eCommerce and

Too often, and through no malicious intent, companies lose sight of their customers interests. In many company war rooms, you’ll find brilliant people bunkered in the back of the building burning through notepads and hallucinating from the noxious fumes of dry-erase markers. Fight plans are drafted and pricing structures are in place. But, ultimately, none of this matters if your customers are not on board. You cannot “go live” in a ghost town.

We’ve all had the impossible call with customer service or have wanted to set fire to stacks of unnecessary rebate paperwork (and sometimes ourselves.)  And there are companies that exploit the working poor in order to generate heftier profits. Bad business is all around us - I’m quite sure there are examples of companies you’d like to see fold. But, successful businesses have customers that support their success. Why would your customers want you to succeed?

Prices, the basest of all customer/company dynamic, and ultimately the cheapest (pardon the pun.) Your prices may keep your customer base, but if your service, brand and quality do not provide a similar value, your customers will eventually tire of “selling” their consumer dignity. Your customers will want you to succeed, but only as long as your prices make it worth it. If you know someone who would still shop at Wal-Mart if they raised prices, I’d like to meet them…On second thought, I’m busy that day.

Your brand (see also: Bragging Rights.) Customers are made up largely of human beings, and my anthropology professor told me that despite our best efforts, humans are emotionally dependent creatures. We seek validation and approval from others, if your company is one that connotes status or promotes a definite image, your branding is a reason your customers want you to succeed. Oftentimes, the more lucrative your brand, the higher the value of its emotional “stock.” Need proof? The iPhone has ego-boosted its way through a record-setting recession.

Because you defend them. Backwards right? But it is a rare occasion that customers defend their brand first. Companies defend their customers by knowing who they are, giving them what they want, and improving their quality of life. Defend customers from your competitors who might not have their sustainable interests in mind. Understand their humanity; share it, rather than exploit it.

The “forest for the trees” metaphor is dripping in apropos. All of the ingenuity in the world will not matter to you if your customers don’t.

Little Giant has been hard at work engineering pumps that their most loyal customers have been waiting for. PlumberSurplus.com is your destination for the new Little Giant TSW Sump Pump System and their NXTGen Condensate Pumps.

• Optimalogica blog recommends a reconciliation system for making financial decisions and experimental sales decisions.


• Gross National Happiness has been measured, and Facebook’s Prototype confirms that we are in fact less happy on Monday’s.


• Can’t keep up with all of the social media, internet and search options available at any given moment?  Mike Moran can help you figure out what to ignore in Internet Marketing.


• Google Reader adds Magic to your settings.

My personal favorite this week, courtesy of SEOmoz:

Sam Niccolls, SEOmoz blogger, writes "This e-mail from a hopelessly confused webmaster to a competitor is worth its weight in gold."

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• Craig Tomlin offers five usability tips and teases readers with an additional five to follow in an upcoming article.  I may not agree with every tip provided in this article but each website designer can evaluate usability for themselves.  I particularly enjoyed the example given in number five which was “Reduce shopping cart distractions”.  The example given by the author is a great one as I too would have been completely overwhelmed by the shopping cart page.  I look forward to seeing the next article.


• Almost 30% of British online shoppers forget their login information when shopping online and state that it is their biggest annoyance.  Europe as a whole said that their biggest annoyance was poor customer service.  Both statistics led those surveyed to reveal that these annoyances led them to spend less money than when their satisfaction level was high.


• Trust and security remain important factors to consumers when deciding who to shop with online retailers.


• Sears leaves categories vulnerable to creative comics.







• Analysts are early to point to signs of stabilization in the economic environment, stating highlights from eCommerce as the beginnings of recovery.
  
  

Little Giant has been hard at work engineering pumps that their most loyal customers have been waiting for. PlumberSurplus.com is your destination for the new Little Giant TSW Sump Pump System and their NXTGen Condensate Pumps.

• This is something that we have talked about and something that I have wanted to do for a really long time so I am glad that another blogger brought it up as a subject and as a best practice.  Michael Martine wrote Make Your Customer the Hero a post about featuring customers on the company blog, how to go about doing so, and the benefits that both parties receive from doing so.  I would be really curious to know if our customers are reading our blog and how many would be interested in being featured, so maybe this post will spur the conversation.


• Internet Retailer reported on data released by the Commerce department and comScore both of which show consumer spending down for the second quarter of 2009 as compared to last year.


• Although the title suggests that Kevin Ertell is merely making predictions when it comes to the future of online retail I would argue that this article is closer to an educated forecast.  A worthwhile read, Predicting the Future of Retail, doesn’t really make claims that are too outlandish, at least not in my humble opinion.


