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Building eCommerce Websites That Work - Part 1
By: Richard Keir, Thu Nov 3rd, 2005
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ebooks filled with questionably useful and/or outdated content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.
About the author:
Richard writes, teaches and consults on business presentations,
eCommerce, site building and programming. Visit http://www.Building-eCommerce-Websites for
eCommerce resources and links and check http://www.Building-eCommerce-Websites/blog
for opinion and ideas.
