In baseball, there is a logical path of progression. The batter comes to the plate, gets a base hit, moves to first base, advances to second base, then third, and finally returns home - scoring a run. After a hit, runners can’t go directly to second or third base; they must go directly to first base, then second, and so on. In 2012, according to Forrester Research, approximately 15 percent of the online businesses that failed, failed because they did not follow good business practices - they attempted an easier path to second or third base.
My father taught me this simple baseball concept when I was five years old. He continued to reteach it every year until I understood and could apply it, in both baseball and each and every thing I intended to do with my life. So, with ecommerce being my latest venture, let’s see if it works!
Each base on the baseball diamond is occupied by one of three parts necessary to establish, create, and implement a successful ecommerce site. First base is occupied by management, second is an ecommerce platform, and third consists of the personnel required to design and operate the web site. Home plate is the sale.
Before the game can begin, management brings a strong business strategy to the batter’s box. The strategy can be traditional brick and mortar, an online click enterprise, or some combination of both. Whichever type management brings to the plate, the end result is to get the hit, round the bases, and make the sale. The responsibility for getting the hit and advancing to first base is in the grip of management.
First Base, Management
The principles of business don’t need to change. It is the application of the principles that is changing with e-commerce. Every business moving online requires individual strategies that focus and meet the needs of the target audience. Businesses should focus on specific users by determining user demographics when structuring the web site. Define the target market, match the site to the target user’s goals, and develop a step-by-step process to assist the target user to reach those goals.
Defining the target market and primary goals of the buyer are tasks developed through management. Build web sites that go to where the eyeballs are. Identifying the target market is much more complicated in the cyber-world than one might imagine. With the brick and mortar store, management targets a specific demographic population through income, ethnicity, gender, age, etc. Online entrepreneurs need to include these same characteristics and technical issues, such as modem speed and monitor size, in the demographic platform.
There are four key factors to successful customer retention:
- First, develop a sustainable identity for companies looking at a long-term relationship with its customer base.
- Second, initiate strong customer relationship management.
- Third, provide customer service and billing departments that can produce instant information when queried.
- Fourth, establish mass customization to meet the growing demand of a global market and the neighborhood around the corner.
Businesses that incorporate both traditional brick and mortar and e-commerce methods of conducting business have discovered better strategies to attract and keep customers.
Second Base, Ecommerce Platform
The ecommerce platform is sitting on second base ready to provide an infrastructure to support: search engines, encryption, online payments, memory, directories and databases, software distribution, virtual organization, and e-mail, to name a few. The ecommerce platform will take management’s hit to third base and facilitate the production of the end product.
Think about it like this: When you go to drugstore.com and type in “Tylenol” the search engine comes back with six pages of search results. That’s a great way to give the visitor a headache. Knowing when “enough is enough” is not an easy task. An ecommerce platform, such as Magento, has conquered the “enough is enough” concept yet provides strong infrastructure capabilities and allows the designer to put together a web site that is both easy to navigate and user friendly. Keep in mind, when a business is devoted to sales and/or services, it is important that the process used to make an online purchase be both simple and quick.
Third Base, Web Designer
Management produced a strategic plan around the needs of the buyer and passed the plan onto second base, where an ecommerce platform provided a system that offers the web designer the flexibility to create a web site to meet the buyer’s needs. The web designer is now ready to design a web site without worrying whether the system will fail, thus creating a negative experience for the guest.
Third base isn’t devoted to just web designers but also customer service personnel, sales, security, accounting, shipping, and just about all the remaining company personnel involved in producing a product for the buyer. Third base is the heart of the online company. Without third base personnel, the company is doomed to lose sales. Buyer-friendly websites focus on the wants of the buyer and can attract & keep the buyer. Remember, the competitor is just a click away, not the city blocks or miles of a brick and mortar store. Create an experience, not a barrier.
Research, courtesy of the Boston Consulting Group, has shown that 65% of site visitors leave the site and shopping cart prior to making a purchase. Design the site around customer service, shopping carts, privacy policies, and credit card security. Identify and determine which of these should be included on the website to attract the first time buyer and develop that buyer into repeat customer. Small businesses, one to nine employees, are not going online because of the cost and technology required in developing a website and these issues need to be addressed by management.
Home Plate, the Sale
Customers in the face-to- face, brick and mortar, transaction are in limited supply; a good merchant wants to keep the business of every person walking through the door and develop that initial relationship into a repeat customer. The local merchant must present an image of honesty and trustworthiness when negotiating a transaction with a customer. Representing the product correctly, making the purchase easy, and supplying a fast delivery service are musts if the merchant expects to stay in business any length of time.
Nothing has changed - the different facets of the brick and mortar sale are the same as those used in ecommerce; the Internet just makes it faster and easier to complete the sale from the buyer’s home or office. A business that expects to succeed online must drill-down and address the following two issues:
- Past buying conceptions of the buyer that involve transaction security, customer service, and purchase/return issues.
- Buyer’s social interaction with the medium which addresses ease of usability. How easy is it to make the online purchase vs. going to the store vs. placing an order over the telephone or through a catalog? How much time does it take?
The internet is a complex system that interacts with anyone who logs on. The web is not directed to an individual living in Iowa, but is directed to a world audience; each site must be developed to attract not only a target audience, but also the largest target audience. Management introduces the strategies, an ecommerce platform develops the system to implement the strategies, and web designers transform the strategies into a viewable medium for the guest. If everything works and comes together to create a social experience and subjective satisfaction for the guest, the affect will be a sale that, in turn, increases profit margins.