11 steps to a good online store. Warehouse and payment
UPD: added about mobile POS-terminals for couriers, thanks aalebedev .
This is the third article in the 11 Steps to a Good Online Store series. If you are interested in what was in the first two, see:
Article 1. Meet the expectations.
Article 2. Make the site simple.
Today we will discuss with examples how a current warehouse and payment by card brings you more money and what should be avoided.
In any business there is no magic pill that you ate - and it immediately went like clockwork. Everything that we are discussing here helps to reduce costs and create a desire in the customer to come to your store again. However, the only way to make sure that all this works is to put yourself in the buyer's place and buy goods in your store. More on this was in the first article .
Show current stock. No product - do not show it. Available by pre-order only? So write! For example, on the M-Video website, the green lines in the “Availability” column are not related to the current state of the warehouse; the update occurs approximately once a day. This is terribly rare for a store where they buy something every minute! To guarantee the receipt of goods in a particular store in the M-Video network, according to the site is impossible: you need to call in the All-Russian support, and there they will try to understand if the goods are in a store in your city.
')
And this is what results from the demonstration on the website of the wrong amount of goods that you actually have: the client gets into unpleasant situations and writes reviews about them. Here, for example, my real review about the purchase in M-Video is on Yandex.Market, sorry, you can not put a link to a specific review there:
In fairness, we note that Apple TV was finally given to me, but this is how M-Video lost money in this situation:
1) Contact center operators spent more than half an hour on long-distance calls with a client (and received a salary during this time); and the work of the operators consisted in checking the status of the order and convincing the customer that waiting for confirmation of the order for 26 hours is normal (which is completely contrary to the “ meet expectations ” rule).
2) M-Video store sales director spent about half an hour reading a review on Yandex.Market, checking on it, writing a response and calling the customer to agree on compensation. And I received a salary during this time.
3) The store employees lost about a man-hour to explain to the customer the unobvious rules in their shop and to issue additional documents when they were compensated. And received a salary for it (and, perhaps, did not have time to offer a new purchase to other customers on the trading floor, as they were busy).
It was all about the costs that can be avoided if you show the status of the warehouse at the time of viewing the site by the client. And what direct losses does the store incur?
Firstly, the client cannot buy goods that you actually already have in stock, and this is not yet written on the website. If you sell nails piece by piece for 3,000 rubles per month, the reduction in the rate of money turnover is not important for you, and if you trade in expensive goods without a large commodity credit (say, smartphones), then there is no batch of goods on the site today, especially in the period when they are bought more actively than usual, before the holidays, for example, they can deprive you of tangible money. After all, after the holidays so many people will not come to your store!
Secondly, a disgruntled customer will think that he was deceived (if he tried to buy goods allegedly in stock, but could not), he will avoid your store, and at the same time he will also write to Yandex.Market and about Habr about his feelings (and the store will come a few people smaller than it could). And if he is very angry, then he is also in Rospotrebnadzor, and in other instances, which is usually completely harmless for the store, but may serve as an extra reason for some kind of verification, which will end in a waste of time for managers and accountants.
Thirdly, the store spends money on advertising, and the actual response from advertising will be less if, in parallel with advertising on the store on the Internet, there are a lot of negative reviews from evil customers, and honest, not customized reviews. If you pay for advertising, you get a reasonable CTR (click-through rate), but clicks are not converted into purchases with the desired frequency, it is possible that the store simply goes bad fame (including offline) - through negative feedback from word of mouth ).
Try to see how Ulmart works. They have something to scold them for, but they show the condition of the warehouse on the site excellently. How to achieve this? If you have no one to ask in Yulmart, just watch their website, go to their store and make sure that they use their website to order goods in the store!
Compare this with the order, for example, in M-Video, where in the store the sellers have some kind of program installed that shows not the same thing as the site.
The same Yulmart website will tell you that if your client has put the goods in the basket but has not yet paid for them, the goods can be transferred to the “in reserve” state and explicitly set the time that the goods can lie in the basket without payment. At Yulmart this is one day, and some sites for the sale of tickets (for a train, to the theater, etc.) require paying for the ticket even faster - within 20-30 minutes.
Payment must be available in the online store. The only case where you can do without it is if you are 100% sure that all your clients pay only in cash, and you want only such people to be your clients.
Remember: when you refuse any necessary functionality of an online store (it doesn’t matter what it is), you lose customers. Yes, some of them can be unpleasant, they can buy goods that do not bring you profit, they can demand delivery, which is unprofitable for you. However, it is not their fault, but your miscalculation. I myself used to miscalculate, promising delivery to Tyumen from St. Petersburg in a week, and then the delivery men let me down because they had some kind of malfunction.
