Ten steps to e-commerce success

Please take note of how I carefully avoided the word ‘heaven’ in the title there...it really wouldn’t have been a good start to mention the word ‘heaven’. 

Damn.

Okay, from here on in I’ll attempt to be more original.

The Internet is maturing nicely. I sold my first items - vinyl records - online back in 1998 when it was all a bit hit and miss, and dial-up to boot. Best-practice was just two words joined together by a hyphen. 

There was a proliferation of search engines, none of which seemed to be that relevant at all, and one soon learned not to type in anything to do with ‘rubber’ else it would all go horribly wrong... 

Actually accomplishing a task - research or heaven forbid, a purchase wasn’t easy at all. There was what we now call ‘friction’ at every turn, causing much frustration and making the high street the preferred option by a country mile.

Catalogues, however, had been around for many years and was a well accepted means of shopping without actually moving in 1998. You could say it was tried and tested, Hammacher Schlemmer, was established by Alfred Hammacher in New York City in 1848 and still trades today.

There was the usual talk of the new thing killing off the old thing, but we’ve seen that as each new sales or marketing channel emerges and matures the others have evolved in turn, or become more important, not less so.

I’m going to take a look at the online channel in particular. There’s a degree of crossover between some of my points below, which only serves to illustrate that there’s no one silver bullet when it comes to being successful online.

I’ve identified some key issues to address that I hope will provide some insight for you...

Buy, build, or licence?

The fundamental decision that will underpin everything else you do. The market is proliferated with a vast number of ‘out-of-the-box’, proprietary and open source e-commerce software platforms so where do you start?

This choice will be governed by 3 main points:

• budget: do you have a large or small budget, and when do you want to amortise the platform? There’s good free open-source software to be had too, if the scope is right.
• complexity of your business operation and product offering: the more complex the model, the more likely it will be that you consider a ‘build from scratch’. This is rare for retail, most operations can be covered out-of-the-box, or with a small degree of modification. 
• previous experience: if a company providing a proprietary platform has either gone pop, or just been hell to work with then you might deem ownership of IP important. Beware though, it’s only possible to take absolute control if you bring design, development and project management in-house and that’s not cheap or without it’s own set of implications.

Open-source sounds attractive, especially where there’s customisation, but portability may not be all that easy, hence my assertion that this needs to be brought in-house to be truly effective. Take care to document your work thoroughly, as any new personnel in will need to hit the ground running.

I’d actually advocate finding a good, stable, scaleable, adequately featured proprietary platform with comprehensive documentation, perhaps with an ESCROW available, for the reasons that the support is likely to be better as it’s been built by the same people that support it.

Verify service levels first, of course, as that can be a difficult and frustrating situation with the wrong partner.

Understand and practice the fundamentals

Three words: basics, basics, and basics.

As in any walk of life, in any profession, the people at the top will be doing the basics very well.

Best-practice is contextual, surprisingly so - get into the mind of the customer. Understand the buying process and the decisions they will need to make in order to become a customer.

Understand that the stakes are high - if they don’t become one of your customers they will quite likely become a customer of one of your competitors.

Factors affecting their decision will include:

• your visibility: can people find you and your product once they’ve got the thought in their head?
• your marketing and your brand: if multi-channel, is your branding consistent? Is your message clear and your tone of communication effective?
• price: surprisingly not the be-all-and-end-all in certain contexts, but at certain times in certain modes people will shop on price
• their perception of your site: deep psychological stuff goes on the instant someone hits your site - will they stay and explore, or will they decide you’re not for them? Look for bounce rates and see Step 10.
• how easy it is to buy and take delivery: do your products justice with great images and copy, allow intuitive navigation and filtering, and don’t annoy or frustrate people when they’re trying to give you their money.

Stick to the knitting

If you’re a retailer, then retail - why try and run a web development business in-house too?

Either one of these is hard enough on its own - consider the employment headaches and cover for holidays - is one developer enough?  Weigh up implications before going in to unknown territory.

Find an expert in the field, validate their status with their existing client base, and then trust them to get on with the job in hand. 

Yes, you’re paying the bills, but think carefully about overruling them on their area of expertise - remember why you hired them!

Take the specialist approach and steer away from 'do it all' companies. Beware of creative or Search agencies that 'do' e-commerce and hire for the right reasons.

Don’t catch featuritis

Would Mary’s wool shop on the high street become a global success if she used IBM Websphere? No, of course not. 

