11 steps to a good online store. Segment Offer
This is the fourth article in the 11 Steps to a Good Online Store series. Here is the previous one (ibid - a link to the others).
For offline trading, segmentation of offers is a long-time trivial move. The same holding owns Pyaterochka and Carousel, Pyaterochka is positioned as an affordable store for thrifty people, and Roundabout as a more fashionable store for the more affluent. Accordingly, comfortable parking and spacious shopping halls are more important for the Carousel, and for Pyaterochka - within walking distance of residential areas. At the same time, the goods in Pyaterochka and in Karusel are about the same, and prices, of course, are different.
If this works well for offline stores, why not try the same approach on the Internet? Here is a typical online store for an audience that I don’t find at all:
')
First of all, the trouble with the site of this store is that the news in April tells about the mode of operation during the New Year holidays, which makes one fear that the store has simply been closed and the site was left in the state it was six months ago.
The page says that cards are not accepted here (at all), and it is emphasized that delivery is chargeable. If the first is completely at odds with the user's expectations (see previous article ), then the second is obvious for most buyers.
Other pages are no better: they tell, for example, what a basket is, which creates a feeling of a terrible lagging behind life. In the 1990s, the term “basket” as applied to an online store might not be known to everyone, but now almost everyone is well aware of the meaning of the word.
On the other hand, I will be glad if it turns out that marketzoo.ru is an example of a good segmentation of the offer, and the same owner with the same warehouse of goods also owns some store, conventionally, zoomarket.ru, which accepts cards and on the site of which they don’t tell anything relevant as of six months, a year or even twenty years ago.
Good knowledge of your audience - the key to the proper segmentation of the proposal. In a large city, it is logical to offer courier delivery: for example, the izikei.ru store brings goods home from the St. Petersburg IKEA store for 600-1000 rubles, and it also takes a significant percentage of the value of the goods just because they take them in the store in your car. Despite this, the service is very popular, at least it was during the pre-crisis period: people often do not have time to go to IKEA, it takes half a day, and many are willing to pay one or two thousand rubles just to not stand in traffic jams . During this time, you can have time to earn more, or, for example, spend time with children, which is generally priceless.
Suppose your clients are very thrifty people who have little money, but relatively much time and desire to save (retirees, residents of remote small settlements, university students who do not need to study hard, etc.)
Then you can try the following:
1) underline that you have cheap goods,
2) offer minor discounts (2-3%),
3) show different prices for payment in different ways,
4) offer many different delivery options for different prices, describing each of them in detail,
5) be sure to accept cash payment,
6) if the product is not extremely cheap, then take credit cards too - maybe some of the customers are sitting without cash, but they can pay with a credit card (be prepared that customers may have credit cards of dying banks that have risky credit policies and money you will not come to the account).
It is important to note that you should respect your customer in any case, no matter how much money he brings to you. That is why, if you offer different delivery options, explain in detail how they differ. For example, one of the courier services requires you to show your passport upon receipt of the goods. For some people, the need to show their passport to the courier is a slight inconvenience, for others - naturally, for the third - humiliation, for the fourth - a big problem.
However, if you explain to the buyer in advance what exactly is required for each delivery option, what is included in the paid service, and what is not, the buyer will be less annoyed than if he finds out about the delivery terms after making the purchase decision.
Unfortunately, you cannot prevent someone from your target group from visiting your online store. However, you can clearly mark the markers of the person you want to see in your store on the very first page (and on all landing pages): if you don’t accept cards and write different prices to pay with a card and cash, your store is not for those saves time. Make another store for them. Do not try to satisfy all people in general: this is impossible, they need different things.
The price in your store is globally influenced by three factors: the prices of those whom you consider to be competitors, your arrogance and (to some extent) the cost of goods. You can and should influence the last two factors on your own.
You already know that low price is not always good. If you managed to get a hundred or two repaired iPhones in a landfill in China, of which a quarter turned out to be completely intact, you are absolutely not obliged to distribute them for free (and cheaper than competitors - not necessary either). The fact that they cost you almost nothing is known only to you - the buyer should consider them as valuable as those who came to your competitor from the official supplier.
