Advice for small retail stores going online (Offline retail)

Offline retail news: Fashion and apparel store owners will be interested in reading this article about local stores going online. It is down-to-earth and gives pragmatic advice. The stores in the article are located in New Zealand, but the recommendations are relevant to  US and in Europe as well. The best part of the article is from the mid-section to the end. On the same topic, I have just finished reading "Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age" and will review it this week. It is also a great read for fashion stores that want to go online and/or want to use internet tools to dreive more in-store traffic.

Source: The Press (NZ)

First paragraphs:

Maximise your chances of e-tail success

Many small businesses embarrass themselves when they go online. Their websites are a fright. JOHN McCRONE reports on how to get it right.

What were they thinking? The website sold clothes aimed at 20-somethings and yet the clothes were being modelled by a middle-aged chap with a pot belly.

Alan Cox of web consultant LeftClick shakes his head. Another Kiwi e-tailer trying to do it on the cheap.

The internet has been around a few years now. Yet still small businesses are throwing themselves onto the web and making all the classic mistakes.

Perhaps the technology fazes them. Their efforts are unfocused and as a result, Cox says, most commercial websites do not perform.

But he says the secret to e-tailing is simple. Selling on-line is a process just as it is in real life. And a website has to recreate the whole of that process if it is going to convert click-happy surfers into concrete sales.

Cox says businesses should start by putting themselves in the customer's shoes. Then think through the entire experience from the moment people land at the site's front door, to the sales patter, to the moment when they finally reach into their pockets for their wallet and the sale is done.

What are the mistakes that commercial sites are making at each of these three stages?

LeftClick specialises in analysing the browsing habits of real users. It road tests new sites by getting people into its Christchurch lab and watching them click away furiously from behind mirrored glass.

And Cox has bad news for sites with amateurish design.

"On average, a website visitor takes only three seconds to work out whether they're going to stay or leave," Cox says.

"In that three seconds they've got to be able to decide both whether you are a trustworthy company that they want to deal with, and do they get a sense you'll be able to give them what they want to get from you."

The problem is trickier than it sounds. Cox says the cues needed to make the right first impression are subtle, subconscious even.

Generally though, the front page should be clean, organised and fast-loading.

Cox says many still believe the myth that all of a site's content should be at most a couple of clicks away. This leads them to crowd as much as possible onto their front page.

"But imagine walking in the door of a physical store like a supermarket and nothing was organised. It was all just laid out on the floor in front of you. You'd leave straight away, wouldn't you?" Cox says.

Read the full article at The Press