If you rightly decided that your site should be able to pay with a card, then this process should be made as simple and convenient as possible. Now on many sites I see integration with Yandex.Money when paying with a card (namely, a card, and not from a Yandex.Money wallet), and for convenience they successfully compete with Assist and Robokassa, two other popular payment operators.
I fully agree with the comment to my first article: the price of the goods must be the same regardless of how the customer pays for it. Yes, you need to set a maximum price. Yes, this means that when you pay in cash, you will get more money in your hands than when you pay with a card. Do I need to know about this buyer? No, because he does not care.
What to do if hungry and angry buyers go near your store who wants to buy your product 10% cheaper than it sells because of the appetites of banks, payment aggregators and other intermediaries between the buyer and you? To be honest, I would have done another store. You would have two stores with a common warehouse, but one store is for people who pay with a card more important than buying cheap.
UPD: One more thing: should POS-terminals be given to couriers so that they can accept payment by cards? In my opinion, it is quite difficult for the store (terminals are expensive, you have to either buy them, which is economically meaningless, or rent from the bank, which is not always profitable either), the courier can lose them or accidentally break, the terminal can be stolen from the courier, in short, a lot of trouble. Surely also adds reporting. A client, as a rule, is easier to pay with a card in advance via the Internet.
Of those services on the Internet that I had to use, mobile POS-terminals were with a courier of a store (I even forgot what, you see - the terminal does not affect the brand's memorability) and Helix nurse (taking tests at home) . In both cases, I would be quite satisfied to pay the order by card on the site. Again, as aalebedev writes in the comments, the terminal may freeze and therefore lose its meaning (and the batteries must also be replaced on time).
I am sure that some of the people who read these lines think that the author is a jammed and slightly sbrendivy resident of the megalopolis, who has lost the habit of holding cash in their hands, and life behind the KAD is simpler. However, there are still many megacities behind the KAD in Russia, and I will simply list those categories of buyers who might be more advantageous to pay with a card than with cash:
1) Those who pay by credit card (not debit). Cash in your pocket is over, the crisis, and your product is ready to buy a person on credit. Maybe his Alfa-bank credit card has remained from good times, and according to her he has 100 days of grace period to repay a loan without interest.
2) Those who buy something relatively expensive and do not want to keep this amount in cash. Yes, imagine, there are lonely pensioners who find it unpleasant to let the courier into the house and give him 30-50 thousand for something in cash. Suddenly the courier will be unclean and run away with this money?
3) Those who order goods not for themselves, but for relatives or friends: then the payer may have funds on the card that the recipient simply does not have, and the payer does not even want to tell the recipient how much the goods cost.
4) Those who now have this money on the card, but by the time they receive the goods they may not be in cash (for example, I order from a business trip children's toys delivered to my home because I return on the night of the child’s birthday and just I do not have time to withdraw money from an ATM and meet a courier).
I am sure that you yourself can come up with many more even more exotic scenarios in which the inability to pay with a card makes no sense to buy at the store, regardless of the attractiveness of the price.
Meet the expectations.
Make the site simple.
Show current stock.
Allow customers to pay by card.
In the next article - one of the main steps: talking about customer segmentation - in response to the fact that all people are different and want different things. Spoiler: not everyone wants " here, now, to deliver for free, and what would the price be with a surcharge of 2, this is not much, 1 kopeck ."
Steps 3 and 4. Show the current stock. Accept cards
This is the third article in the 11 Steps to a Good Online Store series. If you are interested in what was in the first two, see:
Article 1. Meet the expectations.
Article 2. Make the site simple.
Today we will discuss with examples how a current warehouse and payment by card brings you more money and what should be avoided.
In any business there is no magic pill that you ate - and it immediately went like clockwork. Everything that we are discussing here helps to reduce costs and create a desire in the customer to come to your store again. However, the only way to make sure that all this works is to put yourself in the buyer's place and buy goods in your store. More on this was in the first article .
Current warehouse
Show current stock. No product - do not show it. Available by pre-order only? So write! For example, on the M-Video website, the green lines in the “Availability” column are not related to the current state of the warehouse; the update occurs approximately once a day. This is terribly rare for a store where they buy something every minute! To guarantee the receipt of goods in a particular store in the M-Video network, according to the site is impossible: you need to call in the All-Russian support, and there they will try to understand if the goods are in a store in your city.
