Building eCommerce Websites That Work - Part 1
Copyright 2005 Richard Keir
You want to succeed at eCommerce? Welcome to a very big
family. Right off, let's be clear - there are lots of ways
to do business on the internet. And lots of ways to both
make and lose money. Successful eCommerce websites come in
all shapes, kinds and colors and while I can't cover every
type of site in this series, I will present the basics you
need to consider and apply for an eCommerce web site to be
successful.
Let's begin by assuming you have some of the fundamentals,
that you understand the language and that you are serious.
I'm not going to tell you how to set up a web site or get a
decent hosting account. We're beyond those basics. The
basics here are the factors which will influence the
success (or failure) and the degree of success your
eCommerce web site experiences.
First and foremost, you need to provide value for your
customers. Absurd as it seems to have to repeat that, a
lot of so-called eCommerce sites provide no or very little
value for their visitors. Pretending to offer value is not
the same thing as providing value. Promoting miserably
written, hackneyed, cloned ebooks filled with questionably
useful and/or outdated content doesn't make a high value
web site. Sure you might make some money. Once. And
you'll end up with a high refund rate - and an unhappy
credit card processor. That path means you're taking
advantage of inexperienced customers and abusing their
willingness to trust you. This isn't the way to a
long-term business with steady repeat customers.
Value on the net is not very different from any kind of
off-line retail sales -- a quality product line that will
attract potential customers and a competitive price that
will lead to purchases. An honest, quality product that
will meet the expectations you've created in your buyers.
Hyped junk just doesn't cut it.
Next, you've got to have a smooth, user-friendly, easy to
follow process all the way to your thank you page. The
simpler, cleaner and clearer you can make the process, the
better. Where it makes sense you can augment this
user-responsive site profile by adding live-response chat.
If you do decide to use call-in or live chat, it's
imperative that your operators be well-trained, understand
your products and your system and be customer friendly.
This can be a problem if you outsource. The less expensive
out-source call centers can turn out to be very expensive
in terms of lost sales and customers who never come back.
You'll need to check very carefully and be 100 per cent
certain the operators actually speak and understand the
primary language(s) of your targeted customer group.
You'll need to provide extensive background information and
highly flexible, well-written scripts.
You should collect your own customer evaluations -
separately. Don't rely exclusively on any monitoring or
customer satisfaction surveys provided by the call center.
Track your ROI to be sure it's money well-spent. Don't
stop monitoring just because the results looked good for
the first two or three months. Things change. Make sure
you're tracking desired actions linked to the call center
separately from those NOT related to call-in or live chat.
Mixing outcomes leaves you in the dark about what's really
happening.
You probably should have an attractive website. An ugly
site can work, but to do that you need to absolutely know
exactly what you're doing and why it should work. And
you'll have to test like crazy to optimize (of course, you
should be doing that anyway). The ugly site tactic is not
for the inexperienced. Very few individuals really have the
grasp of marketing, market and customer psychology that
makes for a successful "ugly" site.
To provide a pleasant experience, you need to be careful in
what you use - colors, text-size, graphics, animation and
white space can add value to your site or turn it into a
user nightmare. Test your site with people who will tell
you the truth. Just because you love it doesn't mean
anyone else will. In general, aiming for a professional
appearing site is your best option. Look for the highest
ranked, busiest sites in your business area and study the
layouts they use. Extract the common features that you see
on those sites. While other factors heavily influence
traffic and ranking, appearance has a strong effect on
visitors and sites that do testing evolve toward optimizing
visitor behavior.
Keep in mind that a site's desired actions affect the
design and layout. You'll want to study sites where those
actions are most similar to the desired actions you target
on your web site. If your goal is direct product sales,
there's not much point in emulating a site that's optimized
for newsletter sign-ups or AdSense.
If your main goal is direct sales (and if it is, then you
need backend products too), provide incentives for
customers to buy AND to return. The return factor is
critical to a long-term strategy for success. Anyone who
buys is your best possible future customer. Keep them,
track them, make them special offers. Use coupons,
discounts, special deals, customer-only offers and back end
sales. Your customer base is your gold mine. Since
they've shown enough faith in you to buy, do your utmost to
never damage that faith. Treat them like the priceless
resource they are. Think long-term: successful eCommerce
websites are all about value and customer service.
----------------------------------------------------
Richard teaches, trains and consults, on and off-line, on
business and professional presentations, eCommerce, site
building and programming. And writes a lot. Visit
http://www.Building-eCommerce-Websites.com for articles,
information, resources and links and check our blog at
http://www.Building-eCommerce-Websites/blog for opinion and
ideas.
