Brochure site or buying site?
Besides the difficulty of signing up new well-heeled customers online, luxury sites also face a challenge getting wealthy clients to execute transactions online. Some wealthy individuals, experts say, fear security or privacy lapses. As a result, some luxury sites have basically given up on setting themselves apart as transaction-based e-commerce sites and are essentially being designed as high-quality brochureware sites.
"The Net as a sales channel is getting to be somewhat commoditising," said Andrew Bartels, an analyst at Giga Information Group. "Service is a personal thing... so creating a site that's really valuable is hard to do because you're up against the fact that people simply tend to view your site the same as everyone else's." So, Bartels said, sometimes it's best to not even try to offer transactions online and simply stick to what you do best: give targeted information to your high-end clients.
A case in point is Rolls Royce-Bentley. The English-based luxury car company sold only 585 high-end Bentley cars in the United States last year. Bentley's typical buyer is a 45- to 55-year-old male worth between US$18 million and $40 million who already owns six or seven cars, Bentley research shows.
Even with a few more dot-com millionaires springing for new Bentleys, the bulk of the company's clientele is still not likely to even think about buying a car online, said John Crawford, a director with the company's North American division. So, although the site, rolls-royceandbentley.co.uk, attracts a fair amount of tire-kicking visitors, it's designed as a static destination. No flash. Not even much colour. And it's never likely to replace the car company's huge customer relationship division.
"We don't have an [online] concierge service," Crawford said. "Our buyers have staff to do that sort of thing."
But not all luxury sites are targeted at the extreme high end of the luxury market. For most luxury sites, such as Blue Nile, getting customers to actually buy things online is a real possibility. The key to attracting a high-end clientele is simply being able to think through all the contingencies that customers might face.
Blue Nile's typical customerâ€"-an about-to-be-engaged man-â€"waits until the last minute to buy a diamond online, Paquin said, then needs it Friday afternoon for presentation that evening at dinner. That's a delivery date you'd better not miss, he said. And what if she says no? That's where Blue Nile's customer service kicks in. "He can return it, of course. But, mostly, we get a lot of exchanges."
Clearly, although the rich may be different from the rest of us, occasionally they make mistakes, just like everyone else.
