Posts Tagged ‘retail’

Good News For Retailers Who Get It

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
Current Affairs by MonkeySimon - Creative Commons Attribution License

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.


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Back To Work

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

Well, my extended holiday vacation is over now (boo hoo) and its time to get back to work again. I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and wish you a very happy and profitable New Year ahead.

To that end I’m hopefully going to make my first posting of 2009 a huge help for all of you who have eCommerce and/or retail sites online.

One of the biggest hurdles you face with an eCommerce or retail site, especially if you’re running an affiliate site from merchant data feeds, is simply being able to stand out from the crowd in search results.

When the title, description and even product images you publish are the same as every other affiliate using the same data feed it limits what you can do on-page to stand out.

If you’re a decent programmer and have a lot of time (or resources for hiring freelancers) you can always add unique content to be displayed on your pages on a product by product basis. That’s a great thing to do in-fact, however its a little advanced for most people.

So, I wanted to take a look at what the average person could do with their eCommerce or retail site that might give them an edge over their competitors.

The easiest and best (in my opinion) option is to focus heavily on your category pages. This serves a dual purpose. In a normal eCommerce or retail site you’re going to have 3 tiers to your site structure. The top tier is your home page, the second (or middle) tier is your category index pages, and the third tier will be your individual product pages.

In a perfect situation you will be able to make your individual product pages unique from your competitors and spend resources building backlinks directly to the products. However, for the average person using data feeds that’s not a viable option.

So, the next best thing is to focus on your category index pages.

In most cases the system or script you use for displaying your merchant’s data feed as a web site will have separate template files for the category indexes, so you won’t need to know much (if anything) about web scripting beyond very basic HTML to make edits to these.

I want to make sure I’m clear on what I’m talking about here, so lets assume you’re running an Electronics retail site. Your main home page is going to describe what your site offers and in most cases link to each of your categories such as “Computers”, “Printers”, “Scanners”, “Home Audio”, “Home Video” and etc.

Since you’re likely to have hundreds or even thousands of actual products in the inventory its not feasible to link to all of the products from a home page, so category index pages are used to keep your site navigation orderly.

Many site owners recognize that link building for every individual product is an overwhelming chore, especially when you’re first starting out, but where they often go wrong is they instead focus initially on simply building links to their main home page.

Home page links are fine, but they’re easy to get and if your site suddenly goes from Zero links to a thousand links all pointing only to the home page then the search engines are going to view that as unnatural and fishy.

So again I say, focus on your category index pages. Add unique content to each one and spend your link building time gaining links directly to these instead of your home page.

I said this serves a dual purpose and here it is: your category index pages should list individual products in that category, so in building strength and authority for your category index page you’re also building some strength and authority for those individual product pages too by proxy.

In addition, your category index pages should also link back to your main home page too. So again by building strength for your category indexes you’ll be building strength for your home page as well.

Remember, “link juice” or authority flows through links, so go out and get links to your category index pages and that “juice” will flow to them and through them to your individual product pages along with your home page.

Another good idea is to control your site strength and authority by not leaking it onto non-money pages. For example, if you’re selling or promoting sales then you should absolutely have an “About Us” page, a “Privacy Policy” and other pages that let your customers know who they’re dealing with and what to expect. Those pages are important to the visitors you already have, but aren’t useful to bringing in new customers via search results.

So, make sure you block those pages from being indexed in your robots.txt file and when linking to them from other pages of your site use the rel=”nofollow” tag in the link code. In other words, make sure your customers can find these pages, but also make sure search engines ignore them. Otherwise they’re just sucking your strength and authority away from where you really want it–on the pages that will bring you new customers.

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Psst, here’s my secret to selling products online – DON’T!

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

I’ve talked here before about how I’ve taken a lot of what I learned in my life of brick and mortar retail sales and applied it online. It’s true that many of the concepts transfer from real world to online store quite well.

One example is cross-merchandising where you build a page or site about one topic then promote multiple related products on it. For instance, if you visit the Butcher’s aisle at your local grocery store you’re likely to find not just meats on display, but also Steak and Bar-B-Q Sauces too.

The reasoning is simple and sound, a customer might just be there for the meats but by displaying the sauces that often go with those meats you can spawn “impulse” or “reminder” purchases of the sauces to generate additional sales.

That transfers to the online world perfectly. If you run a web site about web coding or programming then you would be foolish to not be promoting web hosting services and coding/programming software tools on your pages.

Your visitors are there for the information on web coding, and it’s a good bet that while they’re interested in the topic many won’t yet have a hosting account or the software tools they’re eventually going to need–so you can use your information resource as a platform for promoting those related tools and earning commissions for yourself.

However, there are also certain points about retail that don’t transfer to the online world naturally.

The biggest is the assumption that visitors to your online store are shopping.

Think of a guy sitting at home playing Madden Football 2008 on his X-Box. He’s playing and having fun, but is a little disappointed because it’s last years version so the player rosters are outdated and he doesn’t have his favorite rookie from this season to use.

