Feelter blog

The online consumer can be a fickle animal. The reason why a consumer buys from one retail site and not the next site offering similar products is the proverbial “64 million dollar question”! However, few retailers would expect that the reason online consumers do not buy from their Web site might be the Web site itself. While most retailers are likely concerned they are not offering sub-par products or services on their web sites, many might not realize that there may be numerous elements on that same Web site negatively impacting the company bottom line, such as these four:

1 – Offering Too many Options  

Whether an online retailer or a bricks-and-mortar store, too many options can actually be a bad thing. For example, if a restaurant has a choice of 20 entrees on its menu what does that tell the consumer? Many would argue it tells the shopper that, for the most part, the restaurant has no specialty dish and that it does, at best, offer a lot of entrees reasonably well, but none with super-high quality. No chef in a kitchen can make 20 entrees equally well under the evening-rush time pressure. The lesson for online retailers is don’t offer myriad options if the site doesn’t have the infrastructure to back it up and deliver to the highest quality. Garnering a reputation for doing a few things extremely well, rather than a reputation for providing a lot of mediocre products adequately, is worth much more in any marketplace. A site can always add products later, once a good reputation is secured.

2 – Not Enough Good Quality Photos and Videos

One of the main criticisms of online retailing over shopping in a bricks-and-mortar store is that the potential buyer can’t actually pick up a product and hold it in their hands. To counter this, eCommerce stores need to provide as many details, high resolution photographs, and video content about a product as possible. An increasing number of online retailers, for example in particular in the automobile industry and real estate, offer 3-D and 360 degree views of their product offerings. As growing numbers of online consumers have access to affordable, unlimited data plans and high-speed bandwidth, such viewing innovations will only become increasingly available from more retailers.

3 – Pricing Lacks a Sense of Urgency

Salesmanship 101: create a sense of urgency. If an online retail site is not creating a sense of urgency with its available products and pricing, it is wasting one of the most tried-and-trusted sales tools available. Virtually all consumers are impulse buyers to some degree. Offering a product at a special price for a limited amount of time helps force the consumer’s buying decision. Another trick is offering only a certain number of a particular product at a special reduced price. Once that number is all sold at the special discount, the price goes back up. A sense of urgency plays on the consumer’s desire to get a “great deal.”

4 - Limited Shipping Options

Free shipping is the future of online retail. An increasingly large number of online consumers disclose in surveys that they will abandon their browsing and shopping cart if they find out free shipping is not being offered. Beyond free shipping, even if it standard USPS 2-9 day delivery, retailers need to also offer faster deliver for those shoppers willing to pay for it: for example, two-day and overnight delivery. In some geographic areas, especially those near a retailer’s distribution center, same-day delivery is becoming increasingly possible, or same-day pickup. A variety of cheap and speedy delivery options are becoming the standard in online retail.

Conclusion

Particularly for those companies whose only, or main, interaction with online consumers is through their Web site, basic sales, marketing and presentation rules are increasingly important. Ensuring that the customer experience is the best it can be entails attention to all the details of the sales process.