3. Selling ice to Eskimos

Selling on the internet needn’t be like flogging a dead horse (though if there’s a market…). With the right approach, you can sell effectively and efficiently.

When I visit your web site I want to be encouraged to spend my money, not run away as fast as I can crying for my mum.

The Hard Sell And The Web Sell

Although the promotion of information and the ability to share information across continents was the raison d’être for the World Wide Web, it wasn’t long before capitalism made its presence felt on the internet. The boom years are certainly remembered more for the spectacular valuations placed on e-commerce sites than a sudden worldwide interest in reading the complete works of Jean-Paul Sartre online.

There is money, and a lot of it, to be made from selling online – from the bloke in a shed selling old records on eBay to the international behemoths like Amazon shipping millions of products. Transactional web sites have become popular so quickly because they help us cash-rich, time-poor wage slaves do what we want with the minimum of effort – and that is the key: you should reflect the reasons why shoppers want to buy from your web site through the functionality of the site.

Talking Technology

There is a glut of web site packages now available that can allow anyone to design, create and maintain a fully transactional web site. The quality and price of these products varies widely, as does the number of options available to the user about how different you can make your site. Nearly all are templates, so whilst you can dictate, say, the colours and the font, you won’t be able to alter how a product or a page appears. Off-the-shelf products do serve a purpose, but if your budget can stretch, I’d veer away from these products and use developers (in-house or third-party) to build your site. Whilst developers will also be using a template of sorts, they should be able to match your specifications far more easily than a boxed product. Using developers also means that you can scale up, fix bugs, alter information and maintain your web site far more easily than using a boxed-product helpline somewhere in Tennessee or New Delhi.

Looking At Your Competition

Competitive analysis is crucial if you are selling products online in competition with other companies. I don’t think there’s a single thing that can’t be bought through the internet (somebody’s soul, virginity and hand in marriage have all gone under the virtual hammer), so you’ll have a competitor somewhere.

Check out their site and see how they promote their products. Test their order pipeline by placing orders (and why not check out their cancellation process at the same time?) and monitor how they communicate with you (as a customer, not a rival), their delivery time and their packaging. They have (presumably) chosen to do things their way for a reason – is their offering and service better or worse than yours?

How did it go?

Q. We have our own proprietary web site and we have a healthy number of customers, but why aren’t they buying?

A. If you haven’t already, it’s time to look at your ‘order pipeline’ – how many clicks are there from product to checkout? Even though you’ll still need to capture all the information, try asking the same questions on one or two pages fewer. This will give your customers less chance of getting bored and pulling out of the sale.

Q. Our customers are buying, but the average order value is low. What could be causing this?

A. Up sell! If users are ordering one product from you, encourage them to order more. You must entice them with either a reduction on the price of the second item or a saving on the overall postage. Group related products together on the web site and refer users to other products that may interest them.

Q. We have mimicked all of our leading competitors’ features; we feel we offer just as good a service. What can we do to make customers come to our site?

A. You have to offer something different to the consumer. If you are facing stiff competition you need to give people a reason to shop with you, especially if you can’t compare on price or advertising spend. Offer more information about each product, use celebrity or even customer endorsements of products and take a different approach to product presentation – make the site more aspirational or ‘exclusive’, therefore justifying, in the mind of the consumer, the higher price.

Here is an idea for you…

If you can organise it, and assuming you’re not a courier company, turn off the shipping charge for your products for one week. Don’t advertise this fact, except maybe on your homepage, and monitor your stats. The likelihood is that your visitor numbers will rise only slightly (users passing on the good news to friends) – but look what happens to your conversion ratio (the number of visitors against the number of orders placed). I’d be very surprised if this didn’t have an immediate effect. Whilst it might not be viable to have free shipping all of the time, you could revisit your pricing models to see if you can recoup the money by other means; or, if you offer free shipping during peak times only, you could determine whether the increase in order volume will negate the need to charge shipping.

Defining idea…

‘In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. [Users] cannot be expected to recognize a good idea unless it is presented to them by a good salesman.’

David M. Ogilvy

Defining idea…

‘It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.’

Oscar Wilde