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The Census and the E-Commerce Wave
The tidal wave of the E-Commerce platform is just starting to build up speed. The US Census Bureau explains that E-Commerce sales are "sales of goods and services where an order is placed by the buyer or price and terms of sale are negotiated over an Internet, extranet, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) network, electronic mail, or other online system." Although the overall percentage of E-Commerce sales in comparison to total retail sales may seem small, the acceleration rate is indeed enormous.
Developing a Winning e-Commerce Strategy
- There is a huge knowledge gap about how the web is really driving online and offline commerce. A recent eCommercePulse survey of more than 33,000 surfers conducted by Nielsen/Net ratings and Harris Interactive indicates e-commerce sites are driving more purchases offline (phone, catalogue, retail store sales) than online. Many consumers are using the web to effortlessly compare features and pricing, then calling the company or visiting their local retail store to make a purchase. Clearly many companies need to factor this information in when analyzing their online and offline marketing expenditures and related ROI.
- According to a recent Zona Research and Keynote Systems Report released earlier this summer, over $25 Billion (USD) was lost in e-commerce due to users abandoning the web site prior to a purchase being made or during the process. The users just gave up because the load times (the amount of time it takes a page to be displayed in a browser) were painfully slow. Today's online shoppers aren't a real patient group; they want information presented in 12-18 seconds or they are off to another site that works.
- Unfortunately, many firms have allocated a disproportionate amount of resources for advertising and not enough on good web site design and back-end infrastructure. It's critical to make the market aware of a site, but if the potential customers are not presented with the right navigation and menus (read information architecture), they will not buy. Case in point: according to recent Dataquest surveys (and others), between 20-40% of most users don't purchase because they can't figure out how to easily move around the web site.
- Many firms fail to properly integrate their e-commerce components with the overall site design. The in-house developers or the outside design firm concentrate on the sexy parts of the web site design process (the graphics, branding, look and feel) and only focus on the e-commerce process after the primary web site design is completed, making e-commerce an afterthought.
- A large number of e-commerce web sites don't even list a phone number, arbitrarily forcing people to contact the company electronically, This is a real problem, as many people don't want to use e-mail or forms as their primary means of communicating. They want the immediacy of the telephone.
- It's very surprising, but approximately 30% of e-commerce sites don't have a search capability that actually works. In many cases it just returns gobblygook. This is a real irritant for many online shoppers who want to find goods and services quickly and efficiently. The need for speed should be the e-commerce merchant's marketing mantra and a good search capability gives users a way to quickly find products.
- One of the most important parts of any web site is the home or index page, as it aggregates the design elements and information architecture. So many index pages are cluttered and poorly designed, loaded with poor graphics, bad menu structures, oddball words, or my absolute least favorite ... 30-60 second Flash animation sequences which force the user to sit and stare at a blank screen while the animation loads.
- Privacy statements are about as exciting as filing taxes (unless you know you're getting a refund). They are out of necessity filled with legal terminology that needs to be addressed succinctly and in a way that makes a consumer feel comfortable about doing business with an e-commerce web site. Unfortunately, many e-commerce web site privacy statements look like an afterthought, or are so "attorney driven" (three pages - who has time to read this?) that people are turned off by them. It's very important that a privacy statement be a compromise document brokered between legal and marketing.
- We are a full service ad agency so I don't mind shooting arrows in the direction of my peers. Too much attention is being placed on web site advertising metrics (clickthrough rates, certified traffic to substantiate ad rates, etc.) and not enough on how people find and use an e-commerce web site. The industry standard web site analysis tool is Web Trends, but one of the least understood aspects of this product is tracking how people find and move around a web site via reports which can be pulled from the server log files; i.e., where did the visitors come from, what pages do they visit, how long do they stay, what are their traffic patterns, etc.? e-Commerce companies should be analyzing these "digital customer tracks" to better understand how to improve their front-end marketing processes and back-end web site design.
About The Author
Electronic Commerce Tax Jurisdiction and Principles of Permanent Establishment
To the extent that a foreign person is not engaged in a Pakistani trade or business, then the absence of a permanent establishment is irrelevant since the Pakistan will not tax that person's active business income. However, some persons entitled to benefits under a Pakistani income tax treaty will not be subject to Pak Tax due to the lack of a permanent establishment, notwithstanding the fact that they may be engaged in a Pakistani trade or business. A Pakistani permanent establishment generally requires a fixed place of business in the Pakistan although a permanent establishment can also arise by imputation from the activities of an agent.
Ecommerce Information Article:
Building eCommerce Websites That Work - Part 1
Let's begin by assuming you have some of the fundamentals, that you understand the language and that you are serious. I'm not going to tell you how to set up a web site or get a decent hosting account. We're beyond those basics. The basics here are the factors which will influence the success (or failure) and the degree of success your eCommerce web site experiences.