')
And this is what results from the demonstration on the website of the wrong amount of goods that you actually have: the client gets into unpleasant situations and writes reviews about them. Here, for example, my real review about the purchase in M-Video is on Yandex.Market, sorry, you can not put a link to a specific review there:
Comment:
I ordered an iPad during the campaign “buy an iPad - get Apple TV for free”. Order 4184108.
1. The site indicates that the goods are in stock at the M-Video store near the house. At the same time, it is impossible to buy this particular product online. I come to the store - there is no product: “We have the site database updated once a day. Probably bought already. "
2. Order this product with delivery can not be for any money, either home or in the store M-Video near the house.
3. I order goods on the site, you can order only with self-pickup from the M-Video store from the other end of the city. Notification of the order does not come, I call to support, they say, we must wait for the notification.
4. Order cannot be paid online: this product is paid only in the store. WHY?
5. After 1.5 hours notice: "Order accepted." I call in support, they say that it is too early to go to pick up the order, you have to wait for the SMS “The order is ready for issue”.
6. After 26 hours (!!!) comes SMS. All this time I am at a loss: have my goods been bought (he hasn’t been paid for yet, through the fault of M-Video), do I have to run to look for this product somewhere else?
7. I come to the store. I pay, take out the box, pick up the goods, ask: I’ve been buying the goods from the stock, isn’t I also supposed to have Apple TV? They say: no, it is not necessary. It was necessary to specify when ordering that you also need an Apple TV.
Well, WHERE I can know that in M-Video there are such rules of shares, that I have to put the goods on the site in the basket, which for the stock are ATTACHED to the purchase ?!
Well, I say, and what should I do to get Apple TV for the promotion? Answer: "We must return this product and order it again, together with Apple TV." And I almost started to do it. I ask:
- And here I was paying on the card. At the same card money will be returned a few days.
- Yes, - they answer, - indeed it is.
- And how can I now order the same product, I still have as much money on the card?
- Yes - they say - no way.
So no Apple TV was given to me, of course. Result: it would be better to be silent about such actions: they promised good, how to get it - they did not explain.
In fairness, we note that Apple TV was finally given to me, but this is how M-Video lost money in this situation:
As the store loses money, showing the state of the warehouse for yesterday
1) Contact center operators spent more than half an hour on long-distance calls with a client (and received a salary during this time); and the work of the operators consisted in checking the status of the order and convincing the customer that waiting for confirmation of the order for 26 hours is normal (which is completely contrary to the “ meet expectations ” rule).
2) M-Video store sales director spent about half an hour reading a review on Yandex.Market, checking on it, writing a response and calling the customer to agree on compensation. And I received a salary during this time.
3) The store employees lost about a man-hour to explain to the customer the unobvious rules in their shop and to issue additional documents when they were compensated. And received a salary for it (and, perhaps, did not have time to offer a new purchase to other customers on the trading floor, as they were busy).
It was all about the costs that can be avoided if you show the status of the warehouse at the time of viewing the site by the client. And what direct losses does the store incur?
Firstly, the client cannot buy goods that you actually already have in stock, and this is not yet written on the website. If you sell nails piece by piece for 3,000 rubles per month, the reduction in the rate of money turnover is not important for you, and if you trade in expensive goods without a large commodity credit (say, smartphones), then there is no batch of goods on the site today, especially in the period when they are bought more actively than usual, before the holidays, for example, they can deprive you of tangible money. After all, after the holidays so many people will not come to your store!
Secondly, a disgruntled customer will think that he was deceived (if he tried to buy goods allegedly in stock, but could not), he will avoid your store, and at the same time he will also write to Yandex.Market and about Habr about his feelings (and the store will come a few people smaller than it could). And if he is very angry, then he is also in Rospotrebnadzor, and in other instances, which is usually completely harmless for the store, but may serve as an extra reason for some kind of verification, which will end in a waste of time for managers and accountants.
Thirdly, the store spends money on advertising, and the actual response from advertising will be less if, in parallel with advertising on the store on the Internet, there are a lot of negative reviews from evil customers, and honest, not customized reviews. If you pay for advertising, you get a reasonable CTR (click-through rate), but clicks are not converted into purchases with the desired frequency, it is possible that the store simply goes bad fame (including offline) - through negative feedback from word of mouth ).
How can I show the fair condition of the warehouse?
Try to see how Ulmart works. They have something to scold them for, but they show the condition of the warehouse on the site excellently. How to achieve this? If you have no one to ask in Yulmart, just watch their website, go to their store and make sure that they use their website to order goods in the store!