• Twitter contests that go well v. Twitter contests that can ruin or really damage a reputation.


• The title alone for this week’s Whiteboard Friday sucked me in.  SEOmoz is quite good at doing that anyways, but the content’s worth it as well.  Check out Whiteboard Friday: 10 Disturbing Similarities Between Dating & Raising Venture Capital.
  

Little Giant has been hard at work engineering pumps that their most loyal customers have been waiting for. PlumberSurplus.com is your destination for the new Little Giant TSW Sump Pump System and their NXTGen Condensate Pumps.

• Shop.org released their 2009 State of Retailing Merchandising Report this week: 
  • “Specifically, retailers this year are setting the following as priorities for their Web sites:
    Checkout process redesign – 79%
    Improved content on product detail pages – 73%
    Site search and browse results – 71%
    Home page – 60%
    Redesigned help section / FAQ”

• Clickthrough rates can change when language and experience are factored into the equation; if you don’t believe me take a look at this experiment.


• Optaros is offering a complimentary eBook on social eCommerce.  The book "5 Winning Strategies in Social Ecommerce" can be found here.


• Social media is only effective if it’s based on trust, transparency and ethical business practices, luckily I work for a company where this isn’t a problem.  Unfortunately there are still, as I suppose there may always be, companies out there that don’t operate in this fashion.  The New York Attorney General isn’t standing for it, in fact he has fined a company $300,000 for encouraging fake reviews.


• Entrepreneurs are powerfully positive.


• Google announces second quarter 2009 financial results.
  

Little Giant has been hard at work engineering pumps that their most loyal customers have been waiting for. PlumberSurplus.com is your destination for the new Little Giant TSW Sump Pump System and their NXTGen Condensate Pumps.

Social networking has afforded post-modern escapism for millions. From novice to savvy and catering to dozens of demographics, there is a site geared towards connecting all of us with all of us.

Though MySpace didn’t exactly pioneer social networking, it’s largely responsible for its ubiquity. The site allowed users to easily upload pictures, biographies and customize their "space" in such a way that their space was, well, uniquely their space. A user could conceivably surf to another user's MySpace page and view the content the user wanted the viewer to see. Social Darwinism was one of the only worries; if a user was naive (dumb) enough to upload scandalous pictures of themselves, they suffered justly for their blunder. With Facebook came another level of social Venn-diagramming. The site functioned largely the same way, save much of the aesthetic customization options. But, now, users could upload and "tag" other users, rendering the "tagged" image visible for anyone in the tagged user’s network. 

Example: John gets a little heavy-handed with the party punch one Saturday evening. His mischievous friend, Mary, snaps a picture of him mid-cartwheel and, in a fit of hilarity, uploads the picture and tags John. Now, John's drunken Olympics are visible for everyone in his network, despite his acknowledgement or permission.

Invasive or intuitive?

Just yesterday, I realized that Facebook also “conveniently” scans your email contacts and "suggests" potential friends based upon their findings. This means that, for those of us who've ever used our personal emails for work-related content, we might find our boss, employee or co-worker as a suggested friend on the right-hand side of the most popular social networking site. Of course, there should be nothing to worry about, right? Right.

There's dozens of articles written about the inherent dangers of reckless networking. Curious parents, hiring managers and college admissions counselors have found a useful research tool in social media. Thanks to the excellent organic search results returned by the engines for the most popular networking sites’, oftentimes “Googling” a person’s name is enough to return dozens of links to their online profiles.

The latest social media site to gain solid traction is Twitter, a "micro-blogging" service that allows users to punch in a 140 character message and immediately send it to all of his/her "Followers." Ironically, the medium was originally designed for work. Now, what was once a way for project managers to simultaneously communicate with dozens of colleagues is now fodder for pedestrian updating. From celebrities to CEO's, pastors to pundits, Barack Obama to Joe the Plumber, almost everyone's got a Twitter account and uses it liberally. For those of us contributing to Twitter’s meteoric rise to banality, we should be conscious of our content.

The problem is, like any other social media, a user’s persona is created through updated content. The danger with Twitter is that it allows for silent commiseration. Voicing complaints is normal, perhaps even necessary, but it's another story when users can see that (during work hours) on June 11, 2008, you "Hated your boss sooo much!" 

The bottom line is that social networking can be fun or even profitable when approached with caution and purpose. Taking a macroscopic look at what a certain Twitter or Facebook update might cost is the key to keeping the necessary division between work and play.

