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 He’s playing and having fun, but is a little disappointed because it’s last years version so the player rosters are outdated and he doesn’t have his favorite rookie from this season to use.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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