etailology

Recognize the Sales Function of Your Home Page:

When you enter an offline store, what do you see? PRODUCT. When you enter most online stores, what do you see? CHEST-BEATING. Thats right, many online retail sites put themselves — not their products — up front. (Aren’t we great?)

That said, there are some key “about our store” items that should live on your home page. Your home page should answer the following questions for the consumer:

• Am I at the right store? (Literally, did I type the right URL?)
• Am I at a store which is appropriate for me? (Read: socio-economic status, psychographic profile)
• Is this retailer reputable?
• Do they have what I came here to buy?
• What else they got?
• What’s happening NOW at this retailer (vs. last or next week?)
• Should I come back?

As a rule, etail home pages are terrible. That’s right: terrible. I could start a whole business just consulting on etail homepages; to borrow a joke I heard from Jacob Neilsen*.. “Send me $20,000 and I’ll send you an email saying your home page sucks.” These pages often include a huge (non-clickable) visual of a product which is overly common or perhaps even out of stock! (The photo, unfortunately, IS stock.)

Such poor execution in the name of “image establishment” (I won’t call it branding, because it’s not) serves only to mislead the shopper and lose the sale.

Here’s a newsflash — if all the imagery on your site is the same product photography your competitor has, then what’s the difference between you and him? If your features and content are the same…? If your customer service is equally efficient…?

Answer? NOTHING. No advantage, no difference… and no reason to shop at YOUR store, other than a lower price — if you offer it. If you want to compete on price (and engage in that “race to the bottom”) then good luck to you. Save yourself some time and don’t bother reading this blog — instead focus on your supply chain because I bet it’s costing you good!. If you, instead, wish to find advantage in your brand and use it as an asset to drive larger revenues, higher tickets, and greater loyalty, then read on.

It’s important to do the basics well — and many sites don’t. But I’ll endeavor to put the basics within the context of how they function to eliminate potential objections from your customers, rather than driving loyalty and membership. Take care of the first as a matter of course; take care of the second to ensure ecommerce success.

Don’t regress to the mean.  Use it to beat up your competition.

*I wasn’t having lunch with him, I was watching him speak at a conference