Clicking on to successful e-tailing on Home Services

Jan

Clicking on to successful e-tailing

posted by admin in Window Cleaning

What were they thinking? The website sold clothes aimed at 20-somethings and yet the clothes were being modelled by a middle-aged chap with a pot belly. Alan Cox of Web consultant LeftClick shakes his head. Another e-tailer trying to do it on the cheap. The Internet has been around a few years now, yet small businesses are still throwing themselves on to the Web and making all the classic mistakes. Perhaps the technology fazes them. Their efforts are unfocused, and, as a result, most commercial websites do not perform, Mr Cox says. But the secret to e-tailing is simple. Selling online is a process, just as it is in real life. And a website has to recreate the whole of that process if it is going to convert click- happy surfers into concrete sales. Mr Cox says businesses should start by putting themselves in the customer’s shoes, then think through the entire experience from when people land at the site’s front door, to the moment they finally reach into their pockets for their wallet and the sale is done. LeftClick specialises in analysing the browsing habits of real users. It road tests new sites by getting people into its Christchurch lab and watching them click away from behind mirrored glass. And Mr Cox has bad news for sites with amateurish design. “On average, a website visitor takes only three seconds to work out whether they’re going to stay or leave. “In that three seconds they’ve got to be able to decide whether you are a trustworthy company that they want to deal with, and do they get a sense you’ll be able to give them what they want to get.” The problem is trickier than it sounds. Mr Cox says the cues needed to make the right first impression are subtle, subconscious even. Generally though, the front page should be clean, organised and fast- loading. Many still believe the myth that all of a site’s content should be at most a couple of clicks away. This leads them to crowd as much as possible on to their front page, Mr Cox says. “But imagine walking in the door of a physical store like a supermarket and nothing was organised. It was all just laid out on the floor in front of you. You’d leave straight away wouldn’t you?” Research shows people are quite happy to click through to information if a site is well signposted. “It is like the way animals forage for food. If they don’t quickly pick up a scent trail, they’ll leave and go elsewhere. “But if you come to a website and get the sense that if you click on a link, you’ll be one step closer to what you want, then you’ll keep following the links.” The navigation design should begin with the spotlight on a customer’s likely needs, not with a company’s wonderful product range or proud history. Again, Mr Cox says, imagine what happens in real life. When customers walk in the door of a flower shop, the owner does not thrust a bunch of flowers in their hand. First they would engage the customer in a conversation ask who the flowers were for and for what occasion. Mr Cox says the front page of a site should begin conducting such a sales conversation, offering customers a set of pathways based on typical needs. Often this means taking a step back. Customers finding their way to an online flower shop frequently scrabble about for a last-minute gift, a quick apology, or a thank you. So this is the product the site is really selling, not flowers as such. Customer-oriented organisation is critical. Fast-loading pages matter as well. Not just because browsers are impatient, Mr Cox says, but because this is one of the little things that spells professionalism. There are still too many commercial sites including Web design firms which have flashy animated entry pages that waste a user’s time. They are more about a company’s ego than a customer’s needs. And then a website must have an instantly distinctive identity. Mr Cox says the Net is an anonymous place, crowded with competition. Customers have to be able to see at a glance what a site actually provides. One e-tailer who has done it right is Christchurch mountain bike clothing firm Ground Effect, founded by Fraser McLachlan and a couple of friends in 1994. The business spotted a niche for baggy, grungy cycle wear in a market dominated by tight shiny lycra. One undoubted reason for Ground Effect’s online success was that it began as a mail-order company, and from the start faced the same issues of selling to distant customers. Mr McLachlan says his watchwords for the site are clean, fast and customer focused. So while competitor sites crowd their front pages with this week’s special offers and product pictures, Ground Effect instead opens with a simple image of a lone cyclist grinding a path across the shingle bed of a river. The sales pitch starts with the customer’s dream ride or at least the dream of a steel-thighed, hardened cycle nut then leads on to the product choices. Mr McLachlan says the folksy language of the site is also cunningly crafted to establish an immediate rapport with the target audience. The blurb for a micro-fleece jacket goes: “Crawl out of bed and into Frosty Boy, then stumble out the door for a wake-me-up blast on the treadly.” And even here, with the introduction to the product, the focus is still on the customer’s dream. Only afterwards does the blurb begin to sell the virtues of the jacket, such as its Windfoil fabric, hazard reflective trim and extra long zip to aid putting it on over a helmet. Mr McLachlan says it is all about creating a sales process, moving browsers smoothly along the decision path to the deal. Mr Cox says a seamless flow is what e-commerce ventures must strive for. In the early days of e-tailing, the goal was just to drive people to a site. A large part of the marketing budget would go on optimisation tricks to make sure a site ranked high on search engines like Google. The logic was that, if enough people showed up at the front door, a reasonable percentage would buy. But that has not worked, Mr Cox says. Now e-commerce is focused on the issue of post-click conversion clinching the sale in other words. Mr Cox says experience testing sites has shown that any interruptions to the flow can quickly cause customers to get cold feet. If they have to puzzle over the next step in the buying decision, they are gone. To save money, many e-tailers use third-party payment gateways. A customer gets as far as filling their shopping cart, then clicking to make payment takes them away to a new portal. This jump just as customers are about to part with their money makes them suddenly nervous, Mr Cox says. E-tailers need to walk through the sales process in their customer’s shoes. Then they would willingly spend the extra to integrate payment with the look and feel of the site. Building a commercial website is not cheap. Many try to get away with spending $3000 to $5000. But $10,000 to $20,000 is a more realistic budget. And then there are the monthly hosting, marketing and maintenance costs to consider. Mr Cox says there are now some good off-the-shelf e-commerce packages for small business, such as Miva Merchant. However, a business still needs to invest some money and thought into adapting the software. “Out-of-the- box solutions just don’t work. You have to tailor the whole experience around your customer,” he says. Many still find the prospect of building a Web presence daunting. They do the least possible, putting up a static webpage with perhaps a grainy picture of their premises, a few product logos to represent what they sell, and some contact details. But Mr Cox says the distinction between physical business and cyber business is fast becoming so blurred that everyone needs a proper Web strategy. For example, high street department stores started off putting only basic products online. They reasoned that anyone buying something like pricey Lladro porcelain figurines would want to see them in the store with their own eyes. Yet shoppers now routinely check out what a store has to offer before they make the trip into town. Mr Cox says even for companies that will continue to sell most of their goods and services in person, the Internet is becoming the real shop window. It works the other way too. Successful “pure play” e-tailers are a rarity. Website operators are finding they also need to have a physical presence such as people on the end of a phone or a proper store. One example is the United States clothing business nau.com. It has opened shops where you can go to see the clothes, even though people are encouraged to purchase online. Ground Effect’s Mr McLachlan says he has found the same story. In the early days, he expected online sales would swiftly replace catalogues and phones. Instead, the two sales channels work together. “If you have a printed object in your hand, there is a different process people go through. They study it and the effect on sales lasts for longer.” Mr McLachlan says it is not a case of either-or for modern business. The sales effort has to be spread across all available channels. Mr Cox says life is only going to get more confusing for small business as the boundaries between retailing and e-tailing continue to erode. But he says to apply the fundamental rule of selling create a process that starts from the customer’s point of view, and you cannot go too far wrong.