Archive for March, 2007
As I mentioned before, most of the people who visit your store will still find the idea of buying online a little strange. You have to reassure them. The most powerful confidence builder is a top-quality site: high production values go to work directly on the visitor’s subconscious. But it’s also important to reassure visitors explicitly.
For example, if you are determined to provide great customer service, tell your visitors so, right on your site. Guarantee that they will be satisfied with what they buy from you, or you will refund their money with no questions asked.
Your site should offer secure online ordering, and you should say so to visitors. But If you try ordering online yourself, you’ll find the biggest concern that you have is not security. I bet what you’ll find yourself thinking is, who are these guys? Did they actually get my order? Are they going to send me the products? When?
When someone places an order from a Yahoo! store, we always generate a confirmation page thanking them for their order, and telling them their order number. That is a good first start, but you as the merchant should also send them an email thanking them for their order and telling them when it will arrive.
And make sure that you ship orders quickly. Web users want fast results. They don’t want to hear that they should expect to wait 4-6 weeks for delivery. This is not 1910. Tell them they will get their order in 3 days.
And make sure they do. The consumers ordering on the Web now are like the scouts of an oncoming army. They will determine your reputation for service for years to come. If you do a great job, they will tell all their friends about you.
Ordering online is still an unusual thing to do, so people who do it are proud of how adventurous they are. Have you ever listened to someone talk about ordering online? “It was no big deal,” they say, swelling visibly. “I just went to their Web site, found what I wanted, and gave them my credit card number. Three days later the stuff arrived. No problem.”
People love to be able to tell such stories to their friends. It’s the most valuable kind of free advertising for you. So make sure that your customers have good stories to tell. If you do a bad job, your customers will also tell all their friends, and you will be in big trouble. Word spreads very quickly on the Internet.
Especially this year, treat your Web customers as if each one were as important as ten customers. Because if you treat them well, each one will turn into ten customers.
Do you want to hear what your customers have to say about your Web site or your products? You should. Tell them that you want to hear from them, and put a prominent email link and/or phone number in your site. Try including a link that will let visitors send email directly to the president of your company. Few will bother to send mail, but everyone who sees it will be impressed by your attention to customer service.
When a customer does send you mail, respond promptly! Customers who have taken the trouble to send you email are like gold. Talk about qualified prospects. So treat them like gold. If you can, make it a corporate policy to respond to email within an hour or two at most. You have to reply eventually, so why not do it right away? Customers will be delighted to see that you care about them.
Source: Yahoo Business: Emphasize Service
Text copyright © 1999 Paul Graham. Feel free to reproduce any of this text on your own Web site, so long as you reproduce it verbatim, and include this message. For any other use, please contact the author. Yahoo! and Yahoo! Store are trademarks of Yahoo! Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Source: Yahoo Business: Emphasize Service
Technorati : customer service, customers, online ordering, ordering online
Anyone planning to sell online should start by shopping online. Next time you need to buy something, look for it on the Web.
When you put yourself in the consumer’s place, you’ll find it is not hackers you worry about, but the merchant. Almost anyone can set up a Web site. So visitors need to be reassured that they are ordering from a real company, and not just a teenager running the site out of his bedroom.
Anything you can do to show that you are real will help increase orders. Include your name, phone number, and street address. Toll-free numbers are especially good. If possible, include an image of your catalog or building, customer testimonials, or even a brief company history.
The best way to show that you mean business may be to include a full selection of products. One of the things that distinguishes winners like Amazonand CDNOWis their huge inventories, which show that they are serious about selling online.
A surprising number of companies have online stores that send the opposite message. Some don’t even have ordering working yet. It makes you wonder, do these guys actually want your business?
A lame Web site is better than no Web site, but not much better. Especially since the latest generation of Web tools make it so easy to build sites with online ordering.
Source: Yahoo Business: Be Real
Text copyright © 1999 Paul Graham. Feel free to reproduce any of this text on your own Web site, so long as you reproduce it verbatim, and include this message. For any other use, please contact the author. Yahoo! and Yahoo! Store are trademarks of Yahoo! Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Technorati : catalog, online ordering, products, toll-free numbers, web site
It is no accident that the people who visit your site are called “Web surfers”. They have the same short attention span as TV “channel surfers”. The average visitor to a Web site looks at only three or four pages before going somewhere else. Visitors will leave at the slightest obstacle.
So if you want people to visit and order from your site, don’t put any obstacles in their way. Whatever you do, don’t force visitors to register. You have to create yourself an account, with a user id and password, before you can even order from Wal-Mart. Do they expect online shoppers to remember a userid and password for every online store they visit?
Most major sites have learned not to require registration. They have also learned not to use frames. Frames are a lot more gratifying to the site designer than the visitor. To visitors, frames are merely confusing.