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• The Boston Globe reports that retailers need to be prepared for a somewhat new and increasingly more frequent trend, customer haggling.  It’s understandable that with the economic decline those who are shopping are shopping for the best deal, but not many retailers are working with the margins that they used to.  If you haven’t done so yet this is a good time to train your representatives the proper way to interact with price negotiations.
• Whether you have an SEO campaign, are thinking about starting one, or questioning if you should keep it in house or outsource, Stoney deGeyter of Search Engine Guide has put together a list of “61 Pre-SEO Campaign Questions You Need to Answer to”.  What’s great is that he has included questions that relate to both in-house campaigns as well as outsourcing.
• Sage Lewis of Search Engine Watch experimented with promotions.  He based the experiment on two different types of promotions: one included user feedback on the best ideas for the future of his column, and the other was based on getting users to link to the column.  He provides his thoughts on the outcomes of the two here.
• Branding can be difficult, especially for the little guy.  Entrepreneur magazine points out five common mistakes that brand marketers may be engaging in.
• Seth Godin is great at pointing out the obvious.  This statement is not meant to belittle his writings but to point out the fact that a lot of the things he writes about are issues that have been on many marketers’ minds, he just finds an eloquent way of relaying the information.  In a post written early this morning he puts into perspective the reasons that good intentioned marketers are finding it harder and harder to get the word out to potential consumers.

Recently, we had some interns helping us review our policy pages. Overall both I and the interns thought it was a pretty interesting project and we will certainly be making some necessary changes to our policies. Specific changes include: making our policies more readable, more user friendly, and displaying the most valuable information in an easy to read layout.

Before we set out on this project we knew that our policies had not been updated in a while, and we were interested in how we stacked up against competitors and other Internet retailers.  We focused on what was displayed in others policies, the terms of their policies and how strictly they where enforced. We also paid particular attention to what was enforced and why some policies seemed more flexible than others, and of those policies which ones were clear sticking points for merchants. With that in mind we decided that our onslaught of interns would be perfect for the job of researching website policies and providing us with some recommendations.

Throughout the entire process I had to combat the question, "who reads the policies anyways?” and I had to explain that it’s true, most people do not read the policies, upfront.  What the interns needed to understand was that the policies contain essential pieces of information which need to be made public and available to our users regardless of what point in the buying cycle the customer decides to read or review them. While someone may not care what the returns process is upfront, you know they certainly care if they get the wrong product, a damaged product or simply do not like what they ordered. Clear and concise information regarding how to contact us, answers to common questions, order status, return a product, terms of use, privacy information etc., needs to be available.

Having this information is not only important, legally, but it is also important to keep transparency between our staff and consumers.  When imperative information is made public upfront it ensures that we are properly servicing our customers and in turn giving them the ability to serve themselves.

I am an LA Fitness customer, but I am pretty good about dealing with salesman so I either didn’t have the problem I am about to explain to you, or LA Fitness taught far different sales tactics when I signed up as opposed to when I recommended that a friend of mine join.  Herein lies the problem, I recommended my gym to my friend so we could go together, not realizing that I was going to put her through an hour of misery in doing so.  I was given a free pass from LA Fitness so I decided to give it to a friend that was interested in joining a gym.  Little did I know that when someone walks into an LA Fitness with one of these free passes they are treated like a piece of meat in a piranha filled fish tank!  Don’t get me wrong, I understand sales, sales tactics, promotional materials, etc., but what I don’t understand is how a company can completely diminish their value proposition, by treating potential customers as nothing more than the next commission.

The Sales Pitch

Enter my friend and I, we are going to a class, we explain that we will be happy to sit down with one of their salesman as soon as it is over so we can get the spaces we want.  After, convincing them that we wouldn’t leave prior to doing so (they held my friends drivers license to insure it) we moved on and went to our class.  My friend really enjoyed the class as well as other amenities that were offered there as well, and it looked like she was seriously considering joining their gym.  We did what we said we would do and met with the salesman before we left.  Before I go further in the story I want to mention that as soon as the salesman sat down I thought of this quiz from BNET, and wished I had a copy to give to this guy who was clearly a peddler.  I didn’t, so I endured the borderline torturous sales pitch with my friend.

