Doing E-commerce: Making it easy for customers to do business with you
With all the hullabaloo about e-commerce sites and the dot-com washout, we decided to take a look for ourselves how a sample of Australian e-commerce sites are doing.
It's certainly a tough climate. Online companies have to deal with the taxation changes, an economic slowdown, and in many cases, a very low share price (compared to the halcyon days of free flowing venture capital). Many of the reports into e-commerce failures discuss the importance of the fundamentals of running a business. Instead of covering old ground of marketing, finance, people, and operations management, we took a look at how the e-commerce sites are doing with managing their customer experience.
The one thing we will say, is that running an Internet business should be no different to a traditional bricks and mortar business. Effectively managing your customers is critical to success, and especially repeat business.
Generally, we found that Web interface design is maturing in the same way as the underlying companies are: by going back to the basics. It used to be that people hurriedly and without much forethought put up a site, thinking that "if it doesn't work we can change it". But this doesn't work. You've got to get it right the first time, or your customers will go somewhere else.
So what have the dot-coms learned over the last couple of years? Many of them have certainly learned a lot and are providing a strong and compelling offering. Others haven't increased enough in their sophistication, yet there are plenty of models around them.
Based on our review, we came up with these key recommendations from the review focus on usability and the interface design. Any organisation currently in the e-commerce space, or considering to do so should consider these as part of their fundamental design:
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With all the research into the dot-coms collapse pointing to good business practices, we were still surprised that some companies thought they didn't need a business plan. Quite a few companies also didn't know their conversion rates. This is a critical performance measure in any traditional sales model. After all, if you make changes to the way you do business, you need to make sure you can measure the effects you're having.
The old adage still applies "if you fail to plan, you plan to fail". This applies to the business itself, and the approach you're going to take to make sure it's easy for your customers to do business with you--and then want to do it again.
ePharmacy currently has 3 staff members. It proves that you do not have to have a massive business structure to have a successful e-commerce business.