Note: I'm talking about the case when you sell a known good device, in fact, no different from the products of competitors, except for a low price for you. If you are selling a stolen, defective or defective product - of course, reduce the price as you see fit, because I am completely unfamiliar with this kind of business.
Offer segmentation is designed to offer the same product in different ways to different people. Offer to those who value money more than time? Reduce the price and, if possible, cost: take a fee for payment in non-cash money, transfer the bank's commission to the customer (if allowed by law and the agreement with the bank), offer cheap delivery (perhaps not very reliable and slow, just warn the customer !)
Offer to people who value time more than money? Round off the price (1999 looks almost the same as 1899, and you need 100 rubles), feel free to describe your advantages (fast delivery, everything is included in the price, payment by card, timing the arrival of the courier). Offer a narrower range of delivery time for some money (for example, 400 rubles - delivery from 18 to 23, and 550 - from 19 to 21). It is enough to specify delivery time with an accuracy of 2 hours, and to promise the arrival of the courier at exactly 7:25 pm is stupid, since there may be traffic jams in the city, the courier may be delayed by another customer, not immediately find a home, etc.
When pricing a product there is another factor that we haven’t talked about before (it was hidden inside the audacity): the regularity of buying a product. For example, if I buy an iron, for me it is unlikely to be significant that it is in your store at 100 rubles more than a competitor (if I went to your site). And if you sell cat litter, I’ll notice the difference. Why?
First, I buy a filler for many years in a row, and quite often (when once in two weeks, when once a month), and therefore I remember its price well. Secondly, it costs 300-400 rubles, and the additional 100 is a quarter, or even a third of the price, it is relatively much.
However, there are two ways to make the price imperceptibly more for the buyer.
If a frog is put into water and the water is heated very gradually, the frog will not jump out of the water and will gradually boil. At least that's what they say. It is also common for a person to ignore gradual changes, even if they move the situation in a threateningly bad direction.
If your product was worth earlier than 213 rubles, and a month later it began to cost 231, then the buyers ordering it relatively recently (say, started 4 months ago), but regularly, say, once in two months, will not notice anything. There are relatively few people who remember exactly how much they paid 2 months ago (or are not too lazy to look at the check, bank statement or letter from the online store).
If in another month the goods will cost 251 rubles, very few people will notice. And when the price gradually oversteps the psychologically important threshold of 300 rubles, it will be noticed (oh! It has risen in price for 100 rubles!), But looking in the previous letter with the store receipt, they will find that the price increase was 10-20 rubles. This is so small that it will be written off for general inflation. Buyers are accustomed to inflation, and no one will be surprised.
Here you will find the possibility of recognizing a customer who has returned to your store very useful. Just do not force everyone to register: there are more elegant ways to track the fact that this client has already visited you before, and even know when. Ask your store developer to do this with a cookie, he knows what it is. If you're interested, too, then a cookie is a label that your website can put on a computer for anyone who visits the site, and then check to see if it is there.
Think for yourself how much time must pass in order for the client to forget how much he spent on the regularly purchased goods on your site last time, and if the client comes less often than he most likely forgets about the price paid last time, you can increase it. Of course, this method is good only for certain categories of regularly purchased goods. If you sell services or some goods that do not usually go up by themselves, it’s dangerous to raise the price on them - the client may be suspicious.
The frog's cooking method is also good as a means of creating a stir. For example, many air ticket sellers in Europe and the United States have long taken it into service and show a gradually increasing price of a ticket for those who again and again several times a day check how much a flight costs along the same route. A frightened traveler starts to get nervous and buys a ticket that is getting expensive before his eyes (instead of going into incognito mode in a browser that helps to pretend that he has never visited a site before and get a price that is shown to a visitor, never before on a site ).
Suppose your store is good enough for your regular customers. This means that it is familiar to them: the interface is convenient and unchanged for years (immutability is important!), The prices suit them, nothing annoys them significantly. In such a situation, the client will go in search of another store only if something unexpected does not suit him.
