Selling Online #4 Special Edition: Merchandising

In a nutshell, merchandising online comes down to the selection and presentation of your products to a shopper on your website. Product presentation is important because it has a huge effect on the satisfaction of the customer visiting your website. Satisfied customers are more likely to make a purchase.

To begin with, the overall design of your site is the most important aspect of online merchandising. If your site is ugly, hard to use, or technically flawed, there’s not much you can do to overcome that with merchandising. If your dealership is located in a burned-out cinderblock building in the bad part of town, even if you’ve got the snazziest product displays, no one is going to buy from you. You need to make sure the design basics are covered (user friendliness, aesthetic appeal, and good content) before worrying about tactical merchandising issues.

The second most important element in merchandising for the web is the product presentation. Words and pictures are basically all you have to offer your online shoppers to help them make their buying decision. The online customer can’t pick up the product and experience all of the little nuances that you get just by holding a product in your hands.

Therefore, it’s imperative that you provide them with as much information as possible. At minimum, this is at least one excellent photograph of the product, as well as a description that compels the shopper to click the “add to cart” button.

You may get photos from the manufacturer or from the distributor. These can be excellent, professional shots that someone spent a lot of money producing or they can be horrible, low resolution images that someone scanned out of a 1979 catalog. If the images you are provided are not excellent quality, you are going to need to take your own photos. Keep in mind that this is the subject of an entire sub-discipline of professional photography. Look at how good the products look at high-end catalog retailers like Land’s End, Eddie Bauer, and Cabela’s and understand that while it may be beyond your resource limit to be that good, it should be a target to shoot for. You can learn a lot about good online merchandising from traditional catalog retailers, even if they are outside the powersports industry.

If your e-commerce software allows it (if not, find new software) you should have multiple images for each product. You should have close-ups of the materials, images of the product in use (a model wearing a jacket, or an accessory installed.

There are technologies that provide a more rich experience when viewing products online. These may be an interactive 3D model of the product or a short video of the product in use. These technologies can be excellent tools to increase sales, however many require a significant increase in resources to set-up and maintain. Keep in mind however; if the customer has technical issues with the required browser plug-in you’ve just placed a barrier to that sale. And you just paid anywhere from 2 to 10 times more than a simple photograph to do so! Therefore, use these wizbang technologies sparingly.

The next major piece in the product presentation is the “copy” or the words used to sell the product. I choose sell specifically instead of describe for an important reason. Basic descriptions don’t move product into the shopping cart. Just like product photography, there are professional disciplines devoted to writing compelling copy that sells products. Look to the big name catalog companies like Cabela’s and read the prose the pros use to describe things as mundane as a cup holder!

Just like product images, you may be able to get decent product descriptions from the manufacturer or the distributor, but again, if they are not up to snuff, you are going to need to redo them. Again, you need to aim upwards toward the style that the big guys use.

A vitally important twist when writing copy for the web is that you are not only writing for human appreciation, but you need to make it look good to robots as well! Typically before anyone comes to your site looking for a product, they are using a search engine like Google first. Search engines work by scouring the internet, recording all the text they find, and placing it in a very massive database that is used to carry out the searches. As you can guess, the majority of the text the robot is going to index off your site is going to come from product descriptions. Therefore extra special attention needs to go into writing copy that will “appeal” to the robot. This means you need to use appropriate keywords that relate to the product, and that your eventual customer may be looking for on a search engine. Avoid the tactic known as “keyword stuffing” to load down your product descriptions with too many keywords that are not directly related to the product in question. If you really abuse this, and Google for instance catches you, your entire site may be removed from their index and you can kiss any future revenue goodbye for a very long time. Don’t play those games, and if your marketing company or website developer wants to do this, find a new company to work with.

With limited resources how should you focus your copy writing? Considering that you most likely do not have Cabela’s pull and people are not flocking to your site all on their own, your initial goal is to get people to your product pages from the major search engines. Therefore with limited resources, be pragmatic and offer descriptions that are more utilitarian and search engine friendly initially, and then go back over them to make them more pleasing to the human visitors. However, always keep in mind that once the human is on your site, the copy and the images are going to be your salesman for the product.

Does this mean that you need to have a professional photographer and a professional copywriter on your staff to do it right? It’s fairly easy to make a compelling argument that online product presentation is a core competency, and like all core competencies, it makes sense to keep it in house where you can develop and protect it. The choice is yours.

In coming issues of my monthly column I’ll be going into some of the merchandising technologies and techniques available to increase sales on your site. But if your foundation of product presentation is not rock-solid, it’s going to be hard to convince anyone to buy the product regardless of the merchandising technologies that your site uses.

Books:

• Intelligent Selling, The Art and Science of Selling Online, Ken Burke (has a great collection of other resources at the end of each chapter as well)
• It’s Just Shopping, e-merchant meets e-shopper, Lauren B. Freedman [may be out of print or something as I couldn’t find it on Amazon except via third party sellers…]

Magazines/Periodicals/Sites:

• Practical eCommerce, The Magazine for eCommerce Result
• Internet Retailer, Strategies for multi-channel retailing
• etailer, covering the future of retail

Tags:Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, powersports, selling-online