Blue Nile: Ask the experts
That's certainly what Seattle-based Blue Nile was aiming for. The company started in May 1999 with a simple premise: Men buy the diamonds, but menâ€"-or at least some men-â€"are uncomfortable in a showroom, particularly when they don't know anything about the stones.
So the company's founders figured the Web could bring a virtually unlimited number of diamonds to buyers, who could then get educated and choose in the privacy of their own homes.
How do you persuade someone to buy diamonds online? The answer, Paquin said, is by establishing yourself, within seconds of a customer landing on the home page, as an expert in the field. And that, he said, is the key to selling absolutely anything on the Web, not just luxury goods.
"You have seconds when a customer lands on your site to convince them or send them away. You have to present a clear message of who you are and what your value proposition is," he said.
Blue Nile reinforces the idea that it's an expert diamond seller by educating buyers. Everything from the most basic facts to a detailed gemologist-level look at the stones is available to users, who can continue to click until they've had enough.
Blue Nile makes it easy for visitors to navigate this vast treasure chest of information. The site uses prominent images of diamonds to avoid cluttering the page with distractions.
Continuing that theme, the company established other hard and fast rules. Purchases should be no more than three clicks away, while specs should be a single click away. And all the information on the site has to be in contextâ€"-a buyer looking at loose stones should be able to get information about settings a click away. "A confused user won't buy. He'll leave, so it has to be clear and easy at all times," Paquin said.
To ensure that the site stays simple and easy for busy users to navigate, Paquin and his team engage in continual fine-tuning. They study the site's logs to learn where people bail out and where they've been. They make sure the home page is freshened often and updated with the right holiday promotions. And they regularly bring in focus groups to get feedback on the site and on planned modifications. "We try hard to let the consumers tell us what we need to do," Paquin said.
One thing they've learned: The wealthy don't like pointless cross-selling promotions getting in the way of what they're trying to do online. Paquin guards against that, something that even sites targeting nonaffluent shoppers could learn from.
"We very much did not want to set ourselves up like an Amazon, which is sort of like a department store. If someone wants to look at diamonds on our site, that's all he'll see. He won't be bombarded with information about pearls," he said.
Apparently, it's working. "They are clearly selling diamonds, and they're using action verbs to do so, like buy and shop," said Steve Telleen, an analyst with Giga Information Group. "Blue Nile doesn't water down its message, which is very effective. This is a very simple site, without a lot of extras, and it works."