What could it be? First, any change in the familiar interface or purchase procedure. Even if this change simplifies the purchase, it may turn out to be bad for the client simply because he is used to the old, but not yet to the new.
Secondly, the unexpectedly high price for some product that he had never bought from you before. For example, you sell batteries at an average price in a city, and, say, thermometers are very expensive. “Very expensive” is a subjective concept related to customer expectations. And if you accidentally deceive his expectations, the client can prick up the skis.
How to make the price of your products high enough, but not exceeding this “threshold of expectation” for the client? My way is to represent oneself as a client or ask a person who is similar to a typical representative of the target group of an online store.
For example, 50 grams of tasty good leaf tea on the website tea-dolina.ru costs from about 150 to about 300 rubles. I specifically did not now check the actual price on the site, from 150 to 300 - this is my feeling. I remember that I pay about that much. Why I do not know the exact price? Because it is written in a check, which I threw away long ago. And also because I usually buy there several different teas, which cost differently. And grabs them for a few weeks. During this time, I forget the exact price, and I can only remember that the price was more than 150, but less than 300 rubles per 50 grams.
Is it a lot? It seems not. Why do I think so? Because 25 Greenfield tea bags that end in a week cost about 85 rubles in a supermarket. However, we used to think that leaf tea is better than batch tea (and usually it is). In addition, tea-dolina.ru sells tea, which I and my family like to taste much more than the Greenfield batch. Thus, tea-dolina sells me tea with the feeling that it costs some reasonable money.
If they make all the prices for all types of tea the same, I’m a little surprised, but if the price does not exceed the upper limit of 300 rubles, I’m unlikely to get upset - I still don’t remember exactly how much it cost.
Similarly, if you buy something regularly, but rarely, the price can always be increased to the next psychologically important limit. This limit depends on the frequency of purchases of goods, the importance of this product for the buyer (ie, the ease of refusing to buy), the share of goods in the budget and the absolute price value. For example, if you buy buckwheat every six months, and your salary is 90,000 rubles, then you don’t care if it costs 100 rubles or 200. If you buy it once a week and your salary is 10,000 rubles, the difference between 100 and 200 will already be noticeable.
From all this, the conclusion is simple: you need to know your buyer better and set a price on the basis of him, the buyer, the idea of ​​justice and reasonableness.
Here is an example of a stock from Citigid store (navigators sell for smartphones). Navigators, by the way, are quite good (albeit with a bad interface). And I don’t like technical support from them, but this is true, by the way.
From the point of view of Sitigid's marketing specialist, this is a great deal. Still, such a discount was made, as much as 30%! But considering how terrible their attitude towards the user I had to experience, I would probably buy into the action "Citigid - two capitals for free" or "Citigid - two capitals for 100 rubles". However, let's move from emotions to numbers: a person buys a program-navigator several times in his life (that is, VERY rarely). 693 is almost 700, and 990 is visually 900. And what, I am being offered something to buy right now with a discount of 200 rubles? Are they bullied?
Discounts are offered, as a rule, either for a better warehouse sale, or for testing a reasonable price for the customer, or for creating an attractive illusion of a discount (in the latter case, they write about the discount, but the discount is not really given or given, but from an artificially high product price ).
The discount should be interesting for the client. In the store, where all customers are economical, you can offer small discounts. In Apple's App Store (the case with Citigid is the same case), a discount of 200 rubles looks ridiculous: it is given to people who have just bought a smartphone that costs at least 100, or even 300 times more expensive.
If you feel that the goods will be bought and so - do not give a discount.
Another request for discounts: in the days of massive sales it is not necessary to double the price and then give a discount of 30% of the raised price. The buyer is not a complete idiot, and if he agrees to participate in such sales, he will notice such “pseudo-discounts”, tell all over facebook, and the store’s reputation will not be good.
For each customer segment, the store’s reputation is important. Do you sell luxury products at exorbitant prices? The store should do its best to keep up the level and delight those who are willing to pay for these goods. Do you sell used jackets? Again, keep your brand among second hand customers: sell clean, good, fashionable last season, with delivery and exchange (well, or what else can your target group of customers attract?)
In the next article - how to offer related products and why.
