Turning shopping carts into a retail store

I’ve been working in the ecommerce / web area for almost 8 years now, and if there is one thing I’ve learned it’s that a checkout and shopping cart don’t make a store.

Think about it this way: if you put a whole bunch of boxes in a warehouse, a till at the front and some baskets / trolleys do you have a supermarket? Not really. You’ve got more of an organised garage sale (rooting through boxes, finding junk you don’t want. You get the picture).

Retailing has been around for years, and it’s about time people started to look at ecommerce as a serious sales channel. That means you have to staff it properly, merchandise products, push sale items, and make all the decisions for the consumer without them noticing. Much easier when you can watch customers walking around and making the mistakes, but can’t you do that on the web? Of course you can – in fact it’s better than that. With search engines & analytics you can practically know what a customer wants when they get there, better than that, we can give it to them, and sell them chewing gum on the way out it’s just all about doing things right from the get go.

So what are the secrets? I certainly don’t claim to be an expert retailer, so from what I’ve learnt here is my top 5 key thoughts:

1. Find out what people are searching for and give it to them. You have the power.
2. Anyone coming to your site needs to be able to find the product they want the way they want to look for it. This means clever searches (why do you have to search for boxer shorts, why not undies?), category structures that mirror how customers look for products, and lots of options to make finding the product they are looking for easier.
3. Flashing things annoy customers (and me). Your site should not look like a street in Hong Kong, and you don’t need to advertise your site on your site, they are already there.
4. Good pictures and lots of them. How long do you spend looking at an item in a shop before you buy it? For me, ages. You aim needs to be: give customers enough information to make a buying decision.
5. Checkout should be easy, you shouldn’t have to sign-up and the more payment options the better.