He starts his pitch, acting sympathetic and understanding, by asking my friend her height, weight, dress size, and how many pounds she wanted to lose.  I understand that these questions may be relevant at some point, but it didn’t make any sense to me to start with this opening remark unless he was deliberately trying to belittle my friend, almost like a warm up.  A warm up that’s purpose is to make someone feel as vulnerable as possible so that you can pounce on them in your next move.  Don’t get me wrong, my friend is not fat, but what girl wants to give out that information unless they are 5’10”, and 130 lbs?  Most girls I know don’t.  I asked him why he started with such questions instead of offering their value proposition, because regardless of which gym she joins she is still going to be the same height, weight, etc. so that doesn’t really make a difference when deciding between competitors, at least not in this case.  He, obviously very irritated with me, proceeded with a story about a woman who had just started going there a few months ago and had lost forty pounds in one month, as if that was a good thing.  I let him know that not only was that unhealthy, but dangerous and an obvious load of nonsense, and proceeded to tell him we were interested in being healthy, not emaciated.  So he changes his strategy, I am assuming that he went the vanity route because we were female, and starts talking about health.  He honestly asked what kind of price she was willing to put on her health, as if joining their gym meant the difference between life and death!  Needless to say we went on like this for more than an hour where he proceeded to make analogies between the value of life and money, told us stories about how he felt it was so important that he bought all of his family members gym memberships, reminded us of his “Associate Manager” status as if we cared, and so on.  Although he disregarded the fact that she said she wasn’t going to do anything without talking to her husband we were finally able to get out of there.

The Moral

So what is the moral to the story?  Don’t ever recommend LA Fitness?  No, well maybe, but the moral is that people aren’t morons, don’t want to be treated like they are, and really aren’t interested in dealing with pushy salesman types, so don’t act like one!

I know that there are persuasion tactics and a lot of them are probably useful, but there were some obvious bad moves on the part of this, associate manager.  There are reasons that customers return to companies that treat them well, and I doubt this is an example of what a consumer would consider a positive experience.  I for one will never recommend them again, but maybe if he had approached the sale differently I wouldn’t have such a sour taste in my mouth.

Here are sales tactics that were used as opposed to the actual value he could have shared:

Tactic

Fear-then-relief (FTR) – The general idea behind this concept is to invoke fear in the person and then when they respond with reactions that are seeking a solution the salesperson can then lead them in the direction of their choosing.  He slightly tweaked this one and invoked discomfort and lack of self-confidence when going over weight, dress size, etc. and then offered their gym as a source of relief to these feelings.

Tactic

Bait-and-switch – This sales concept refers to the offer that is too good to be true, and too good to pass up.  Well, usually when something is too good to be true, it really is too good to be true.  This was his approach when trying to convince us that we would be super skinny after one month, just like one of their other members.

Tactic

All prospects are liars – The idea behind this approach is the thought process that all of the excuses that are being given to not sign up for the salesman’s product are a lie.  So when my friend said she wouldn’t sign up without speaking to her husband he assumed that he just needed to convince her a bit further.

Tactic

Time is money – By reinforcing his position at the company he was attempting to make the potential prospect feel like he had other clients he could be working with at the time, and therefore she should be thankful for the time he was spending with her.  This also reinforces his importance at the company so that we didn’t try to take the control or lead the conversation.

Notice that he didn’t reveal any actual real value that could be gained by signing up for their gym over the other gyms that she was reviewing at the time?

There were probably many more sales tactics used, but these are the ones that stood out, and if this is what works for their industry then more power to them, but I don’t know how many of their customers actually feel a positive mutual relationship with companies that sell in this way.  Look for recommended sales approaches in a follow up post, who knows, maybe the associate manager will have changed his ways, but I doubt it.

Kohler is arguably one of the most innovative brands in the home improvement industry. The new Karbon faucet has completely transformed the kitchen and more specifically revolutionized the kitchen faucet. Meanwhile Kohler seems to effortlessly create bathroom fixtures that are not only sleek but save water, like the Escale toilet.

This week’s review of eCommerce and entrepreneurship articles:

• Brian Eisenberg posted a list of resources that his team views as invaluable to becoming a conversion analyst.  The list isn’t really limited to conversion analysts and encompasses various areas of eCommerce.
• There are more than one billion internet users worldwide, according to comScore!
• Ogihara Corp., an auto parts supplier for U.S. carmakers would not have been able to implement a Product Lifecycle Management system, had it not been for Aras Corp. and their open source offering.  As the economy continues to decline other vendors may have to do the same. ..
• Jeremiah Andrick of Microsoft’s Live Search Blog posted part one of his series “Optimizing your very large site for search – Part 1”.  While I am not sure if Live Search is the best teacher on the subject, his points are worth reviewing.
• If you haven’t heard of McKay Hatch, it’s likely that you will given the press he has been receiving lately.  Hatch is the founder of the No Cussing Club, a club that he started when he was in 8th grade by handing out fliers that encouraged his peers to use their words for good and recognize how often they were using cuss words in their conversations.  Members, of which there are now more than 30,000 of and span worldwide, make a commitment to the no cussing challenge and try to “Leave people better than they found them”.  While the internet has had a huge impact on the club’s growth and success it has also contributed to a campaign, sparked by those against McKay’s beliefs, to bully McKay into taking the site down.