31.Oct.2011 How to launch a (successful) eshop – part three
After two previous guidelines, which can be found here (first part) and here (second part), this is the third part in this eshop tutorial trilogy. This last (but certainly not least important) part will cover the three most important aspects of your shop right after the launch: logistics, customer care and marketing.
Even though a webshop has many similarities to a physical store where customers just walk in, you need to keep in mind that these remain two totally separate sales channels. I could even say with confidence that these are actually two totally different sales approaches. Whereas a standard shop, based in the streets will have a natural visibility by default, your webshop will simply not. People don’t just walk on the internet, passing by your shop and saying “Hey let’s visit this one for a while”. A new site has exactly 0,00 visibility by default, so it’s up to you to increase this visibility.
Increasing teh visibility of the site takes some very basic actions and can already be achieved with relatively small budgets, but it isn’t that straightforward. If for instance, you will start sellingclothes online, you need to keep in mind that by just linking to your site, you will be “Textile selling store #1.203.504 in row and counting. On the internet, you need to stand out, make sure people look at your ads and do what it takes to get on your shop in as few steps as possible. This is where marketing kicks in. I’m not a marketing expert, but I can tell you this: make sure you get the right keywords on your site, be original and creative and most importantly, manage your marketing budget efficiently. What I mean is that you don’t need to spend thousands of euros/dollars on advertising in order to reach millions of people that are situated far outside your audience. Make sure you target the appropriate public, using their channels and adapt your ads so that their needs are reflected in it. Social networks have been proven to be a great marketing resource as well, use them wisely and creatively. When visiting the DMF 2011 fair a few weeks ago, I also saw an interesting lecture of Adobe on efficient conversion management, by creating several marketing campaigns at once in order to link people through to the exact product range they’re looking for, which considerably cuts down the required amount of effort that the end-user needs to do in order to obtain what he/she needs. Which brings us to customer care.
Customer care is often misunderstood. Customer care is not only taking care of customer complaints or issues after you sold the product, that’s simply taking care of customer complaints or issues after you sold the product. Customer care, as the name states, is taking care of your customers or making sure they feel like they’re getting the service they’re paying for, before during and after the purchase. Make sure they do as little effort as possible, make sure that the whole sales process goes as smooth as possible and make sure the customer (or end-user) feels great about buying the goods. Also make sure that the customer doesn’t feel like he or she is being scammed or lured into more costs. Many sites I know still ask an extra fee for domestic shipments… bogus! Domestic shipments are cheap nowadays if you organize them efficiently, so why should you charge the customer for something that you could offer for free without taking risks? The same counts for gift wrapping. I don’t know how some merchants don’t feel ashamed of charging for this, wrapping material comes at almost no cost.
Cutting down on shipment costs brings us to logistics. It’s mainly thanks to logistics that you will be able to manage the goods flow without going crazy and it also has a massive impact on the customer satisfaction. Good logistics make happy customers. Make sure you get the goods as quickly as possible (face your fear of getting a small stock and just do it) so that you can send them as quickly as possible. Do some research and find the best quotes and the best service for your deliveries. Try working via indirect channels and if possible try to automate as much as possible. It’s amazing how many you can accomplish by just thinking through a few good and easy to implement processes and automate them. It all sounds straightforward, but strangely enough, it’s being forgotten over and over again.
As you will notice, this last part was brief and didn’t go that much into detail as the previous ones. A part from the fact that I must admit my expertise is a little more shallow in these domains, there’s also the fact that all three of these pillars are to be used in extremely specific ways depending on your business. That’s also why you should always do some research on these subjects, keeping these guidelines printed in your brain. Try Google, browse Amazon for some great books and attend several conferences and/or fairs on the subject. Expecially the latter will give you a more hands-on insight in these subjects than a book or a text like this will do, so you should definitely give them a try. And just as I said in the beginning of the first part, this text is far from being meant as a schoolbook, you should actually more or less consider it like those Ikea manuals. I provide you with the information on how to mount everything, but it’s up to you to build it and make sure it looks great, it’s located in a good way and it works great.
This is it. I hope you enjoyed this and will use it as your blueprint for the big adventure that lays ahead. i’m sure you won’t regret it! Good luck!