So, he makes the decision to buy the latest 2009 version of the game and get the updated rosters as well as the new feature or two they include each year.

Does he go online to buy it? Probably not.

There’s always exceptions, but most people in this guy’s shoes would jump in their car, drive to Wal-Mart, buy the game and go home happy. Very few are going to make the decision to buy the game and then do it online where they’ll have to wait for it to be shipped to them.

Then who are all those people visiting your online store?

A majority of them are potential shoppers who are in the middle of the decision making process. They haven’t decided to buy the game yet, they’re going through an internal debate over whether or not the game is worth $50 to them right now.

Most site owners I’ve talkied with seem to get this, yet they don’t take the logical next step to improve their online sales.

Think about what you see on most product description pages of online stores:

  • the product name in the title
  • a brief description of the product features and options
  • a pretty product picture
  • the price point and a “Buy Now!” button

Everything a shopper needs to make the decision and purchase, right?

Well, sure if they’re ready to make the purchase. And maybe a few now and then will even make up their minds while looking at your page and buy from you–but still you’re not really giving them anything that a dozen other retail sites could are you, so why would your page convince them to buy the game today and from you?

Change the question!

In a brick and mortar store the majority of people coming through the door are ready to buy something so the retailer really just needs to make their products easily findable and the checkout process customer friendly to get sales.

But online that’s reversed and a majority of your visitors are likely still in the decision making process over a purchase, so you have to retool the process to fit.

One simple way to do this is to take the average product display page and change the title to change the question.

Instead of having “Madden 2009″ as the bold page title across the top of your product sales page, use something like this:

Who Doesn’t Want to be Super Bowl MVP?

Madden 2009

And then below that will be your product description, image and purchase button.

That simple addition of “who Doesn’t Want to be Super Bowl MVP?” right at the top like that changes the question completely for your visitor as soon as the page loads in their browser.

They came to your page debating whether the game was worth $50 to them, but now they’re debating whether the joy and excitement of feeling special when they become Super Bowl MVP is worth $50.

It changes and personalizes the decision process to transfer the focus from the product to the customer.

That’s huge because people rarely have an emotional investment in products, it’s easy to enter the purchase decision process with a “take it or leave it” attitude.

But, we all have a huge personal investment in our own happiness–so if you can reframe the question visitors are debating to be about them instead of the product you’ll find more people willing to spend their money and also willing to spend more money.

$50 can be a lot to spend on a game for anyone watching their budget, but $50 for personal happiness won’t be the same mental obstacle for most people.

I just did this very thing on a retail site that sells Halloween Costumes as part of the product line over the past 2 months, and while retail sales in general are down this year my site saw a 70% increase over the same period from last year.

I directly attribute the majority of that sales increase to my changing the question in visitor’s minds.

All I did was add an image of a very poor attempt at a home-made Halloween costume to my costumes product pages, then basically asked “which will you wear to the party?” so it compared the bad visual with the costume on the page.

Instead of debating whether to buy a costume, or how much they were going to spend on a costume this year… I changed the question for my visitors to “do you want to look good, or do you want to look like a fool?”

And I’m happy to report that a lot of my site visitors prefer to look good.

So, my secret to selling products online is simple, DON’T! Don’t sell the product, change the question and sell the happiness or other benefit for the customer from your product display pages.


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Confessions Of An Old Retailer

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

I’ve mentioned this here before but the majority of my background experience is from . I spent a couple of years with the Postal Service before finally making the leap to working for myself full-time, but prior to that I spent over a decade in management for mostly high volume, discount retail chains.

A lot of the things I do today online that earn me money are based on concepts I learned during that time. In fact, while I know there aren’t any magic secrets to making money online and hard work is the only sure path–I also know that there are certain ideas and techniques that will compliment and improve upon the results of that hard work.

Since those are what I try to share on this blog, I thought today was a good time to touch on some of the most basic and often overlooked concepts.

Traffic
Like everything there are nuances and ways to accessorize, but at the core my thoughts about online come down to this: put your product in-front of someone looking to buy it and you’ve got an easy path to a sale.

That may seem overly simple, but every day I read a blog or forum posting of some “guru” that talks about ways to increase traffic which have absolutely nothing to do with bringing a single quality visitor to your web site.

Who wants garbage traffic? And yes, there is certainly such a thing. If I’m trying to promote sales of a software program that repairs the Windows Registry why in the world would I want to do anything that would include the traffic of Mac or Linux users? That would be wasted efforts, time and money for me.

Yet so-called experts are constantly talking about (and selling) their methods for chasing this junk traffic to others.

Lesson from my retail experience that applies online: Don’t advertise your Ground Beef sale in a Vegetarian Newsletter.

Tell, Don’t Sell
Working in high volume, discount retail you don’t get much of a chance to interact with individual customers, which is very similar to the position you’re in when running a web site. So, not having the time to act as a salesman, retailers learn to be creative marketers. One of the most useful devices for encouraging someone to make a purchase (or a larger purchase) is known as cross-merchandising.

