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The Essentials of E-Commerce Tutorial II We're back!... And you're here with tips that'll help you design an effective sales program.
Let's ask you you're shopping habits. Are you the indecisive kind who just loves to go peeping at every window and buy something till something catches your eye. Or are you the Know-what-I-want type who just walks into a store and ask the attendant for the specific stuff you're looking for.
Bt then your shopper-type will depend a lot on what you're looking for. Right? I can tell you about myself. You'd rarely find me milling throgh a hardware store and asking the attendant for the various colors of nuts 'n' bolts that they have and then buying one the appeals to my taste. And prhaps one...just once would you find me sialing into a food store and asking the girl at the counter about "Err...I was wondering if you'd have tea leaves stuffed into bags ....something that I could dip into a cup of boiling watwer...would you have that?"
See, it pretty much boils down to this. The product that you're looking for often defines how you shop for it.
Some of the questions that you should be asking yourself before opening up an online shop are:
What exactly is your product?
Who is your target audience?
How will they want to interact with your company, and how can your site enhance this interaction?
Several Web-based stores allow prospective shoppers to go through their products either by category or by keyword. These methods are, for the most part, derivatives of the technologies that make the software work; databases and file systems are quite effective at categorizing things.
But what you need to find out is the best approach for your customers.
Let's now take a look at the different kinds of products that are out there and how actual companies are customizing their Web sites for mximum efficiency.
Its all about selling...selling and selling
There is no rule about selling your goods on the Web. You can sell them in many different ways. Most techniques, however, tend to fall into one of the following categories:
Gifts and Impulse Products
A lot of the times, you don't know what you're looking for until you see them before your eyes. Traders who sell gift items know this. If you're wanna offer 'impulse-buys' , then you'd want to design a site that is easy, fun and enjoying to explore. Allow your prospective customers to go on a small windows shopping tour. Garden.com makes its site as fun to explore as it is to shop. Many of its customers are hobbyists, who are always looking fot tips on gift ideas.
Commodity Products
Everyone of us knows what a audio tape or a CD looks like. Comodity-type products are low-risk purchases where you don't not have you worry about whether you've bought the right color or whether they'll be compatible with your system . The only thing that does matter is that the seller has a good stock of the product and that he's selling it at a resoanbale price.
Commodity goods
Sellers who offer such products are usually differentiated by their products' price, selection, and availability. CDNow and Amazon are sweating hard to to be the killers in this arena. Competing on prices would take prices down to zero. That would be detrimntal to profits. So, these companies are focusing on adding value through personalized customer service and convenience. For instance, music retailers have learned that many of their customers want to look for albums based upon a half-remembered lyric. "You know ... the first line goes like this...Tra-La-LA...I'd like that album please. In response, the site expands its search abilities to track a song based on say, the 1st stanza. See how convenient it gets! Good that you do online will always boomerang to you. The better you are to your customers , the better they'll be be to you. They'll do more business with you.
Products that require thinking before you actually sign the check
Some products require you to do a lot of thinking before you can out dish out the cash. Expensive items such as consumer electronics, cars, cellular phone services come in a whole range of prices, any number of models and options. You need to do a lot of thinking before you decide to go in for such a product. Besides these brick 'n' mortar products, something else that would involve a good deal of pre-purchase deliberation in the near fiuture are e-commerce software packages. A number of middleman services are now mushrooming to help consumers make their buying decisions. Sites like CompareNet and mySimon offer side-by-side comparitive study of different products.
Configurable Products
Sometimes the range of options that a product provides is all that is takes to make the product happening. A case in point is computer workstations and servers. While the basic components are the same, but you have a series of options to choose from. Computer manufacturers like Dell and Apple hav evn gone so far as enable their customers to design their own products. They abide by the motto: "Tell us what you want and we'll build it for you."
These techniques are beginning to show up in other field too. Take a look at pix.com. You can upload an image and have it placed on all kinds of merchandise to get a one-of-a-kind item.
