11 steps to a good online store
Instead of an epigraph: the previous overview post on this topic (not mine) here dates back to 2010, and I decided to refresh the topic. If you know the owners of online stores, please show them this article.
Have you already made your own online store, or are you just going, or have you already made dozens of store sites to order? As a regular user of dozens of online stores in Russia, the USA, the UK, Germany, China and Finland, I am very grateful to you: online stores have made my life more convenient, and now it’s easier to order everything I need without leaving home.
Back in 2010, I could not even dream of such an abundance of online stores. And now it is my turn to help those who manage, own or plan to manage an online store: your loyal customer wants your business to flourish, especially during times of crisis.
')
I hoped that I could tell about it if not talentedly, then at least briefly, but my friend AlexanderByndyu , who had read the first version of this text, said that for the good of the matter each section should be made into an independent article, with examples and tips, and I, reluctantly, agreed. Now, I boldly share with him the blame for what you might get tired of reading this, and for someone else - and wait for the next article in the series. Thank you, Sasha!
It will be a question of what happens far from everyone, namely, to sell the goods in such a way that your client feels satisfied. This is important: our idea of ​​what the customer needs is different from what he needs from his point of view.
All articles will be based on real stories of communication with online stores in 2015-2016.
I argue that:
If these hypotheses seem reasonable to you, then reading further makes sense. In this and the following articles I will give examples confirming these hypotheses, but the purpose of the article is not to prove that the hypotheses are correct, but to offer specific ideas for managing the online store so that it remains profitable and has a good reputation.
From my point of view, reputation is the most important asset of any modern business. If the reputation is good, then even a rather unpleasant story can be made without great losses for the business. If the reputation is weak, then even one medium-sized scandal and noise around the store can deprive it of a good half of customers.
An example of the importance of reputation - in the public eye: Yandex. Due to the fact that Yandex consistently defended the interests of its users in the 1990s-2000s, it was constantly useful for them, even from large scandals (such as issuing special services to the security services without giving the court the personal data of those who donated money to Navalny through Yandex.Money) left without significant reputational losses. There is nothing to say about smaller scandals (such as randomly recording everything that is said around, in one of the Yandex.Maps versions for Android), “well, they were mistaken, it never happens” ...
Despite the obvious desire to say that profit is more important, customer satisfaction will tell you better about the success of your business. The trick is that you do not have to work in the negative, but the main goal is more correct to make the satisfaction of the buyer. It is just like in seduction: if you are genuinely interested in a person, it is difficult for him to resist your spell. If a person is not interested in you, but simply no longer with anyone to share a bed today, then you will hardly succeed in seduction.
The buyer initially does not want to make you richer, he wants to make himself better, but he may want to make you richer. For example, if you own a very good car service, everyone will be happy to visit your service. You may have different motivations for buying: from the simple “I want the best service to my car and I am ready to pay for it” to the more far-sighted “I want these guys to always serve me, so I would rather drink coffee them, not in a cafe around the corner, so that they have a profit, even when I don’t need to repair anything. ”
So further we will talk about how to make the buyer satisfied.
At the beginning - about meeting expectations.
Most likely, the person who visited the site of your online store, was on this site is not the first time in my life. In any case, he has some ideas about what to do to buy the right one. The closer your store is to its presentation, the better.
How to find out what a customer has?
Firstly, to be a buyer myself, buy something from competitors, make your store more convenient than them, and then constantly buy something at home in order to continuously control convenience.
Secondly, even when planning a store, you need to glance at industry leaders and take the best from them. For example, ozon.ru on the site recently had the opportunity to select the date and time of delivery, and immediately other shops began to add it.
What is the main expectation of the buyer?
I have this - waiting for a quick purchase of what I need. Throw a stone at me who thinks fundamentally different. If I am far away, you can throw in the screen on which you read this text.
What I categorically do not expect? Here it is, for example (taken from yokot.ru, right from the first page):
I think I need to make a choice, right? A friend told me that he was buying cat food here. And so I came here with the same. Where is the feed? Yeah, it seems, you need to click the "Store" button (I wonder, why on the screen is everything else?)
It didn’t get any easier ... Now I have to tell what city I am in (by the way, in the pop-up hint after the words "Your city", according to the rules of the Russian language, there should be a dash, and the question mark does not need a space). It is also interesting how the hint looks like when you are in a city that is not familiar with the store - for example, on a business trip abroad. That's how:
I was already beginning to get annoyed: this amazing guess, from which city I was, could be put somewhere in a corner and held there until the moment when I asked to deliver the goods to me. If I don’t find it here, I’ll remember not only that the necessary product was not available, but also that before searching for a product I saw some unnecessary screens and pop-up windows.
I understand that in different cities there may be a different state of the warehouse, and maybe I need to show different delivery times depending on my city, but in the case of the pet store I don’t expect it. In fact, if you sell cat food at retail, you do not carry it from France to order? Well, coped with the city.
