|
Dying Is Easy - Ecommerce Is Hard
By Frank Fiore
Being a parent of a teenager has its responsibilities. One of them is staying up late at night waiting to hear the front door open and close thus knowing that your offspring has returned to the roost safely. During these bouts of guard duty I would lie in bed doing my‘man thing’ with the remote - hunting for channels - when I ran across an infomercial hawking a new weight loss product that burns fat while you sleep. It went on and on offering medical research supporting the product’s claims. Then came the testimonials from those who swore they lost three dress sizes in three weeks.
You know, the usual hype.
After a while I got bored watching the attractive lass pitching the product, switched channels and hit on another infomercial. This one was how to get rich doing business on the Internet.
Now, I’m not up on burning fat – exercise is all well and good if you don’t overdo it. Besides, I believe you can’t out live your genes. Case in point. About a dozen or so years ago, Jim Fixx took up jogging after his heart attack to stay healthy and made a lot of money selling a jogging program.
He died of a heart attack. But back to the Internet infomercial.
Fat burning may not be my forte but eCommerce is. So I diligently listened as the head sales guy stated that lots and lots of people are making money on the Internet – and so could I.
You know, the usual hype.
All you had to do was buy their Internet money-making package. It was mine for the asking. (THEY were asking $79.95 – paid out in three equal installments.) Like the weight loss guy, he went on and on offering testimonials and telling me how I can make money selling just about anything I could think of on the Net while I slept. I started thinking. “Were these to companies related?”
Take it from me. Making money on the Net is NOT easy. To paraphrase an old investment quote – “If you want to make a small fortune in eCommerce - start with a large one.” Just look at the many dot-bombs that litter the Net today.
So why is it so difficult to make money on the Net? There are a variety of reasons and they come in all sizes – small, medium and large. There’s the cost of building and maintaining a full-blown eCommerce site. Web servers, database servers, email servers and a host of software applications are only the start of long laundry list of expense items. Then there’s the personnel – programmers, web designers, IT specialists, businesses developers, marketers, customer service and warehouse people. Finally there’s warehousing and shipping the products themselves. The money needed to run a successfully eBusiness flows like a river. Money to create it, maintain it, then money to advertise and promote it. And if you are lucky enough to do better than Mr. Bezos and turn a profit – you have to contend with comparison-shopping agents that threaten to drive profit margins to near zero.
And don’t think the brick and motor crowd can do it any better. Being successful in meatspace doesn’t guarantee success in cyberspace. Take Toys-R-Us for example.
Here’s a company that was at first Amazoned by eToys. After much ado, they teamed up with a top Silicon Valley Venture Capital firm to teach the upstart eToys a lesson or two in selling toys. As it turned out, what they had to give up in equity to the VC made the deal go sour. The costs – in their mind – were prohibitive and now have partnered with a dot-com, called Amazon, to help them sell their wares in cyberspace.
Now many of the dot-coms that were spun off from brick and mortar businesses are being brought back into the nest. Barnes & Noble is a good example. BN.com was once a stand-alone business but now its being brought back into the corporate fold as just another B&N division.
No, eCommerce is not easy. To paraphrase Edmond Gween’s deathbed quote, “Dying is easy – eCommerce is hard.”
Now, there’s a universe of ways for an eBusiness to fail. But as it turns out, it’s the simple things that can be fatal. Simple everyday mistakes using email, shopping carts and just disrespect for customers can drive shoppers from an eBusiness like the plague. No please don’t get huffy about the following simple mistakes made by eCommerce companies, saying to your self that no self-respecting business can do such a thing. You’d be surprised how many still do.
Simple Email Mistakes
Want to really anger your customer base? Do these.
If you have an email address and at least a dozen email buddies you’ve probably received jokes via email. In a lot of cases, along with the jokes that have been forward several times comes a long list of everyone that the joke was sent to in either the TO line or the CC line for every recipient to see. This happens because the sender didn’t know of or understand the purpose of the BCC address line.
Receiving an email with a long list of other people’s email addresses is either funny or annoying. But no real damage is done – unless it’s done by a business. Oh, you say company IT departments and employees are much too sophisticated in the ways of the Net to do such a thing? Think again.
Just a few years ago an employee at a major corporation sent an email out to their list of suppliers who were not aware of each other. Unfortunately, they became aware of each other’s presence as soon as the email was sent because the sender entered all the email addresses in the CC line and not the BCC line. Very embarrassing for the company and probably didn’t do the employee’s career advancement any good.