Categorized and Indexed Catalogs
Though shopping through category/ sub-category does have its downside, I'll have to admit that sometimes shopping becomes a whole lot easier if done this way, especially when you're shopping for supplies. Office Depot's site does a good job of organizing things so you can get in and out quickly. Grainger, the industrial supply catalog, has thousands and thousands of items. For a company like that, categorization is a must.
Now, that you've spent a lot of time reading this, next , you'll have spent some time on figuring out what's right for your company and your products. Don't get lured by not setting up a store that easiest to build. It may not work out for your company.
To be competitive, you need to understand how your customers want to work with you, what levels of convenience they desire and what features they will value in your online store.
Adding value to your site::
Over and above these methods, a number of companies have deployed new technologies to deliver even better service and environments to their customers. These aren't storefront solutions in and of themselves, but they can work as excellent supplements to other systems.
Automated Answers and Advice
Brightware has put its 20 years of know-how in artificial intelligence to interpret natural language,thereby magically allowing its system to answer customer queries.. Brightware claims that, with some training, its system can automatically reply to 80 percent of common service and sales inquiries, regardless of how the questions are phrased.
This technology has also been used by financial, mortgage, and health care companies to determine their customers' needs and then actively recommend a prepared solution. You can finally bid farewell to door-to door-to-door salesmen.
Automated Recommendations
Net Perceptions and Firefly are pioneers of collaborative filtering, an automated merchandising technology that can cross-sell items to customers with similar purchasing behavior. Say a customer wants to get caught up on his aquatic-adventure reading and buys 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and Moby Dick. Meanwhile, someone else buys Moby Dick and The Hunt for Red October. These collaborative filtering tools will connect that information and recommend The Hunt for Red October to the first customer and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to the other customer. By using this system, you're basically letting your customers with similar interests make recommendations to each other. And the more they buy, the more accurate the recommendations will become. Pretty cool, eh?
These are just two ideas on how you can edge over others in a dog-eat-dog business situation. You'll need to go and find what your customers need and how you would communicate with them. Then, put your sales people on the job.
Oh. don't forget to keep reading to see how this method worked for aida.com.
Designing the storefront
The first section of the shopping experience enables customers to quickly locate the goods they're looking for piling them onto their shopping cart, right there on the front page. The second part processes the orders and securely sends them to the fulfillment center, where they're packed and shipped to the customers. And, the third section offers a summary of their orders and functions as a printable receipt.
The first interface asks the customers about their equipment and then tells them which RAM chips they need, using the configurator:
The display is designed to up-sell and cross-sell the chips against one another by displaying all the options and prices at once and highlighting the savings the customers will get when they place larger orders. The shopping cart always displays what items are in the order. The same page is actually loaded into the browser again and again, each time with additional information. This results in a fast, smooth experience for users.
The second interface is modeled after an order form:
When customers click checkout, they see this page. All the items in their shopping carts are itemized and subtotaled. Billing and shipping addresses are captured first, allowing tax and delivery costs to be calculated and added to the bill.
The final costs are totaled and displayed, along with the warranty and guarantee policies from legal. Payment information is requested and then processed in the background. If everything is correct and acceptable, order confirmations are created, complete with your company's phone number and tracking numbers for the customers' reference:
As before, the site is cycling through the same page repeatedly so that users don't have to take time to find their way through a new interface every time the screen is loaded.
So aida.com is taking shape and looking good. The design team has put together a great interface that matches your requirements, and management loves the ease of the "1-2-3 Buy Now!" concept. The next step is to implement the backend, making sure Denise's buttons actually work and customers receive the products they ordered.
You see,just because a site looks slick doesn't mean it works. A simple interface can hide a complex and powerful set of tools.
So which tools should you use? In the next lesson,we'll provide you with more technical stuff and hook you up with the right solution for your particular needs.
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