Now the menu says that I am in St. Petersburg. And why should I then advertise the delivery in Moscow and the region? And the news for Muscovites? Oh, is there another menu here? In the middle of the screen, yes? Under advertising?
Great, now we'll look for the right feed. Fortunately, I remember what it's called: Royal Canine Urinary. That is what is written on the package with food, which I bought a week ago in a store around the corner. Are looking for:
Amazing This is a very famous feed, but it is not here! Okay, look for the product code, the benefit is also on the package: LP34. This is the internal code of the company Royal Canine, it is usually in the description of the goods in any store.
Again no!
Let's try to turn on sophisticated intelligence. Let's call it in Russian: LP34.
Again, no! And so: Urinari? Finally found! And now guess at what stage an ordinary visitor to the store would refuse to search if he were not such a curious experimenter as I?
Question with an asterisk: where did the hyphen appear in the name of the Cyrillic feed if in the original it says “LP 34” (see, for example, this proof )?
If I didn’t know for sure that the goods I needed in the store are there, I would go to look for it in another store immediately after the first failure with the search. Why is the search in this store so strange? I don’t know for sure: it’s possible that the developer of the store or its owner, or the manager themselves are always looking for products through the catalog, and not in the search, maybe the store wasn’t tested well enough, and maybe they decided that this problem would not affect so many customers, and they are not sorry to lose.
In any case, if you deliberately deceive the expectations of some potential buyers, you need to check regularly (once a month at least) if the percentage of the deceived has not changed: what if they are getting bigger and you have already started to lose a more noticeable piece of income?
For example, if two years ago in St. Petersburg it was natural to wait for a taxi for 20-30 minutes, but now, in 2016, after the arrival of the companies Uber and Taksovichkof, more and more people believe that a taxi should arrive 5 minutes after the call.
I repeat: a very good way to do what the buyer expects from you is to play the buyer yourself and ask your friends to play, and the more different your friends are, the better. However, it is better to play with those who can actually be the buyer of your goods. Those. if you sell toys for small children, and all friends have children already participating in the university, then it makes no sense to play with friends like this: they are not real buyers.
The next way is to take an example, but this is fraught with strange effects.
On the one hand, everything on the site should be similar to the best examples in the industry, for example, “Ozone”: search, tips “and still buy it”, simple payment, choice of delivery time, simple and fast delivery at a time that you promised.
On the other hand, industry leaders sometimes make rather gross mistakes that need not be repeated.
For example, on ozon.ru in the fall of 2015, it was possible to order goods that some Nika LLC actually sold through the Ozone showcase. When buying goods turned out to be in different baskets - Ozon and Nikov, and these baskets had to not only be paid separately, but the delivery conditions were different; moreover, Nika LLC sometimes refused to deliver the goods, arguing that they only sell some goods in bulk (which is not mentioned anywhere on the site).
Here we formulate an important rule: the store must always be responsible for what it sells and promises. If you aggregate the offers of many stores, you will have to force these stores to work according to general rules, which should be clearly visible on the page where the buyer decides on the product. Something like Amazon does (alas, in the search and it can give out a cloud of goods that can not be delivered to your country, which is very annoying).
Let us try to imagine how it would be possible to fix the website yokot.ru in order to satisfy at least the most severely deceived expectations:
1) When you enter the site immediately opens a storefront online store
2) The guess about the city is done quietly, without the active participation of the buyer, and the city is reflected somewhere in the left corner, in the tradition of a decent store, and by clicking on the city, a list falls out from which you can choose another city.
3) The content of advertising depends on the city and takes up minimal space, or advertising in general appears just before the order in the basket, so that the buyer can add something else to the basket.
4) The search has been significantly improved, so that it can be easily searched both by name in Latin letters and by possible keywords in Russian.
Examples will be in the following article, but speaking about expectations in general, it should be noted that the client on the Internet usually waits:
1) Exactly three delivery methods - courier, pickup, mail (pickup can be from your warehouse, and from an intermediate point of delivery).
2) At least two methods of payment - cash to the courier, by credit card on the site.
3) The minimum effort of the buyer to receive the order (no "we deliver only from 11 to 17", "call the ten-digit order number to the courier" and "personally present the passport and bank card, which you paid").
I will be very grateful for the questions, as well as for feedback on the manner in which the article about this would like to continue to read the owners of online stores. In the next article - about why it is important that the online store was simple, and how to do it.
Thank!
Have you already made your own online store, or are you just going, or have you already made dozens of store sites to order? As a regular user of dozens of online stores in Russia, the USA, the UK, Germany, China and Finland, I am very grateful to you: online stores have made my life more convenient, and now it’s easier to order everything I need without leaving home.