The concept is very basic, if someone comes to your store for laundry soap they have “doing laundry” as a focal point in their mind, so it’s a good time to suggest products like fabric softener and bleach to them.

But remember the retailer doesn’t have time to actually talk to each customer and make those suggestions, so how does he/she do it? Well, by displaying the items they want to promote (suggest) next to or near the related items they know most people are coming in for.

And this works with everything. Here’s a real world example that I remember. At the time that the movie, “Forrest Gump” was released on video I was managing a store for a well known movie rental chain. When Gump came out we made a huge display of it in the store because it was such a wildly popular and desired movie. We included in that display the 2 copies of another Tom Hanks movie, “Joe Versus the Volcano” which had been sitting untouched on our older movies shelves for months.

Nobody ever came to rent “Joe Versus the Volcano”. But, after placing those two copies on the Gump display we couldn’t keep them in the store. As fast as they would be returned they would be rented right back out. That’s the power of cross-merchandising. When people are focused on something, in this case the actor Tom Hanks, they’re open to related suggestions.

This same principal applies online, in fact the most well known Internet company makes its entire living from it–Google. Google’s income stems from showing related advertising to searchers. They match the ads that get displayed to the term you search for… that’s just them saying if you’re looking for hammers you might be inclined to buy nails; and that’s cross-merchandising.

Lesson from my retail experience that applies online: Know what your visitors are focused on at the moment and suggest related sales in your advertising/affiliate links.

Targeted Traffic Isn’t Targeted Enough
Here’s another point that it seems to me a lot of those gurus are constantly taking liberties with. And by that I mean they’re taking advantage of people on a technicality in my opinion when they sell their plans on chasing traffic.

The reason I feel that way is because targeted traffic is good, but it doesn’t automatically mean you’ll make any revenue at all. What you really want is the right targeted traffic, and most of the reports and ebooks I’ve seen over the years fail to explain this distinction. These folks take you just “so far” with their plans and systems, but fall short of delivering the most vital piece of the puzzle to you.

Here’s the difference between the two. If I were an Adobe affiliate promoting online sales of the popular graphics program Adobe Photoshop it would be easy for me to get traffic from people searching for terms like “photoshop tips and tricks” or “tutorials on photoshop”.

And technically (this is where most of those plans and systems take advantage of folks in my opinion) that could be called targeted traffic, right? These are visitors interested in the software I’m promoting… but am I going to make any sales from that traffic?

Maybe once in a great while, but for the most part no.

However, if I went after people searching for terms like “photoshop discount” or “photoshop with instant download” then I’d be chasing the right targeted traffic.

This traffic is going to be people who aren’t just interested in Photoshop, but are specifically interested in getting Photoshop and it’s going to be easy to make sales with this crowd.

Lesson from my retail experience that applies online: While every unmarried woman is a potential customer (or technically targeted visitor) for a Bridal Gown shop owner, only engaged women are the right potential customers (best targeted visitors) to spend their efforts chasing.

Combine These Points
Here’s where it all comes together. Once you learn to ignore junk traffic and can recognize the right targeted traffic to go after, then you can add in cross-merchandising for maximum effect.

Using the Photoshop affiliate site example from above, once I was bringing in the right traffic (people looking to get Photoshop) then I would be able to include other promotions such as Photoshop Learning materials or courses as related suggestions to visitors who were focused and in buying mode.

Some Random Thoughts To Close On
Don’t get caught up in the whole “volume traffic” nonsense. I see it every day and it drives me mad. Just yesterday someone asked on a popular webmaster forum how much money should he be making from 200,000 monthly visitors to his site, because his earnings were under $300 per month and he thought that was kind of low.

Hell yeah it’s low! And I know why without having to know anything about this guy or his web site… he has been chasing junk traffic. Somewhere along the way he got the notion that profits would come from volume traffic. They don’t!

I’ve said it here before but it’s worth repeating to make this point again. I prefer 200 of the right targeted visitors over 20,000 random visitors any day. I will make more money from the lower number, and I don’t have to be a great salesman to do it.

If I’ve got 200 people looking for what I’m promoting I don’t have to “sell it” to them at all, I just have to put it in-front of them with a clear path to satisfaction (purchase) then stay out of the way.

Also, when you read or hear tips/tricks/secrets/whatever about getting more traffic, always take a moment to consider whether the idea will lead to the right targeted traffic for you or not.

Sometimes it will. As I said before there are nuances and ways to accessorize everything you’re doing and that includes chasing the right targeted traffic. But you have to be smart about it and learn to avoid the garbage that doesn’t lead to the right targeted traffic.

You’ll come across buzz words and terms, ideas that seem logical on the surface like “long tail keywords”; but you have to remember that no matter what it’s only good if it ultimately leads to the right targeted traffic for you.

I love long tail keywords and talk about them myself, but like traffic there are different types of long tails. There are long tails that’ll bring you targeted traffic, and there are long tails that’ll bring you the right targeted traffic. Learn to recognize the difference and you’ll be in a much better position fast.


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