Love thy customer
Apart from the need to quickly get up to speed with several decades' worth of basic business skills, another major problem in online selling has been the early belief that building a customer base was worth any amount of investment--and justified going online to sell at a loss.
Particularly in the US, product rebates, steep discounting, and free shipping were among the many incentives used to lure consumers online. Yet these all eat into precious margins, forcing the business into a spiral of losses that would ultimately affect the company's ability to deliver. This, in turn, led to a customer exodus, which helped secure the fate of the hundreds of dot-coms that are no longer around.
Clearly, keeping customers happy is the way to keep them shopping. And, despite early inclinations to the contrary, keeping customers happy doesn't necessarily require a singular focus on low prices.
Customers also welcome good service, a range of delivery options, product variety, and the convenience of a full-service shop available at times that suit their lifestyle; give them all this, and you won't have to sacrifice precious profit margins.
This singular focus on customer satisfaction isn't a skill you can learn overnight. Many online companies quickly realised this lesson after their e-mail handlers literally staggered under the weight of customer enquiries and complaints being sent to them.
Such problems are ironic given that the same companies often have perfectly well-equipped internal or outsourced call centres with more than enough resources to handle the influx. Make sure your online support processes are integrated with existing customer support centres, where a variety of applications let staff juggle phone calls with multiple e-mail responses and chat sessions at the same time.
Customer-centric business philosophies aren't built overnight, and can be a real problem for many real-world companies where selling and product development take priority. But if you want to succeed online, make sure customer service takes on an air of urgency within your company's internal culture.
Selling online "changes the relationship you have with your customers," says Kate Holz, general manager of e-business supplier ACCPAC International. "When somebody used to go visit them and take their orders, there was an interface between you and the customers. That was the true sales function, and you have to understand how going online is going to affect that sales cycle. A lot of this is still so new that people are tossing around ideas and realising how unprepared they are to face an Internet Web store."
Pretty as a picture?
Even issues such as site design can become pitfalls if customers can't easily navigate around and find the information they need. Test your site design extensively within the company before customers even get a chance to see it; actively solicit customer feedback once they do; and don't be afraid to radically update designs. With so many options online, customers won't stick around at a site they can't use well.
Customer service also revolves around performance issues such as bandwidth, as you'll know if you ever spent minutes waiting for a complex site to load. While they may sound great in marketing presentations, complex graphics, Flash presentations and the like can be a big turn-off for the majority of customers, who are still using 56Kbps or slower modems to get online. Bandwidth economy is particularly important if you're aiming to serve rural parts of Australia or overseas customers, where poor line quality can mean even 56Kbps is unachievable.