For offline trading, segmentation of offers is a long-time trivial move. The same holding owns Pyaterochka and Carousel, Pyaterochka is positioned as an affordable store for thrifty people, and Roundabout as a more fashionable store for the more affluent. Accordingly, comfortable parking and spacious shopping halls are more important for the Carousel, and for Pyaterochka - within walking distance of residential areas. At the same time, the goods in Pyaterochka and in Karusel are about the same, and prices, of course, are different.
If this works well for offline stores, why not try the same approach on the Internet? Here is a typical online store for an audience that I don’t find at all:
')
First of all, the trouble with the site of this store is that the news in April tells about the mode of operation during the New Year holidays, which makes one fear that the store has simply been closed and the site was left in the state it was six months ago.
The page says that cards are not accepted here (at all), and it is emphasized that delivery is chargeable. If the first is completely at odds with the user's expectations (see previous article ), then the second is obvious for most buyers.
Other pages are no better: they tell, for example, what a basket is, which creates a feeling of a terrible lagging behind life. In the 1990s, the term “basket” as applied to an online store might not be known to everyone, but now almost everyone is well aware of the meaning of the word.
On the other hand, I will be glad if it turns out that marketzoo.ru is an example of a good segmentation of the offer, and the same owner with the same warehouse of goods also owns some store, conventionally, zoomarket.ru, which accepts cards and on the site of which they don’t tell anything relevant as of six months, a year or even twenty years ago.
How to segment?
Good knowledge of your audience - the key to the proper segmentation of the proposal. In a large city, it is logical to offer courier delivery: for example, the izikei.ru store brings goods home from the St. Petersburg IKEA store for 600-1000 rubles, and it also takes a significant percentage of the value of the goods just because they take them in the store in your car. Despite this, the service is very popular, at least it was during the pre-crisis period: people often do not have time to go to IKEA, it takes half a day, and many are willing to pay one or two thousand rubles just to not stand in traffic jams . During this time, you can have time to earn more, or, for example, spend time with children, which is generally priceless.
Suppose your clients are very thrifty people who have little money, but relatively much time and desire to save (retirees, residents of remote small settlements, university students who do not need to study hard, etc.)
Then you can try the following:
1) underline that you have cheap goods,
2) offer minor discounts (2-3%),
3) show different prices for payment in different ways,
4) offer many different delivery options for different prices, describing each of them in detail,
5) be sure to accept cash payment,
6) if the product is not extremely cheap, then take credit cards too - maybe some of the customers are sitting without cash, but they can pay with a credit card (be prepared that customers may have credit cards of dying banks that have risky credit policies and money you will not come to the account).
It is important to note that you should respect your customer in any case, no matter how much money he brings to you. That is why, if you offer different delivery options, explain in detail how they differ. For example, one of the courier services requires you to show your passport upon receipt of the goods. For some people, the need to show their passport to the courier is a slight inconvenience, for others - naturally, for the third - humiliation, for the fourth - a big problem.
However, if you explain to the buyer in advance what exactly is required for each delivery option, what is included in the paid service, and what is not, the buyer will be less annoyed than if he finds out about the delivery terms after making the purchase decision.
Unfortunately, you cannot prevent someone from your target group from visiting your online store. However, you can clearly mark the markers of the person you want to see in your store on the very first page (and on all landing pages): if you don’t accept cards and write different prices to pay with a card and cash, your store is not for those saves time. Make another store for them. Do not try to satisfy all people in general: this is impossible, they need different things.
Pricing
The price in your store is globally influenced by three factors: the prices of those whom you consider to be competitors, your arrogance and (to some extent) the cost of goods. You can and should influence the last two factors on your own.
You already know that low price is not always good. If you managed to get a hundred or two repaired iPhones in a landfill in China, of which a quarter turned out to be completely intact, you are absolutely not obliged to distribute them for free (and cheaper than competitors - not necessary either). The fact that they cost you almost nothing is known only to you - the buyer should consider them as valuable as those who came to your competitor from the official supplier.