Back in 2010, I could not even dream of such an abundance of online stores. And now it is my turn to help those who manage, own or plan to manage an online store: your loyal customer wants your business to flourish, especially during times of crisis.
')
I hoped that I could tell about it if not talentedly, then at least briefly, but my friend AlexanderByndyu , who had read the first version of this text, said that for the good of the matter each section should be made into an independent article, with examples and tips, and I, reluctantly, agreed. Now, I boldly share with him the blame for what you might get tired of reading this, and for someone else - and wait for the next article in the series. Thank you, Sasha!
It will be a question of what happens far from everyone, namely, to sell the goods in such a way that your client feels satisfied. This is important: our idea of ​​what the customer needs is different from what he needs from his point of view.
All articles will be based on real stories of communication with online stores in 2015-2016.
Key hypotheses
I argue that:
- The success of the business, the further, the stronger will depend on whether the goal of the business is to improve the quality of life of the client. This concept is already 20 years old in the treatment of patients in developed countries, the rest of the countries and industries will follow the same path.
- The task of advertising is to make a good choice of the target group, and not to deceive a potential buyer.
- The success of a business depends to a large extent on whether the business meets the client’s expectations. If the offer of a single player on the market has become the de facto standard, everyone else will have to pull up. Examples: Gmail (mail in the cloud), Uber (payment on an attached card, car feed in 5 minutes).
If these hypotheses seem reasonable to you, then reading further makes sense. In this and the following articles I will give examples confirming these hypotheses, but the purpose of the article is not to prove that the hypotheses are correct, but to offer specific ideas for managing the online store so that it remains profitable and has a good reputation.
Reputation
From my point of view, reputation is the most important asset of any modern business. If the reputation is good, then even a rather unpleasant story can be made without great losses for the business. If the reputation is weak, then even one medium-sized scandal and noise around the store can deprive it of a good half of customers.
An example of the importance of reputation - in the public eye: Yandex. Due to the fact that Yandex consistently defended the interests of its users in the 1990s-2000s, it was constantly useful for them, even from large scandals (such as issuing special services to the security services without giving the court the personal data of those who donated money to Navalny through Yandex.Money) left without significant reputational losses. There is nothing to say about smaller scandals (such as randomly recording everything that is said around, in one of the Yandex.Maps versions for Android), “well, they were mistaken, it never happens” ...
What is more important - profit or customer satisfaction?
Despite the obvious desire to say that profit is more important, customer satisfaction will tell you better about the success of your business. The trick is that you do not have to work in the negative, but the main goal is more correct to make the satisfaction of the buyer. It is just like in seduction: if you are genuinely interested in a person, it is difficult for him to resist your spell. If a person is not interested in you, but simply no longer with anyone to share a bed today, then you will hardly succeed in seduction.
The buyer initially does not want to make you richer, he wants to make himself better, but he may want to make you richer. For example, if you own a very good car service, everyone will be happy to visit your service. You may have different motivations for buying: from the simple “I want the best service to my car and I am ready to pay for it” to the more far-sighted “I want these guys to always serve me, so I would rather drink coffee them, not in a cafe around the corner, so that they have a profit, even when I don’t need to repair anything. ”
So further we will talk about how to make the buyer satisfied.
At the beginning - about meeting expectations.
Step 1. Meet your expectations.
Most likely, the person who visited the site of your online store, was on this site is not the first time in my life. In any case, he has some ideas about what to do to buy the right one. The closer your store is to its presentation, the better.
How to find out what a customer has?
Firstly, to be a buyer myself, buy something from competitors, make your store more convenient than them, and then constantly buy something at home in order to continuously control convenience.
Secondly, even when planning a store, you need to glance at industry leaders and take the best from them. For example, ozon.ru on the site recently had the opportunity to select the date and time of delivery, and immediately other shops began to add it.
What is the main expectation of the buyer?
I have this - waiting for a quick purchase of what I need. Throw a stone at me who thinks fundamentally different. If I am far away, you can throw in the screen on which you read this text.
What I categorically do not expect? Here it is, for example (taken from yokot.ru, right from the first page):
I think I need to make a choice, right? A friend told me that he was buying cat food here. And so I came here with the same. Where is the feed? Yeah, it seems, you need to click the "Store" button (I wonder, why on the screen is everything else?)
It didn’t get any easier ... Now I have to tell what city I am in (by the way, in the pop-up hint after the words "Your city", according to the rules of the Russian language, there should be a dash, and the question mark does not need a space). It is also interesting how the hint looks like when you are in a city that is not familiar with the store - for example, on a business trip abroad. That's how:
I was already beginning to get annoyed: this amazing guess, from which city I was, could be put somewhere in a corner and held there until the moment when I asked to deliver the goods to me. If I don’t find it here, I’ll remember not only that the necessary product was not available, but also that before searching for a product I saw some unnecessary screens and pop-up windows.