Compare this with the order, for example, in M-Video, where in the store the sellers have some kind of program installed that shows not the same thing as the site.
The same Yulmart website will tell you that if your client has put the goods in the basket but has not yet paid for them, the goods can be transferred to the “in reserve” state and explicitly set the time that the goods can lie in the basket without payment. At Yulmart this is one day, and some sites for the sale of tickets (for a train, to the theater, etc.) require paying for the ticket even faster - within 20-30 minutes.
Payment by cards
Payment must be available in the online store. The only case where you can do without it is if you are 100% sure that all your clients pay only in cash, and you want only such people to be your clients.
Remember: when you refuse any necessary functionality of an online store (it doesn’t matter what it is), you lose customers. Yes, some of them can be unpleasant, they can buy goods that do not bring you profit, they can demand delivery, which is unprofitable for you. However, it is not their fault, but your miscalculation. I myself used to miscalculate, promising delivery to Tyumen from St. Petersburg in a week, and then the delivery men let me down because they had some kind of malfunction.
If you rightly decided that your site should be able to pay with a card, then this process should be made as simple and convenient as possible. Now on many sites I see integration with Yandex.Money when paying with a card (namely, a card, and not from a Yandex.Money wallet), and for convenience they successfully compete with Assist and Robokassa, two other popular payment operators.
I fully agree with the comment to my first article: the price of the goods must be the same regardless of how the customer pays for it. Yes, you need to set a maximum price. Yes, this means that when you pay in cash, you will get more money in your hands than when you pay with a card. Do I need to know about this buyer? No, because he does not care.
What to do if hungry and angry buyers go near your store who wants to buy your product 10% cheaper than it sells because of the appetites of banks, payment aggregators and other intermediaries between the buyer and you? To be honest, I would have done another store. You would have two stores with a common warehouse, but one store is for people who pay with a card more important than buying cheap.
UPD: One more thing: should POS-terminals be given to couriers so that they can accept payment by cards? In my opinion, it is quite difficult for the store (terminals are expensive, you have to either buy them, which is economically meaningless, or rent from the bank, which is not always profitable either), the courier can lose them or accidentally break, the terminal can be stolen from the courier, in short, a lot of trouble. Surely also adds reporting. A client, as a rule, is easier to pay with a card in advance via the Internet.
Of those services on the Internet that I had to use, mobile POS-terminals were with a courier of a store (I even forgot what, you see - the terminal does not affect the brand's memorability) and Helix nurse (taking tests at home) . In both cases, I would be quite satisfied to pay the order by card on the site. Again, as aalebedev writes in the comments, the terminal may freeze and therefore lose its meaning (and the batteries must also be replaced on time).
Who are these strange people?
I am sure that some of the people who read these lines think that the author is a jammed and slightly sbrendivy resident of the megalopolis, who has lost the habit of holding cash in their hands, and life behind the KAD is simpler. However, there are still many megacities behind the KAD in Russia, and I will simply list those categories of buyers who might be more advantageous to pay with a card than with cash:
1) Those who pay by credit card (not debit). Cash in your pocket is over, the crisis, and your product is ready to buy a person on credit. Maybe his Alfa-bank credit card has remained from good times, and according to her he has 100 days of grace period to repay a loan without interest.
2) Those who buy something relatively expensive and do not want to keep this amount in cash. Yes, imagine, there are lonely pensioners who find it unpleasant to let the courier into the house and give him 30-50 thousand for something in cash. Suddenly the courier will be unclean and run away with this money?
3) Those who order goods not for themselves, but for relatives or friends: then the payer may have funds on the card that the recipient simply does not have, and the payer does not even want to tell the recipient how much the goods cost.
4) Those who now have this money on the card, but by the time they receive the goods they may not be in cash (for example, I order from a business trip children's toys delivered to my home because I return on the night of the child’s birthday and just I do not have time to withdraw money from an ATM and meet a courier).
I am sure that you yourself can come up with many more even more exotic scenarios in which the inability to pay with a card makes no sense to buy at the store, regardless of the attractiveness of the price.
Summary of previous and today's articles
Meet the expectations.
Make the site simple.
Show current stock.
Allow customers to pay by card.
Thank you for reading!
In the next article - one of the main steps: talking about customer segmentation - in response to the fact that all people are different and want different things. Spoiler: not everyone wants " here, now, to deliver for free, and what would the price be with a surcharge of 2, this is not much, 1 kopeck ."
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/299830/
All Articles