Note: I'm talking about the case when you sell a known good device, in fact, no different from the products of competitors, except for a low price for you. If you are selling a stolen, defective or defective product - of course, reduce the price as you see fit, because I am completely unfamiliar with this kind of business.
Offer segmentation is designed to offer the same product in different ways to different people. Offer to those who value money more than time? Reduce the price and, if possible, cost: take a fee for payment in non-cash money, transfer the bank's commission to the customer (if allowed by law and the agreement with the bank), offer cheap delivery (perhaps not very reliable and slow, just warn the customer !)
Offer to people who value time more than money? Round off the price (1999 looks almost the same as 1899, and you need 100 rubles), feel free to describe your advantages (fast delivery, everything is included in the price, payment by card, timing the arrival of the courier). Offer a narrower range of delivery time for some money (for example, 400 rubles - delivery from 18 to 23, and 550 - from 19 to 21). It is enough to specify delivery time with an accuracy of 2 hours, and to promise the arrival of the courier at exactly 7:25 pm is stupid, since there may be traffic jams in the city, the courier may be delayed by another customer, not immediately find a home, etc.
How not to sell cheap?
When pricing a product there is another factor that we haven’t talked about before (it was hidden inside the audacity): the regularity of buying a product. For example, if I buy an iron, for me it is unlikely to be significant that it is in your store at 100 rubles more than a competitor (if I went to your site). And if you sell cat litter, I’ll notice the difference. Why?
First, I buy a filler for many years in a row, and quite often (when once in two weeks, when once a month), and therefore I remember its price well. Secondly, it costs 300-400 rubles, and the additional 100 is a quarter, or even a third of the price, it is relatively much.
However, there are two ways to make the price imperceptibly more for the buyer.
Frog cooking principle
If a frog is put into water and the water is heated very gradually, the frog will not jump out of the water and will gradually boil. At least that's what they say. It is also common for a person to ignore gradual changes, even if they move the situation in a threateningly bad direction.
If your product was worth earlier than 213 rubles, and a month later it began to cost 231, then the buyers ordering it relatively recently (say, started 4 months ago), but regularly, say, once in two months, will not notice anything. There are relatively few people who remember exactly how much they paid 2 months ago (or are not too lazy to look at the check, bank statement or letter from the online store).
If in another month the goods will cost 251 rubles, very few people will notice. And when the price gradually oversteps the psychologically important threshold of 300 rubles, it will be noticed (oh! It has risen in price for 100 rubles!), But looking in the previous letter with the store receipt, they will find that the price increase was 10-20 rubles. This is so small that it will be written off for general inflation. Buyers are accustomed to inflation, and no one will be surprised.
Here you will find the possibility of recognizing a customer who has returned to your store very useful. Just do not force everyone to register: there are more elegant ways to track the fact that this client has already visited you before, and even know when. Ask your store developer to do this with a cookie, he knows what it is. If you're interested, too, then a cookie is a label that your website can put on a computer for anyone who visits the site, and then check to see if it is there.
Think for yourself how much time must pass in order for the client to forget how much he spent on the regularly purchased goods on your site last time, and if the client comes less often than he most likely forgets about the price paid last time, you can increase it. Of course, this method is good only for certain categories of regularly purchased goods. If you sell services or some goods that do not usually go up by themselves, it’s dangerous to raise the price on them - the client may be suspicious.
The frog's cooking method is also good as a means of creating a stir. For example, many air ticket sellers in Europe and the United States have long taken it into service and show a gradually increasing price of a ticket for those who again and again several times a day check how much a flight costs along the same route. A frightened traveler starts to get nervous and buys a ticket that is getting expensive before his eyes (instead of going into incognito mode in a browser that helps to pretend that he has never visited a site before and get a price that is shown to a visitor, never before on a site ).
Principle of significance
Suppose your store is good enough for your regular customers. This means that it is familiar to them: the interface is convenient and unchanged for years (immutability is important!), The prices suit them, nothing annoys them significantly. In such a situation, the client will go in search of another store only if something unexpected does not suit him.
What could it be? First, any change in the familiar interface or purchase procedure. Even if this change simplifies the purchase, it may turn out to be bad for the client simply because he is used to the old, but not yet to the new.
