e-Commerce, ten years of selling stuff on the web
I first got involved in setting up eCommerce businesses in 1995. I was at Entertainment UK and we had decided in our immense wisdom that it was time to try selling Videos (not even DVDs back then) and CDs over the web. Most people hadn’t even heard of Amazon back then! Anyway with a bit of help from Simon Clark (then at Nettec) and a struggle with Barclays online payment processing we made it happen. We were selling stuff on the web, hardly anyone bought anything but we felt we were pioneers.
Now ten years later it’s all much more main-stream. In fact I would say that online retailing has really arrived in the last five years, tens of millions of consumers are taking advantage of the benefits of e-commerce. They buy online for convenience, selection and empowerment and the challenge for merchants is to make it easy and compelling to convert surfers into shoppers and to keep them coming back.
Success in online retailing boils down to getting the customer experience right, this is what drives greater conversion hence more purchases, higher levels of customer satisfaction and the financial results we all strive for. “Our research shows that retailers that offer the right customer experience and do not just think of the bottom line are able to reap the rewards of online retail.” Forrester retail analyst Rebecca Jennings (IT Week)
If you want to find out more you could do worse than checking out the benchmarking report Online Retail 2004 (e-consultancy & sales logiq) which reviews the user experience of UK retail sites in a useful way.
There are other key lessons to be learned for retailers with on offline presence – the bricks and mortar retailers and the catalogue companies. It’s worth keeping in mind that the majority of consumers do their product research online before they purchase offline. This means that in-store, in-catalogue and online marketing and promotions need to integrated to ensure best results.
News Link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/internet/ecommerce/
And http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/