First and foremost, you need to provide value for your customers. Absurd as it seems to have to repeat that, a lot of so-called eCommerce sites provide no or very little value for their visitors. Pretending to offer value is not the same thing as providing value. Promoting miserably written, hackneyed, cloned ebooks filled with questionably useful and/or outdated content doesn't make a high value web site. Sure you might make some money. Once. And you'll end up with a high refund rate - and an unhappy credit card processor. That path means you're taking advantage of inexperienced customers and abusing their willingness to trust you. This isn't the way to a long-term business with steady repeat customers.
Value on the net is not very different from any kind of off-line retail sales -- a quality product line that will attract potential customers and a competitive price that will lead to purchases. An honest, quality product that will meet the expectations you've created in your buyers. Hyped junk just doesn't cut it.
Next, you've got to have a smooth, user-friendly, easy to follow process all the way to your thank you page. The simpler, cleaner and clearer you can make the process, the better. Where it makes sense you can augment this user-responsive site profile by adding live-response chat.
If you do decide to use call-in or live chat, it's imperative that your operators be well-trained, understand your products and your system and be customer friendly. This can be a problem if you outsource. The less expensive out-source call centers can turn out to be very expensive in terms of lost sales and customers who never come back.
You'll need to check very carefully and be 100 per cent certain the operators actually speak and understand the primary language(s) of your targeted customer group. You'll need to provide extensive background information and highly flexible, well-written scripts.
You should collect your own customer evaluations - separately. Don't rely exclusively on any monitoring or customer satisfaction surveys provided by the call center. Track your ROI to be sure it's money well-spent. Don't stop monitoring just because the results looked good for the first two or three months. Things change. Make sure you're tracking desired actions linked to the call center separately from those NOT related to call-in or live chat. Mixing outcomes leaves you in the dark about what's really happening.
You probably should have an attractive website. An ugly site can work, but to do that you need to absolutely know exactly what you're doing and why it should work. And you'll have to test like crazy to optimize (of course, you should be doing that anyway). The ugly site tactic is not for the inexperienced. Very few individuals really have the grasp of marketing, market and customer psychology that makes for a successful "ugly" site.
To provide a pleasant experience, you need to be careful in what you use - colors, text-size, graphics, animation and white space can add value to your site or turn it into a user nightmare. Test your site with people who will tell you the truth. Just because you love it doesn't mean anyone else will. In general, aiming for a professional appearing site is your best option. Look for the highest ranked, busiest sites in your business area and study the layouts they use. Extract the common features that you see on those sites. While other factors heavily influence traffic and ranking, appearance has a strong effect on visitors and sites that do testing evolve toward optimizing visitor behavior.
Keep in mind that a site's desired actions affect the design and layout. You'll want to study sites where those actions are most similar to the desired actions you target on your web site. If your goal is direct product sales, there's not much point in emulating a site that's optimized for newsletter sign-ups or AdSense.
If your main goal is direct sales (and if it is, then you need backend products too), provide incentives for customers to buy AND to return. The return factor is critical to a long-term strategy for success. Anyone who buys is your best possible future customer. Keep them, track them, make them special offers. Use coupons, discounts, special deals, customer-only offers and back end sales. Your customer base is your gold mine. Since they've shown enough faith in you to buy, do your utmost to never damage that faith. Treat them like the priceless resource they are. Think long-term: successful eCommerce websites are all about value and customer service.
Copyright 2005 Richard Keir
Richard teaches, trains and consults, on and off-line, on business and professional presentations, eCommerce, site building and programming. And writes a lot. Visit www.Building-eCommerce-Websites.com for articles, information, resources and links and check our blog at www.Building-eCommerce-Websites/blog for opinion and ideas.
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Thinking of building an affiliate niche store? There's the hard way and there's the easy way. This article shows how ridiculously simple it can be to do it the smart way if you know what to use.
The first article of this series discussed page views per session as a kind of early warning system key performance indicator (KPI) for your website. The second discussed time on site as another warning flag. Both of these articles show specific measurements used to forecast site problems. There are lots of KPI's you can set up to warn you of impending doom or better show your successes but to go through each one would take me till the end of next year. So to wrap up this series, this article will discuss the general metrics you should be looking at as an 'e' business and more importantly why you should be looking at them.
Anyone using a slow, or an awkward payment processor had better wake up! There are some very slick ways to transfer money around the globe, in todays, lightning fast world, both your customers and your suppliers demand payment in the click of a mouse.
Why time spent on your site is important All websites regardless of type should measure this KPI, simply because all websites can use it as a gauge to see how compelling their offers are as well as check web site performance. It doesn't matter whether you're running a content portal or an e-commerce sales operation, time spent on your pages is an important metric to measure. If you have for instance a commerce site you need to know how long your offers hold your audience.
I had a rude awakening recently. I checked the days worth of sales from one of my sites and there were none. This had never happened before and of course I was anxious to find out what was wrong.