products to help both DIYers and web professionals who are building ecommerce sites on behalf of their clients.
So if the business case is sound, given there are plenty of sources of help, now is the time to jump. The technologies have been ironed out, there are plenty of online buyers, yet you can still be a bit ahead of the competition. It just remains for me to wish you all success in your ventures.