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Every kind and size of business has experienced teething troubles at best and full-scale
meltdowns at worst, when it comes to Ecommerce success.
And yet - economic recession notwithstanding - most thoughtful
people agree that internet sales will continue to grow at the expense
of traditional bricks and mortar stores. The rate of growth may slow
temporarily, and there may be shakeouts in some sectors, but the
general trend is for more Ecommerce, not less. The internet technology,
logistics and financial systems are all in place, and there continues
to be spare capacity for growth in the shape of a massive buying public
which has not yet embraced the web store.
So companies of all sizes will continue to move into Ecommerce, or
expand their presence. Why then have so many business people found it
so darn difficult to get a web store up and running and trading
successfully? Here's what we think is going on...
1. There are internet brands and then there are high street brands that go onto the internet. The strategies are usually different in some interesting (and potentially expensive) ways
2. Selling on the internet is all about knowing your business in
detail. The structure of your product lines and the inter-relationships
between them is the structure of your Ecommerce shop
3. You should understand how to get people into your web shop. This is about so much more than ‘search engine optimisation’
4. You should understand how to increase the likelihood that your customer will buy once he or she is there
5. Helping your customer to pay for their goods is always a good idea. The pitfalls are many and various
6. All the preceding points inform and to an extent specify the
web site’s design criteria – they are not after-thoughts or add-ons
(unless you like to spend money on constant overhauls of your design
foundations)
7. The likelihood of employing a single individual – or even a
single team of individuals – who really can execute on all the detail
referred to above is practically non-existent
8. Having assembled a competent team or teams, the chances that they will actually care enough about your business to make it a success
– which is really what is needed – are infinitesimally small: not
because people are bad or lazy, but because there is a mismatch between
their abilities and their motivation.
I’ll leave it there for now – it’s some food for thought. I will be
following up with a series of articles on each of the eight issues I’ve
mentioned...
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