Something I've noticed lately...
When invited to pen a guest blog for our friends at SagePay recently I asked for a subject on which to write. 'Pick one - something you've noticed lately' came the reply.
Well, fine by me, I thought, as it just so happens something has really jumped out at me of late...
In 2008 there was a mass panic about the dreaded bird flu, or H5N1 to give it it's technical name, and last year there was an even bigger panic over swine flu. What you may not have heard about, however, was something called 'featuritis'. Granted, nobody has ever died from it, but it seems to be be pretty contagious all the same, infecting 99.9% of all companies. This is my worrying conclusion of late anyway.
Companies (retailers, in our case) appear to be fixated by features and platforms, and service is something that we usually have to bring up at the end of the meeting after we've answered a gazillion questions about things they will never even use.
So, what's selling online all about then? What are the basics we need to understand in order to have a chance of success?
What does an elephant and your conversion rate have in common? Not a question you'll get asked every day, I'll wager, but one that has more of a bearing on your day-to-day life than you might imagine if you're an e-tailer.
It’s been a long time coming but it seems the thinking may be changing, at last. For years our industry has been fixated on visitors – success being measured by how many people visited a website.
Strange that it’s taken obviously very intelligent retailers such a long time to realise that yes, visitors are indeed welcome, but it’s how many of them that end up as a customer that really counts.
