Will Your Business Fly Online?
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.
- The nature of the goods or services you offer
- The type of customer you sell to
- The size of your business and the role played by your existing distribution channels.
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.
Suitable products
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.
Customer benefits
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.
Easy to use
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.