Coach site so
hard to understand that nearly all the text on the first page is
navigation instructions. If the site were easy to navigate, Coach
could use that space to present their products instead.
–>Another big disadvantage of frames: many search engines don’t index sites that use frames. So using frames will decrease the amount of traffic you get from search engines.
None of the most heavily visited sites use frames. In fact, the more important the site, the simpler the design. Look at what is probably the most important site on the Web, Yahoo!There are no bells and whistles to distract you. The design of the site is so simple that you get it at a glance.
Most of your visitors will not start at your front page. Most of your hits will come from search engines, and when someone searches for a phrase in a search engine, they are sent directly to the page in your site that contains that phrase. So most of your visitors will drop right into the middle of your site, like paratroopers. The design of your site has to tell them immediately where they are, and what their choices are.
Most major sites solve this problem by putting a row of buttons at the top or down the side of each page. Somewhere, usually at the top of the page, they include a small version of their logo. The logo serves two purposes: it brands the site, and it serves as a link back to the homepage. For example, look at these interior pages from CDNOW and the NASA store. They all use this approach. So does Yahoo!. It has become the accepted convention for the way a site should be organized.
Make sure you put these links at the top of the page. You don’t want new arrivals to have to scroll down to the bottom of the page just to find out where they’ve landed.
Many of the people who arrive at your site will be searching for a specific product. We find that almost half the people who place orders were searching for that particular product. You have to pay special attention to these visitors, because they are the ones who actually spend money. Every online store should be searchable, and there should be a search button on the home page, if not on every page. Every store with less than 2000 pages should also have an alphabetical index. (All Yahoo! stores automatically have both.)
Source: Yahoo Business: Make Your Site Easy
Text copyright © 1999 Paul Graham. Feel free to reproduce any of this text on your own Web site, so long as you reproduce it verbatim, and include this message. For any other use, please contact the author. Yahoo! and Yahoo! Store are trademarks of Yahoo! Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Technorati : Yahoo store, web site, web surfers
In a print catalog, “production values” refers to the quality of the paper and printing processes used, the number and quality of images, and the care taken with graphic design. High production values are critically important in catalogs, which have to convince consumers to buy based on a few sheets of paper.
Production values are even more important on the Web. Consumers will not buy from an amateurish Web site.
Most of the people who visit your site will still find the idea of ordering online unusual. I have been buying online for three years, and I still find it a little unusual. So your site needs to inspire visitors with confidence. It should say that yours is the kind of company that does things right, and that if I order something from you, it will be a good experience.
Of course there is no direct connection between the quality of your site and the quality of your company. A company could have a brilliant graphic designer and lousy products. But usually there is a connection, and that is what visitors to your site will assume. If your company is unable to put up a good Web site, then it seems natural to assume that your company cannot deliver good products or services.
The most extreme case, of course, is when your company does not have a Web site at all. Occasionally I go to look for information about some product, but find that the company either doesn’t have a Web site, or has a site with nothing in it. Not impressive.
Almost as bad as the empty site is the site that looks amateurish.
In contrast, take a look at Despair.com. Here is a site that says, we mean business. What makes a site say that? The same thing that makes a Ferrari look like it means business: good design. On the Web, good design means good proportions, appropriate typefaces, clear layout, and color combinations that work.
Overall the most important feature of a Web page is the organization. That is what visitors will notice first. It should be possible to “read” the structure of a page at a glance. A high quality Web site looks clear. A badly designed site looks haphazard.
Of the elements on the page, the most important are the images. A Web page consists of text and images, and everyone’s text looks the same, so the difference in production values between good sites and mediocre ones depends almost entirely on images.
By images I do not necessarily mean product images. I mean gifs and jpegs, whether they are product images, display text, logos, button bars, bullets, or what have you.
To start with, better Web sites usually have more images. For example, they tend to have button bars at the top of each page, to brand the site and to aid in navigation. And instead of displaying
Titles Like This
in screen text, they often display as gifs. Text rendered as a gif can be antialiased, meaning you don’t see jagged edges. You can use any font, not just whatever the browser has, and you can also get 3D effects like bevelled edges and drop shadows, which (used sparingly) make a site look richer.
When I say that better sites use more images, I do not mean that they use more k of images. Big images take a long time to download, and that is the kiss of death in an online store. In a top-quality site, images are the seasoning, not the foundation of the site. Use small, punchy images that will carry a lot of the surrounding area.
In particular, avoid the common mistake of putting a huge image on your front page. By all means put your logo on the front page, and in fact on every page, but make it download fast. Your logo is not what your customers came to see.
They came to see your products. But don’t throw full-size product images at your visitors until they ask for them. Sophisticated sites begin with a page of smaller thumbnail images, which visitors can click on when they want to see more.
If you don’t use thumbnail images, your section pages will be too slow.
