First Step Marketing

Your Web site is here to serve your customers—not impress them. You job is to design a site and offer a shopping experience that gives consumers a quick, safe, and easy way to purchase something from your Web store.

So before you sit down with your Web consultant, and before your Web designer puts pointer to screen, be sure the 10 ways to drive customers away from your site are avoided.

Confuse Your Customers

That might be funny to you, but treating your customer with no respect will drive him away from your site for sure. And one sure-fire way to drive him away is to confuse him.

Keep your navigation simple. You’re there to sell. Customers are there to buy. Make it easy for them to find your products and buy them. If they can’t find what they want and order it in three mouse clicks, you run the risk of losing them. So, organize your site material logically from the customer’s point of view. Be sure to include clear directions for navigating the site from your home page. Remember that the home page of your Web store serves a variety of functions. It’s a map of your store, a welcome mat, and a marketing message all in one.

People get lost easily, so include a “Return Home” link on every page of your site. Include a FAQ page and have links to the FAQ on every page where you think a customer might have a question about your store or service. Anticipate the needs of your users. If your site has a lot of product to sell, provide a search engine to easily find it.

Go light on the technical jargon and don’t adopt a hipper-than-thou attitude in your writing. Shoppers want information—not a sales pitch. Don’t persuade. Inform.

Finally, look at your URL. See that WWW in front of it? It stands for the World Wide Web. So think globally. Users from other countries can easily access your site. If you want to make an international sale, respect cultures other than your own. Remember—they might not be familiar with American slang or expressions. So, keep the wording simple.

Stay Anonymous

Here’s another cute trick that will drive customers from your site—stay anonymous. It never ceases to amaze me when the only means of contact on a shopping site is an email address. Come on! We all have an address. Use it. Put your company mailing address, phone number, fax number, and customer service number on your site. And, while you’re at it, don’t forget to give your customers several ways to order from you—online, by phone, fax, and mail.

Why? People want some indication that your company is real. Supplying just an email address or a P.O. box could seriously impact your sales. But if you’re running a business out of your home, you may have little choice.

Also, consider putting a picture of you and your team on your Web store. Make your Web site seem more personal and you more approachable. Be sure that you have an “About Us” section on your Web store that tells the shopper who you are and what your store is about. Use this area of your site to drive home your Unique Selling Position and why the shopper should buy from you.

Offer at Retail

Shoppers believe that because an online merchant doesn’t have a brick-and-mortar store, his overhead is low and he can pass these savings on to them in the form of lower prices. I know. I know. That server farm you have taking up the space of a small condo costs as much, if not more, to set up and maintain as a storefront in a strip mall. But shoppers don’t believe it. So don’t sell at retail. Sell at some kind of discount—at least a 10% off suggested retail price or more.

If you can’t offer a discount on the first sale, then offer some value-added service; perhaps a coupon good for a free item or a discount on a future purchase. You might consider partnering with another Web merchant selling products that are compatible with yours. If so, offer shoppers a “bundled” price of your product or service with your merchant partner’s product or service.

Frame Your Page

If you really want to drive customers away, then frame your pages.

Frames are a way to display several sections of several pages all at once. This is done by dividing the screen into several segments, or frames.

Frames are bad for two reasons. First they confuse the shopper and second, it makes it nearly impossible for a shopper to bookmark a framed page if he wants to return to it again later. When he does bookmark it and return, he only sees the framed page in his browser, losing any and all frames that surrounded the framed page originally.

Frames on your merchant site should be used for only one reason—to keep your navigation bar in front of your customers so they can find their way back to your site when you send them to another. For example, if you have set up reciprocal links or banner exchanges with other sites, a one-frame navigation bar directs customers back to your site from the site you sent them to.

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Pitfalls of Shopping Website, enough to scare your Customers away

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 1:00 am and is filed under Ecommerce, Marketing, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.