Online sales of clothing and footwear soared by 20% in April, while internet lingerie sales have risen 72% year-on-year, according to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index.
The index found that consumers spent £326 million online on clothing and footwear in April.
Since April 2000, when the index began monitoring online sales, more than £150 billion has been spent online in the UK.
Could eCommerce boost your company’s annual revenues by an additional 5-10%?
It is very interesting and important to compare high-street retailers with mail order companies. In the UK more than 1 in 10 books are now purchased online, that is over 10% of the actual market share.
John Lewis’ online sales now exceed total sales of it’s largest Oxford Street department store and many specialist mail order companies have expanded online revenues to exceed 25% of total turnover.
Littlewoods has ramped up its target for the proportion of business it wants to do online from 50 to 70 per cent, having achieved its original goal three years ahead of schedule.
www.wdsinternet.com/ecommerce.aspx
Essentially, all aspects of managing your online shop should be easy and efficient. The shop should provide the right kind of service and experience for your customers and at the same time provide you with an effective and profitable means of online selling.
Bearing in mind that the facilities of your online shop depend on the system you adopt, you should aim for:
This may include full control of:
This may include:
This may include:
You must make sure that you can:
It is vital for your shop to be welcoming and user-friendly. Just as in a ‘bricks and mortar’ establishment, you should make every effort to provide an online shop that is inviting and gives your visitors a pleasant experience.
Make sure your contact information (including phone numbers, email address and postal address) are readily available. They should either be part of every page or reached by means of a prominent link on each page.
Make sure your design shows clearly how to enter your shop, to avoid confusion visitors. The shop entrance should not be obscured with advertisements or too much information. Home pages that are too busy may prevent the customer from locating your shop and the goods or services on offer there.
To prevent your visitors from wandering aimlessly around your shop, make sure your navigation system easily allows them to find what they came for.
Be careful not to hassle customers for personal information until they are ready to buy. This is the equivalent of a pushy sales assistant and could result in customers going elsewhere.
Make your shop layout and categories meaningful for customers. Items should be divided into appropriate categories, making it as easy as possible for people to find what they are looking for. Avoid ambiguity in the categories and if necessary use text descriptions to explain what is in a category.
A search facility should always appear prominently on the web site. A quick and easy means of ‘finding what you are looking for’ is particularly important, given that browsing through a large online shop can be a difficult and slow process. Make sure that the search facility accepts appropriate terms, including multiple words. This will make the whole searching process work well for customers.
Make sure your online shop can be operated by and is accessible to all customers. ‘Accessibility’ means ‘making the content accessible’, so that everyone can navigate and read what is there, regardless of their location, experience, disability, or type of technology they use. As well as being required by law, good web site accessibility will bring you many more potential customers.
The shop items need to be kept up to date with correct information. There is no point in advertising items that you no longer stock or that are wrongly priced. Web site users will come back if they know the content is updated regularly. But if you disappoint a customer by not providing an advertised product, you will get ‘poor press’ as the customer relays their experience to others.
The shopping cart should be both easy to use and to navigate. Shop items should have clear and informative labels to describe them and to show if they are in stock. The customer likes to see what they are buying, so you should include images of items to help identify them. This is particularly important for the more expensive purchases or fashion items. The ‘add to cart’ link should be positioned next to each item listed, with the ‘view cart’ link viewable at all times.
As the customer makes their order, each step of the shopping cart process needs to be explained, from adding an item to paying. Orders should be placed and processed with as few clicks as possible, and customers should have to provide as little information as possible. There should be provision for the customer to recover easily from any mistakes.
Be as flexible as possible and allow your customers a variety of payment methods, including:
Use a sample group of people of different ages, backgrounds and Internet experience to find and buy a product. Use their feedback to fine-tune how your online shop works.
Registered web site users can log into an account management section with their email address and password to manage the following areas:
Wish lists drawn up by the customer of items they desire can be used as the ideal shopping list for their friends and family choosing the perfect gift.
You can ask customers when they register with your online shop if they would like to be added to your email mailing list. Then you can divide this into two types of email mailing lists – HTML (the language of the Internet) and text only. You can use the mailing lists to inform customers of sales, special offers and other initiatives.
You should promote the value of online shopping at your web site. If you can offer benefits over high street shopping, customers may be tempted to buy online. Your promotion will depend on the kind of items you sell, but useful features could include product reviews.
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:
Researchers estimate that US firms alone spent $400 million on email marketing in 2006.[1]Â
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