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E-commerce Lesson - Holes in the Bucket

Take a moment to envision your online business as a bucket. 

You fill the bucket with two types of customers - potential customers (leads or prospects) and repeat customers.  But not all these “customers” purchase from you every time (if they do, let me know…I want to invest!), so there are holes in your bucket. 

So, here are some hard facts.  Every day your business is losing sales.  You are letting customers leak out from the bucket.  Sometimes these customers find you again and sometimes your competition finds them. 

In fact, if your business is like most businesses, you already have MANY holes in the bucket.  Some small holes (or cracks in the bucket) cause only several customers per day to funnel out.  And some holes are the size of the Lincoln Tunnel leading customers escape every day never to come back again.  Bye Bye!

Let’s explore these two types of holes for online retailers.

The small holes in your bucket are often unknown or not discussed in your day-to-day business.  Often they are not measured, so they are easy to miss.  Luckily, these are easiest to fix too.

For example, small bucket holes for online stores include:

• Incomplete Product Copy – are you missing critical benefits or features in your product descriptions
• Confusing Shipping Expectations – do you effectively manage a customer’s expectations as to when they will receive their order?
• Poor Customer Service – how long does it take to get back to a customer when she contacts you?  How long is the wait time when a customer calls into your company?  How is the quality of customer service responses to customer questions?

The small holes in the bucket are usually easy to fix by anyone…read: business users.  There is no need for fancy technology or the latest marketing technique.  Rather, constant improvement to the quality of customer experiences with you.

• Listening to customer feedback
• Talking to customers (polling or picking up the phone)
• Completing competitive analysis get inspired by your competitors
• Analyzing clickstream data for your online store

Bottom line:
Too many business owners make the mistake of overlooking these small holes in the bucket!

Now for the BIG holes in the bucket!

These are impeding your business SIGNIFICANT amounts of revenue and bottom link profits.  These BIG holes vary from business to business but here are some common offenders.

• Poorly Designed Online Store – I could spend a day’s seminar on this subject, but here is the bottom line – it is critical that your online store is structured both visually and with an appropriately named product hierarchy. Nothing will hurt your business more than a poorly designed store where customers get confused by your design.
• Bad Site Search – this is an often overlooked component for online stores.  There are two types of shopping done on online stores – browsing through navigation and search (for targeting shopping). Search is often used by customers who are looking for something specific.  If you have it, make sure to display the best results for that search.  If you have it and the search results are not well-merchandised, you are leaving MUCHO money on the table.  If you don’t have it, maybe you should.  Site search is critical to online stores.
• Lack of Social Proof – does your online store give the sense that anyone else has ever shopped there before?  Do you have testimonials or product reviews? Amazon.com is well-known for being an incredible resource of details and useful customer reviews.  Also, if you are a small mom-and-pop retailer, you’ll want to help build trust with visitors to your site.  Why should someone buy from you?  Is there something special they should know?
• There are plenty more…

Where do I start to fix the holes in your bucket?

This is a common question for online retailers.  I am currently developing a a step-by-step program to help you get started called the OnlineStoreCoach.com™ INNER CIRCLE.  (Shameless plug, I know)

If you have holes in your bucket, you’ll want to join.  To be the first to know about this program, sign up for my free email newsletter.  Plus, you get some of my favorite tips and tricks, proven strategies and more right into your inbox.

Filling the bucket.
David