Current Affairs by MonkeySimon - Creative Commons Attribution License
Among my daily readings today I found an interesting piece over at MediaPost by Laurie Sullivan (was actually posted a few days ago, I’m behind in my reading) titled Online Retailers Have Opportunity To Influence Consumers, that could prove to be good news for those retailers/etailers who “get it”.
The story is based on a research study from Bazaarvoice and Richrelevance, and while some of the numbers are scary for retailers, for example that 48% of consumers plan to reduce offline and online spending in the near future, there are some good signs and implacations from the study too.
For instance, suggested sales and impulse buys appear to have risen steadily since 2004. These are items the consumer didn’t set out to purchase, but were enticed to by smart–and often “at the checkout”–promotions.
The takeaway if you run a retail site is simple, cross-promote your merchandise and be sure not to waste any white space in your checkout process pages.
If customers are browsing the latest Horror DVD releases on your site, be sure you also suggest some older Horror titles along with Thriller/Suspense titles as well. If it’s related, suggest it. You may be surprised at the impact to your bottom line.
And on your checkout pages, you’ve already got a buying customer who is entering their credit card information, just prior to them clicking the “Pay Now” button is a prime time to suggest additional items.
And again, if you can set it up so that the items you suggest at this point are related to the items the customer has in their shopping cart already, the chances of adding to the sale are greatly increased.
Another interesting takeaway from the article for me was the information on review sites. It seems up to 77% of online shoppers rely on ratings and reviews when making purchasing decisions.
That number may be slightly based on users of the giant retail sites like Amazon and eBay which have ratings and reviews built in to their services, but it’s still interesting to see that above traditional advertising streams, people want and trust the reviews and ratings their peers provide.
This gives retailers a huge openinto help influence and guide their visitor’s buying decisions in a completely open and transparent manner.
Setup a simple ratings and review system on your site. Good or bad, let your customers and visitors share their thoughts on you and your products. Heck, encourage them to do so.
Don’t worry about negative comments, and NEVER become defensive to them. Use them as an opportunity to reach out to an unhappy or unsatisfied customer. Find out what went wrong, and how you can make it better.
You may get that single customer back, or you may not… but if others see the discussion they will realize that you care about your customer’s experience and that’s uber-PR for you.
