1.
Why ecommerce? Why does your business need it?
Before
you do anything, consider your motivation for entering into the world
of e-commerce. Embarking on this journey can bring great rewards but
it is also time-consuming, can require significant investment and is
potentially distracting to the core business activities that got you
to where you are now.
Are
you looking to increase sales? Deliver a better customer experience?
Compete with other brands?Increase your brand awareness? Reduce the
cost of service and improve your operational capability? Too often
we have seen the underlying premise behind an e-commerce investment
is not clear or understood across the various stakeholders in the
business. This makes it difficult to measure success, secure
sufficient funding and ultimately deliver at the pace required for a
successful outcome.
Having
a clear understanding of why you see e-commerce as a worthwhile
investment is key. It gives you a solid term of reference against
which to baseline all subsequent activities and allows you to
continually ask yourself ‘by doing this activity or spending this
money, am I addressing one or more of my original objectives?.
2.
How will you measure the success of your ecommerce project?
Once
you have a clear understanding of why you want to invest in
e-commerce, next you must decide on how you will measure the success
of your efforts.
There
are various dimensions you could use to measure the performance of
your e-commerce platform and hence determine how successful it is.
Sales revenue, transaction count, new customers, average transaction
value (ATV) and website visitors are some of the more typical
measurements that you may want to track.
Converting
your original objectives into a set of clearly measurable targets
will give you the ability to track your e-commerce efforts and make
adjustments along the way as required.
Note:
A key tip here is to ensure ‘metrics’ capabilities are built into
your e-commerce platform from the off. These will enable you to
capture important data around customer behaviors and the performance
of your online sales channel, thereby empowering you to make informed
decisions on what is working and what could be improved.
3.
Have you considered how the e-commerce capability will integrate with
the rest of your business?
Your
e-commerce capability is a direct extension of your business and
constitutes more than just a website. For it to be successful, your
complete supply chain must be integrated to ensure you are able to
deliver your product or service end-to-end.
What
current systems do you have in place that will need to be integrated
with the e-commerce solution? Stock control, accounting and
point-of-sale (POS) are some of the systems we have typically
integrated with in order to provide an effective end-to-end sales
channel.
Consider
also how you will deliver product and marketing content to this new
channel. Will in-store promotions also need to be published online?
Will you be selling the same product catalogue through your
e-commerce website? If you have a loyalty scheme, will this be
available online? Understand where the crossovers are and define how
far you want go with integrating these components.
4.
How should merchants promote their ecommerce sites?
There
are lots of ways this can be done, but for any business there are two
no-brainers. The first is to promote the site to all existing
customers - if they don’t know that you sell online, they will go
elsewhere. If they use your site and like it, they will probably tell
their friends. So "Order online at" and your web address
should be on every piece of literature and advertising that a company
produces.
The
second is to register with search engines. It may take a little time,
but it's often free and can produce good results. Just remember that
your site will register more effectively if the pages are generated
in HTML, rather than being dynamically generated from a database. In
our customer's experience this can affect traffic to your site by
around 50%.
5.
What are the key things to turn browsers into buyers?
In
short, remove the reasons why people might not buy. Make your
ecommerce site oriented towards sales rather than marketing. When
prospects are at the site, the marketing process is complete. So,
show them the products immediately – don’t hide them behind acres
of marketing copy. Provide full terms and conditions – it seems
more professional plus protects you. Give your contact details,
including a telephone number. Explain your guarantee and returns
policy. A rock solid guarantee goes a long way to persuading people
to buy. Finally, explain your security, encryption and privacy
policies.
6.
What reach will your e-commerce capability support?
By
default, your e-commerce capability makes you open for business in
every country, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Consider whether your
business is set up to service this market and if not, ensure that you
localise your offering accordingly. For example, you may decide to
accept orders from customers anywhere in the world but limit free
delivery to Australian-only addresses.
Consider
also the devices that your customers may want to use to purchase your
products or service. E-commerce websites that work well on desktop
computers do not necessarily translate to deliver a good customer
experience on tablet or mobile devices. Decide on which devices you
consider to be important and ensure the appropriate capability is
designed in early on in the process.
What
about support for your e-commerce website? Do you want to limit the
hours your online store is open for business? What happens if a
customer has an issue or query outside of normal business hours? All
of your good work in building a high-quality e-commerce platform can
easily be undone if you stretch yourself too far and are unable to
deliver the level of service expected throughout the supply chain.
With
the reference of : BIT
and
free
Ecommerce information