Make your product images as high quality as possible. Consumers won’t buy from an image that looks like a badly lit polaroid. So have a professional photographer take your photos. Images shot with a top-quality digital camera look brightest, but you can also scan transparencies or even scan images right out of your print catalog.
If possible, try to make the background color for the product images either the same color as your pages, or transparent. Product shots look better when the object seems to sit right on the page.
Finally, don’t make spelling mistakes in your site. A few of those will undo all the other work you’ve done to make your site look professional.
Source: Yahoo Business: High Production Values
Copyright © 1999 Paul Graham. Feel free to reproduce any of this text on your own Web site, so long as you reproduce it verbatim, and include this message. For any other use, please contact the author. Yahoo! and Yahoo! Store are trademarks of Yahoo! Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Technorati : Web Site, product images, professional photos, website
What sells online? That is probably the question we get asked most. At the risk of being repetitive, what sells online is work. In our experience, the difference in success between one store and another depends a lot more on how hard they work than on what they are selling.
I know of two stores, Store A and Store B, that are selling exactly the same products. Store A sells five times as much as Store B. The reason is, Store A works a lot harder. They work on their site almost every day, and they also do more to promote it.
But although work is the decisive factor, what you sell matters too. As a general rule, whatever sells in print catalogs will also sell on the Internet. If the customer has to see something before buying it, then you probably can’t sell it in a print catalog, or online. Otherwise, you should be able to sell almost anything.
It’s true that more men use the Internet now than women, so if you sell something that men buy, you are likely to have a slight edge. Someone who works with computers is almost certain to have Web access, so anything computer-related is likely to do comparatively well. And Internet users are richer and better educated than the population as a whole, so luxury items may do well.
But these trends are not set in stone. When televisions first became available, the first buyers were probably richer and more technologically inclined than the population as a whole. But TV rapidly became mainstream, and the same thing is happening to the Web.
More important than the type of products you sell is the size of the niche you choose.
In the physical world, niches are based on geography. I often buy food at the corner store near my house, despite the small selection and high prices. If this store were more than 100 yards away, I would never buy anything there. But in the physical world, proximity is king.
Not on the Internet. Geography is almost irrelevant on the Internet. Niches on the Internet are based on what you sell, not where you are. And whatever you sell, you have to be the place to buy it, because your customers can just as easily visit any other online store.
So you have to choose a niche small enough that you can dominate it. For example, if you are a tiny company, it would probably be a mistake to try selling top-40 CDs online. You would have a hard time competing with CDNOW. But you would probably have a chance at becoming the site for European folk music.
One certain way to dominate a niche is to be the manufacturer. For example, Harbor Sweets is going to be the site for buying Harbor Sweets, because they make them. Manufacturers may be the biggest winners on the Internet, especially small manufacturers who have till now been at the mercy of the channel.
Source: Yahoo Business: Choosing the Right Niche
Technorati : niche, products, selling online
1. Work Works
If there is a single secret to selling online, it is to work hard. Hard work is the secret to succeeding in almost anything, but it is especially important on the Web.
It’s true what they say: the Web levels the playing field. A high school can make a better Web site than a large industrial company. On a level playing field, how big you are matters less than how hard you work.
There are millions of consumers out there, but lots of other Web sites are competing for their attention. So you can’t just build an online store and walk away from it. You have to work hard to draw visitors to your site, work hard to create a site that those visitors want to buy from, and work hard to give those buyers such good service that they and their friends will buy again in the future.
So the bad news is that starting a business on the Internet is just like starting any other business: work, work, work. The good news is that it is a lot cheaper.
The Web gives you something that has never existed before in history: an inexpensive sales channel direct to consumers. Before the Web, if you wanted to sell direct to consumers, you either had to build retail stores or do catalog mailings. In either case the entry fee is hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.
On the Web, you can sell direct to consumers worldwide for a hundred dollars a month. You have to work hard to exploit this opportunity. But if you are willing to work hard, you don’t need a lot of money to get started.
Source: Yahoo Business: Work
Technorati : Getting Started Selling Online, Selling Online, Web, Working Hard
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Technorati : driving sunglasses, kids sunglasses, poker sunglasses, polarized sunglasses, replica wholesale sunglasses
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Technorati : Aviators, Ray-Ban, Replica Wholesale Ray Ban Sunglasses, Wayfarers, Wholesale Ray Ban Sunglasses
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Technorati : Aviator Sunglasses, Ray-Ban, Ray-Ban Replica Wholesale Sunglasses, Replica Wholesale Sunglasses, Unisex Sunglasses, Wholesale Sunglasses
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Technorati : Replica Wholesale Sunglasses, Spy, Spy Replica Wholesale Sunglasses, Spy Sunglasses, Sunglasses, Wholesale Sunglasses