Secondly, the unexpectedly high price for some product that he had never bought from you before. For example, you sell batteries at an average price in a city, and, say, thermometers are very expensive. “Very expensive” is a subjective concept related to customer expectations. And if you accidentally deceive his expectations, the client can prick up the skis.
How to make the price of your products high enough, but not exceeding this “threshold of expectation” for the client? My way is to represent oneself as a client or ask a person who is similar to a typical representative of the target group of an online store.
For example, 50 grams of tasty good leaf tea on the website tea-dolina.ru costs from about 150 to about 300 rubles. I specifically did not now check the actual price on the site, from 150 to 300 - this is my feeling. I remember that I pay about that much. Why I do not know the exact price? Because it is written in a check, which I threw away long ago. And also because I usually buy there several different teas, which cost differently. And grabs them for a few weeks. During this time, I forget the exact price, and I can only remember that the price was more than 150, but less than 300 rubles per 50 grams.
Is it a lot? It seems not. Why do I think so? Because 25 Greenfield tea bags that end in a week cost about 85 rubles in a supermarket. However, we used to think that leaf tea is better than batch tea (and usually it is). In addition, tea-dolina.ru sells tea, which I and my family like to taste much more than the Greenfield batch. Thus, tea-dolina sells me tea with the feeling that it costs some reasonable money.
If they make all the prices for all types of tea the same, I’m a little surprised, but if the price does not exceed the upper limit of 300 rubles, I’m unlikely to get upset - I still don’t remember exactly how much it cost.
Similarly, if you buy something regularly, but rarely, the price can always be increased to the next psychologically important limit. This limit depends on the frequency of purchases of goods, the importance of this product for the buyer (ie, the ease of refusing to buy), the share of goods in the budget and the absolute price value. For example, if you buy buckwheat every six months, and your salary is 90,000 rubles, then you don’t care if it costs 100 rubles or 200. If you buy it once a week and your salary is 10,000 rubles, the difference between 100 and 200 will already be noticeable.
From all this, the conclusion is simple: you need to know your buyer better and set a price on the basis of him, the buyer, the idea of ​​justice and reasonableness.
Discounts must be significant to the customer.
Here is an example of a stock from Citigid store (navigators sell for smartphones). Navigators, by the way, are quite good (albeit with a bad interface). And I don’t like technical support from them, but this is true, by the way.
From the point of view of Sitigid's marketing specialist, this is a great deal. Still, such a discount was made, as much as 30%! But considering how terrible their attitude towards the user I had to experience, I would probably buy into the action "Citigid - two capitals for free" or "Citigid - two capitals for 100 rubles". However, let's move from emotions to numbers: a person buys a program-navigator several times in his life (that is, VERY rarely). 693 is almost 700, and 990 is visually 900. And what, I am being offered something to buy right now with a discount of 200 rubles? Are they bullied?
Discounts are offered, as a rule, either for a better warehouse sale, or for testing a reasonable price for the customer, or for creating an attractive illusion of a discount (in the latter case, they write about the discount, but the discount is not really given or given, but from an artificially high product price ).
The discount should be interesting for the client. In the store, where all customers are economical, you can offer small discounts. In Apple's App Store (the case with Citigid is the same case), a discount of 200 rubles looks ridiculous: it is given to people who have just bought a smartphone that costs at least 100, or even 300 times more expensive.
If you feel that the goods will be bought and so - do not give a discount.
Another request for discounts: in the days of massive sales it is not necessary to double the price and then give a discount of 30% of the raised price. The buyer is not a complete idiot, and if he agrees to participate in such sales, he will notice such “pseudo-discounts”, tell all over facebook, and the store’s reputation will not be good.
Reputation
For each customer segment, the store’s reputation is important. Do you sell luxury products at exorbitant prices? The store should do its best to keep up the level and delight those who are willing to pay for these goods. Do you sell used jackets? Again, keep your brand among second hand customers: sell clean, good, fashionable last season, with delivery and exchange (well, or what else can your target group of customers attract?)
Thank you for reading!
In the next article - how to offer related products and why.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/300154/
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