I understand that in different cities there may be a different state of the warehouse, and maybe I need to show different delivery times depending on my city, but in the case of the pet store I don’t expect it. In fact, if you sell cat food at retail, you do not carry it from France to order? Well, coped with the city.
Now the menu says that I am in St. Petersburg. And why should I then advertise the delivery in Moscow and the region? And the news for Muscovites? Oh, is there another menu here? In the middle of the screen, yes? Under advertising?
Great, now we'll look for the right feed. Fortunately, I remember what it's called: Royal Canine Urinary. That is what is written on the package with food, which I bought a week ago in a store around the corner. Are looking for:
Amazing This is a very famous feed, but it is not here! Okay, look for the product code, the benefit is also on the package: LP34. This is the internal code of the company Royal Canine, it is usually in the description of the goods in any store.
Again no!
Let's try to turn on sophisticated intelligence. Let's call it in Russian: LP34.
Again, no! And so: Urinari? Finally found! And now guess at what stage an ordinary visitor to the store would refuse to search if he were not such a curious experimenter as I?
Question with an asterisk: where did the hyphen appear in the name of the Cyrillic feed if in the original it says “LP 34” (see, for example, this proof )?
How does a store lose money on deceived expectations?
If I didn’t know for sure that the goods I needed in the store are there, I would go to look for it in another store immediately after the first failure with the search. Why is the search in this store so strange? I don’t know for sure: it’s possible that the developer of the store or its owner, or the manager themselves are always looking for products through the catalog, and not in the search, maybe the store wasn’t tested well enough, and maybe they decided that this problem would not affect so many customers, and they are not sorry to lose.
In any case, if you deliberately deceive the expectations of some potential buyers, you need to check regularly (once a month at least) if the percentage of the deceived has not changed: what if they are getting bigger and you have already started to lose a more noticeable piece of income?
For example, if two years ago in St. Petersburg it was natural to wait for a taxi for 20-30 minutes, but now, in 2016, after the arrival of the companies Uber and Taksovichkof, more and more people believe that a taxi should arrive 5 minutes after the call.
Work on the bugs. How to meet expectations
I repeat: a very good way to do what the buyer expects from you is to play the buyer yourself and ask your friends to play, and the more different your friends are, the better. However, it is better to play with those who can actually be the buyer of your goods. Those. if you sell toys for small children, and all friends have children already participating in the university, then it makes no sense to play with friends like this: they are not real buyers.
The next way is to take an example, but this is fraught with strange effects.
On the one hand, everything on the site should be similar to the best examples in the industry, for example, “Ozone”: search, tips “and still buy it”, simple payment, choice of delivery time, simple and fast delivery at a time that you promised.
On the other hand, industry leaders sometimes make rather gross mistakes that need not be repeated.
An example of industry leaders
For example, on ozon.ru in the fall of 2015, it was possible to order goods that some Nika LLC actually sold through the Ozone showcase. When buying goods turned out to be in different baskets - Ozon and Nikov, and these baskets had to not only be paid separately, but the delivery conditions were different; moreover, Nika LLC sometimes refused to deliver the goods, arguing that they only sell some goods in bulk (which is not mentioned anywhere on the site).
Here we formulate an important rule: the store must always be responsible for what it sells and promises. If you aggregate the offers of many stores, you will have to force these stores to work according to general rules, which should be clearly visible on the page where the buyer decides on the product. Something like Amazon does (alas, in the search and it can give out a cloud of goods that can not be delivered to your country, which is very annoying).
Turning the shop into candy
Let us try to imagine how it would be possible to fix the website yokot.ru in order to satisfy at least the most severely deceived expectations:
1) When you enter the site immediately opens a storefront online store
2) The guess about the city is done quietly, without the active participation of the buyer, and the city is reflected somewhere in the left corner, in the tradition of a decent store, and by clicking on the city, a list falls out from which you can choose another city.
3) The content of advertising depends on the city and takes up minimal space, or advertising in general appears just before the order in the basket, so that the buyer can add something else to the basket.
4) The search has been significantly improved, so that it can be easily searched both by name in Latin letters and by possible keywords in Russian.
What is supposed to always
Examples will be in the following article, but speaking about expectations in general, it should be noted that the client on the Internet usually waits:
1) Exactly three delivery methods - courier, pickup, mail (pickup can be from your warehouse, and from an intermediate point of delivery).
2) At least two methods of payment - cash to the courier, by credit card on the site.
3) The minimum effort of the buyer to receive the order (no "we deliver only from 11 to 17", "call the ten-digit order number to the courier" and "personally present the passport and bank card, which you paid").
Thank you for reading!
I will be very grateful for the questions, as well as for feedback on the manner in which the article about this would like to continue to read the owners of online stores. In the next article - about why it is important that the online store was simple, and how to do it.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/299518/
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