There comes a time in every new industry where the players can’t rely on the hype and land grabbing tactics anymore to ensure easy profits.
I think the online retail industry is definitely well into such a stage now. It’s becoming virtually impossible to build a business around ecommerce alone if you don’t have exclusivity around a product, a territory, or a unique service angle (Zappos) which really sets you apart. Everyone else is left to partner and compete at the same time with the top ecommerce destinations (Amazon, eBay, Shopping.com, Google Shopping, etc.). Some succeed for a while with increasingly convoluted affiliate-type automated marketing schemes. But building a loyal customer following is difficult.
Just like in the brick-and-mortar world when big box stores arrived decades ago, independent retailers have to catch up constantly with the leaders of the retail industry and they have become strangely dependent on them and threatened by them at the same time. They feed their products to Google, Shopping, or eBay, get visits in return but sometimes have to pay for them. Next time the same consumer searches for that product again, where does he go? Google again. So is it time to create better, more unique, more unforgettable ecommerce experiences on small online stores or what? If you don’t believe just ponder the following:
Ok. You get the idea. The ecommerce frontier is not a frontier anymore. Everyone or so has staked their claim. So how do you create opportunity in that kind of an environment? Precisely by forgetting about new territories and investing in what’s already available to you as a retailer: visitors. It’s not enough anymore to invest in SEO, adwords and product feeds. You want visitors in but no visitors out. Abandonment and bounces are your worst enemy. You need visitors in and buyers out. Because buyers come back. Because buyers are now in your customer database. What small retailers need are the same tools used by the largest players: advanced search, merchandising, and analytics to turn more visitors into loyal and satisfied customers, to improve conversion rates and lower customer acquisition costs.
At Exorbyte, we have been helping top retailers with custom solutions for almost 10 years and we now bring the same automated enterprise tools and techniques to small retailers for free or just a small monthly subscription. Come see more at http://commerce.exorbyte.com. Every day or so, I talk to small retailers obsessed with product feeds, upset about paying the high fees charged by shopping.com, Shopzilla, or eBay, worried about Amazon’s or Google’s possible competitive threats to their business. There is only one way forward for them: use these dominant platforms to attract users but then offer them the best web store you can and make sure they leave satisfied so they can come back and buy again. Leave them no chance to leave without the product they came to search or the products they didn’t know you carried. Make product search better, faster, and more intelligent. Automate suggestions based on categories, trends, etc. Make sure you know what users are looking for and hat they are not finding. Learn to know your visitors like you know your neighbors.
To do so, you need much more than what the average ecommerce platform can offer alone. Whether you are using a hosted platform (Yahoo, Volusion, StoresOnline, Nexternal, etc.) or your own installed version of some shopping crt software (Zen Cart, Magento, OS commerce or other), we can help make your search, reporting and merchandising capability state-of-the-art in just under an hour without any complex integration. Come see more at http://commerce.exorbyte.com.
