It is a fact that most of the variables which help people move through their decision process have changed their order of importance. It is not because online customers are different people or target segment but they do have different buying habits for products they buy online. Successfully selling on the web requires learning web's lessons. I will use one recent research to present one of the most important ones. According to a research of buying habits, most important reasons for leaving a site without purchasing are: 1) could not find the items they were looking for; 2) shopping cart - hard to find; 3) long checkout; 4) site was not trustworthy; 5) shipping charges were too high. We can notice that the first three reasons are all from the same origin - TIME. Most of the online shoppers didn't buy from the website because they had no extra time to spend to find the product they were looking for, to locate the shopping cart or the process of the checkout was too long. The other reasons, which formerly took the first place, although still important, are now ranged lower. What does this mean? It means that the key to success in selling over Internet is to give them what they want and give them now. Any extra click or not needed content can cost you big money. Internet shoppers will abandon your site immediately if you don't take care to make it easy for them to buy. The experience of today's online shoppers gets bigger every day and so does their expectations from you. You not just have to research their needs and customize your product any longer, but even more research how do they want to buy your product and optimize your web presence. Yes, that's a lot of work. You will constantly have to monitor the movements of your website visitors through your web pages, come up with website structure that brings more profits, be there for any additional questions your visitors might have or even predict when they are going to leave your website and help them move forward. All of this requires a big effort, I agree, but it will ensure your survival and growth. It will convert your web visitors into customers and take care they come back for a repeated purchase. After all, the key to successful online presence is seeing the web for what it really is: just another way to reach and serve customers, but with efficient business model. And we come to our question again: what has the web taught us so far? What is the lesson of the web? The lesson of the web is not how the big eat the small but how the fast eat the slow. |