A platform is not necessarily the bottom line. There are major brands out there with all the money in the world to spend on software that have very poor websites. 

Get the architecture right, first and foremost, and don’t get bogged down comparing features of one platform against another - you may not even need it, and it may not actually help you - especially front end stuff. 

Start with a clear brief detailing what you currently have in place and use on a day-to-day basis, and try to use what you’ve learned in Step 2 above to determine what else you need to cover. If you’re outsourcing, then see Step 3: it’s more about know-how than features, then it’s down to great after-sales service to help you grow. 

Know your limits

It’s good to think big, but understand the limitations of what you’re trying to achieve - there’s no point aiming for 10% for a particular conversion rate if nobody else in your sector has ever got near 5%.

Your expectations need to be in line with the real world: you may feel your website is better in key areas than M&M Direct, for example, but you’re not them (unless you are them, obviously), and you don’t carry the weight of their brand.

Speak your customers language

Don’t call your product a certain thing if your customers know it by a slightly different name. How many different descriptions of a TV are there, for example? Cover all the bases and be careful not to project your ‘in-house’ labels on to your customers as these may not be in line with theirs.

This extends beyond language to preferences too - your preconceptions of what they want should be treated as a starting point only. Survey them periodically, get to know them and you can begin to understand which levers to pull with certain types in order to communicate with them effectively.

Don’t annoy people

Remember, people enjoy spending money! Ensure they positively enjoy giving you theirs by creating a seamless and pleasurable experience for them.

From the moment they home in on your product and hit your landing page to the point when they take delivery there are a host of instances where you could lose them, possibly to a competitor.

Create a good initial impression: is the site looking professional and credible? Is your message good and your branding strong?

Allow them to find what they want: some will know exactly what they’re after, some won’t have a clue, and some will have a rough idea. Provide good, clear taxonomy, navigation and filtering and good on-site search that will make suggestions if someone makes a typo.

Provide comprehensive product information: not just a product description, but also display an understanding of the contexts in which your product might be used and build this in to product copy.

If you really insist that somebody register before buying, ask for the minimum info possible, and keep things nice and concise. Same goes for checkout process.

Have returns and delivery info to hand, and don’t write them in Greek - keep it all simple.

Identify and understand all your ‘touch points’ and strive constantly to satisfy customer requirements at each one. Then, when you’ve done that, get creative with your marketing: go the extra mile and surprise them with something nice too.

Engage on all fronts

Multi-channel is the new buzz, and it’s even possible to be so if you’ve eschewed the high street and taken the decision to be ‘pure-play’.

There are all manner of clearance channels, marketplaces, affiliate channels, and this is now proliferated further by new devices such as Smart phones and tablets such as the iPad.

A recent SeeWhy report cited 9 of the 10 highest converting websites as having catalogues and being very good at joining up all these channels, so learn what will add sales and profit and focus resources accordingly.

Think about email and SMS marketing to underpin all your activities too.

Be social

Learn how to use Social media properly - the clue is in the name ‘Social Media Marketing’.

It shouldn’t be about ‘sell, sell, sell’, just see it as providing an opportunity to have a nice chat and a metaphorical cup of tea with your customers.

The challenge is to understand how social media can enhance your existing customer communications, and how you can leverage social media tools to feed back into your bottom line, and importantly, how to attribute value to your efforts.

Use SMM for customer engagement, as a complementary to your other customer service channels, and online PR.

Search engines now include Twitter and Facebook content too, so be sure to encourage reviews there as well as on your site.

In a slightly different context, get involved in industry groups and forums, and share your experiences and opinions with others.

Don’t ‘set and forget’

It finally seems that one can use the word ‘optimise’ without it automatically being related to a search engine, which is great news. There are pretty simple tools out there that will enable you to have a go at some testing yourself, and it’s a good thing to realise initially that to make a change without testing the idea could cost you a fortune.

Develop and adopt a ‘testing mentality’ - it’s now possible to test those ‘light bulb’ ideas and see if they are the key to your early retirement.

However, do not be under the impression that simply by having an analytics tool and being able to view lots of stats that you are actually forming insights into your online business. It takes a business question to focus attention, and then experience to formulate a methodology for statistical analysis to bring an actionable insight that will address the question.

See Step 3 if you want to get the best from the pile of gobbledygook produced by your analytics tool and hire a proven expert, internally or externally for real actionable insights. This will also allow you to get on with what you’re in business to do - retail!