Another example of a fatal email mistake happened just recently.
Internet consultant firm Razorfish launched its first email newsletter several weeks ago to its clients. Now, being an Internet consulting firm and living the Internet on a daily basis, you’d think that Razorfish would know the ins and outs of sending an email newsletter. But you’d be wrong. Recipients of the newsletter were given the option to unsubscribe –so far, so good. But all unsubscribe requests were inadvertently sent to everyone on the email list, and - to add insult to injury - subsequent complaint letters were also sent to the entire list. Razorfish, a company troubled by poor earnings and a dismal stock price, apologized and terminated its email newsletter.
And here’s a tip for unsubscribing people from your list. Let them do it themselves. When a customer or client send an email requesting to removed from a mailing list, that request goes into a black hole with usually no confirmation that the proper action was taken. But you can avoid this by providing a special web page on your site for unsubscribing those on your mailing list.
Create a special page on your web site where recipients can unsubscribe by just clicking on a URL in your email. As soon as they click on the link, your server recognizes it as an unsubscribe action and presents them with a web page that says that they have successfully unsubscribed from your list. It also gives you another chance to interact with them once they are on that page like asking if they would like to subscribe to another list or join your new preferred shoppers club, etc.
Simple Shopping Cart Mistakes
Dot-coms are spending huge chunks of money to get traffic to their site, and hopefully induce visitors to buy only to find that a significant portion abandon their shopping carts before the purchasing process is completed. In fact some 65 percent of online consumers bail out of a transaction and abandon the shopping carts before the final purchase took place. And nothing will make a shopper say “Bye, bye” to your shopping cart than surprising them near the end of the checkout process.
One way to have your shopper bolt for the door is to surprise them with shipping charges.
So, before you put your customers through your order taking process, let them know what the actual shipped price of their order will be. You can do this in one of two ways. First, present the customer with the full amount of his order before you ask for his credit card. If you can't provide a calculation, then have complete shipping and handling charges listed on your Web store - and make that list easy to find!
This is even more critical for your international customers. First, if you want to sell to international customers, then you have to let them know it. Give them the international shipping costs before they reach your order form. If you don’t ship out of country, don’t tell then that after they’ve gone through the checkout process.
Here’s another simple shopping cart mistake. Have the shopper register and fill out a long personal information form before they check out. Ask for lots of personal date before they buy and you can watch those abandoned shopping carts pile up. If you want to collect some demographic information, do it after the order is finished – and give them a reason to hand you the information. Offer them a discount on their next purchase, or tell them they will receive special handling or pricing if they are a registered customer.
If you want to get something from a consumer – like personal information outside of name, billing address, shipping address, email address and phone number - you have to give something in return. Remember what that wise marketer, Yoda, said in Star Wars – “Give, then take”.
Show Some Respect
Rodney Dangerfield gets no respect. He told his psychiatrist that he had suicidal tendencies. His psychiatrist said that from now on Dangerfield had to pay in advance.
That might be funny to you, but treating your customer with no respect will drive him away from your site for sure. And one sure-fire way to drive him away is to confuse him.
Keep your navigation simple. You're there to sell. Customers are there to buy. Make it easy for them to find your products and buy them. If they can't find what they want and order it in three mouse clicks, you run the risk of losing them. So, organize your site material logically from the customer's point of view. Be sure to include clear directions for navigating the site from your home page. Remember that the home page of your Web store serves a variety of functions. It's a map of your store, a welcome mat, and a marketing message all in one.
People get lost easily, so include a "Return Home" link on every page of your site. Include a FAQ page and have links to the FAQ on every page where you think a customer might have a question about your store or service. Anticipate the needs of your users. If your site has a lot of product to sell, provide a search engine to easily find it.
Go light on the technical jargon and don't adopt a hipper-than-thou attitude in your writing. Shoppers want information - not a sales pitch. Don't persuade. Inform.
Finally, look at your URL. See that WWW in front of it? It stands for the World Wide Web. So think globally. Users from other countries can easily access your site. If you want to make an international sale, respect cultures other than your own. Remember that they might not be familiar with American slang or expressions. So, keep the wording simple.
Avoid these simple eCommerce mistakes and your B2C and B2B eCommerce endeavors will not become “Bankruptcy to Consumer” and “Bankruptcy to Business”.
As for me, I’m going to sleep until I’m 65, wake up thin and have lots of money to enjoy it with! Now, where did I put those toll free numbers?
|
