If you sell products online, you belong to the subset of eCommerce known as eRetail. Whether that means selling your own products through branded eCommerce or selling someone else’s products through dropshipping or some related means, your experience with your customer will be governed almost exclusively by how you can relate to them online.
With so many people choosing products and brand allegiances based on more than just quality or price, you may be surprised to learn that there are numerous ways to increase the appeal of your company going into 2018 and beyond. Let’s take a look at some of them.
Community Building
For customers buying products online, the experience is a solitary and faceless one all too often. This isolation deprives a prospective customer of an opportunity to interact with like-minded consumers, but it also deprives you of the opportunity to enable your ideally-delighted customer to be a fervent brand ambassador for you for free. Furthermore, by fostering an online community, you will likely be privy to customer feedback that can help you refine your product in a meaningful customer-centric way.
You can build a community either through forums or social networks, but the key is to be inviting and inclusive. Nobody wants to hang around on a sterile board. Be sure that you can incorporate images, video, and content moderation. You want to ensure that people in your community are having positive experiences and interactions.
Trust and Safety
The isolated purchasing process has ramifications beyond community isolation. Friction resulting from a customer’s lack of trust can cause shopping cart abandonment and thus lower your engagement as well as your brand’s reputation. You want to show the customer that they are taken care of so that they trust you and feel safe doing business with you. With larger companies, trust and safety is frequently assumed. However, if you are a young eRetail company, you should look into bolstering your T&S stance going into 2018.
Clearly outlining a customer-friendly refund policy is important. Having a clear chain of contact is also helpful. All too often, companies hide behind templated support contact forms. While these are sleek and often characterized by strong ease of use, never underestimate the importance of having a phone number, contact address (especially for returns), and domain-specific email address. These things, coupled with social proof through positive reviews, should help you win your customers’ trust.
In-Store Harmony
Despite the persistent cries to the contrary, brick and mortar stores are not going extinct. In fact, some of the most successful eRetail stores like Warby Parker and Bonobos have actually opened brick and mortar stores. Even if you don’t have a physical outpost, going to trade shows, selling at pop-tents, and promoting your wares at conventions are all important ways of engaging your community and building trust and safety. But they are also a wonderful way to create a true experience amongst your customers.
Especially today, creating a memorable and shareable experience through harmonized design and engaging atmosphere. As Doug Stephens said at the Business of Fashion’s flagship event “VOICES”, “Stores can’t be just about distributing products. They need to be about distributing experiences: less stores, more stories.” Invite your customers to purchase your product offline in certain situations, and enable seamless integration between offline and online purchasers so that your customers are receiving the same emotional and engaging purchasing experience irrespective of their means of purchase.
Niche Outsourcing
The most important relationship in a retail environment is the relationship between your business and your customer. Paradoxically, a fast-growing eRetail company often finds itself unable to attend to its customers due to growing pains. In an attempt to standardize contacts and streamline productivity, various components of business are being outsourced. Customer support, especially first-contact outreach, is increasingly being offshored to skilled virtual assistants. Fulfillment companies that pack and ship a company’s product to their customers are being sought with greater demand.
The great news is that outsourcing these types of components will not only improve relationships with your customers, it will often ultimately save you money. While it’s true that your first goal should be to establish product-market fit, once your business is scaling, it will be to your benefit to outsource any aspect of your business that distracts from your attempts to meaningfully grow and interact with your customers at scale.
Personalization
Data is helpful in understanding macro trends, but if you don’t use it responsibly in such a way that provides greater insight into what your customer truly wants, you aren’t using it to its fullest potential. Every bit of data from the page from which your customers were referred, to the amount of engagement they have on your social sites, to items they have historically added to their cart, to what they’ve purchased, to when they’ve purchased, all the way up through the comments they leave regarding your product can help you better cater to their specific needs.
Every customer is different. It’s time to leverage that data on a personal level to help deliver exactly what they want to them and sell them products that will likely pique their interest at a time when they are likely to be receptive to the offer.
Trends regarding eRetail are essentially an evolution of what we have learned about customers in 2017, which in turn was built upon learnings from previous years. The most apparent shift, however, is that price and quality alone are no longer sufficient to meaningfully differentiate your product. Building an experience-oriented purchase flow, however, could catapult your business to new heights this year.
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