Getting Your E-Commerce Payoff to Really Pay Off

The good news is that you can multiply your sales, profits and repeat traffic at very little incremental cost by using basic e-commerce technology to improve on-site customer relations and services. These technologies include:

Product search

Product search on your website can immediately establish a high-impact customer relationship: Customers need to be able to find exactly what they want, and quickly. Your search should allow customers to enter product words and get relevant product lists, even if they misspell or use partial terms. Organize your products into directories so prospects can access products by category. Combining product search and directories provides more ways for customers to find what they want. For example, entering just “digital” or even “dgital” should bring up a page featuring the most popular digital products, each one linking your product directory to the most related products. A third way is to group your products into “Solution Stores” — “Video Solutions,” “Office Solutions,” etc. — so consumers can see different ideas and packages. A good Web developer should be able to guide you in selecting the appropriate solutions for your website.

B2B e-commerce websites use the same technologies, but differently, because their customers are usually experts. B2B customers want results that are concise and built for fast choices. For example, having parts listed by size under a single photo with a short description is ideal. Each product listing should be one line, with a “description” link that goes to a page with more information, technical specifications and usage illustrations. A reorder list is particularly valuable to B2B customers, who typically repeat orders or need to know what their previous orders have been. If reorder lists are filled out automatically by the website and linked to past order summaries, they encourage repeats and supply valuable inventory and buying-pattern information.

Shopping cart

Shopping cart features can have “value-add” business building impact. Minimize order abandonment by providing a totaled “cart summary” that follows customers from page to page with their orders. Make sure you have “order edit” capability, so orders can be easily changed during product selection, order entering and checkout. If customers go back to visit other pages, make sure they can always use one click from any page to go back to their orders without any reentry of information. At some point on customers’ shopping or payment pages, ask if you can register them for future ease in ordering. Dropping “cookies” (a small piece of code that identifies the customer’s computer and relates it to their past orders and information) from shopping cart pages won’t hurt your search engine positioning (as it would from your home page) because shopping carts are not landing pages that customers come to from search engines. When you select a Web developer, ask to see the search engine rankings by keyword search of e-commerce websites with cookies they have developed, so you know they are experienced.

Customer shopping paths

Tracking customer shopping paths enables you to report which pages get high traffic but low sales, so you can adjust descriptions and offers. Pages with high exit traffic are good places to feature discounts, package offers and rebates to recapture customers. An ideal place to merchandise add-on items is the page describing or following “hot” products. Database programs can be used to contact customers after sale with items related to the products they bought or showed interest in by the pages they visited.

Shipping, handling and delivery policies

Shipping and handling policies are vital because the issue that causes the most abandoned shopping carts is shipping costs. Consider promoting free shipping and handling with orders of a certain amount (e.g., $50) right on your home page, order pages and cart summary to encourage that added sale because “It’s paid for by saved shipping costs.” Keep the minimum free shipment price low as an investment in acquiring repeat customers. When it comes to delivery, quote a good delivery date to manage expectations, and then deliver faster. (In other words, underpromise and overdeliver.) Automate frequent e-mails to customers that keep them informed of their orders’ delivery progress. If items are back-ordered, inform customers at the time of sale, and offer free delivery of partial orders to avoid delays. The few customers that have to go elsewhere to get an unavailable item will come back with more loyalty because they value your honesty. Amazon.com is a model of using shipping, handling and delivery to avoid lost sales and build customer relations.
For example, Amazon consistently seems to deliver faster than quoted, uses e-mail to immediately inform recipients of split shipments and give customers the option of changing their order, and generally charges for only one shipment on split orders. B2B websites should offer shipment tracking and a single low basic service delivery rate for all purchases within broad categories to enable easy cost projections by their customers. Early B2B delivery can make problems for customers because no one may be scheduled to receive it, and if it gets lost at the customer’s premises, they will be upset and you will be blamed.

Guarantees, return and privacy policies