Selling Online #43 : Put Your Best Foot Forward

The idea for this month’s column came to me last year when I was out doing some Christmas shopping. I didn’t have a specific item in mind, but I did have a general idea. Now this is a store that I don’t normally do a lot of shopping in so I’m sure when I walked through the door I had a little of that “deer in the headlights” look. Fortunately this store was staffed with knowledgeable and helpful staff and I think even more importantly, the products were organized and presented in a manner that made it, if not enjoyable, at least pleasant to shop in.

One thing that’s pretty obvious from looking through those stacks of catalogs on your parts counter is that we are in an industry with an insane number of products that our customers can choose from. While a small percentage of the hard-core enthusiasts know exactly what they want (you know the type.. The ones that have the distributor catalog memorized and come in with reams of printouts from the forums) most people need some help figuring out what they need or even more importantly what they don’t know they need.

Unlike in your physical store where you can have one of your knowledgeable and helpful staff aid a lost customer, on your website for the most part, the customer is on their own (unless of course you’ve got some type of online chat and co-browsing or co-shopping application on your site).

When it comes to e-commerce, the only tool you really have to help the customer is the merchandising on your website. For the purpose of this column I’m going to define merchandising to encompass three things:

1. Organization of the products (product or feature groups, category and taxonomy development, etc.)
2. Selection of products (what product go into those groupings or receive some other type of “feature” status)
3. Presentation of the products

The first two elements go hand in hand. You can create a “category” on your site and call it something like “Maintenance Essentials” with products that pretty much anyone that rides any type of powersports vehicle is going to find useful or necessary. One of those items may be chain lube. Let’s say you’ve got access to like 10 different brands each with 3 variations and 3 different sizes. That’s 90 different combinations! For one simple product!

Imagine this type of scenario that I think makes up 80% of the shopping situations out there: A guy rides his motorcycle as an alternate commute vehicle and an occasionally for recreation. He likes his motorcycle, but he’s got a life. He doesn’t spend every waking moment on forums to determine what the ultimate chain lube is. He doesn’t ride with a big group of people that will sit around debating the relative benefits of various type of chain lube. All he knows is that his chain looks dirty and needs cleaning and lubing.

He goes to your site, or any typical site, and types in chain lube and is presented with almost 100 choices! For a simple product like chain lube! You need to make sure that on your site that you’ve picked the “best” one or two options for these major product types and present them in a way that makes it 1) easy to find and 2) communicate that based on your expert opinion that these are the ones to go with. Basically the exact same thing that a good parts person would do in a face-to-face situation. The difference is that online you need to do all of this before the customer ever comes onto your site.

There are a few different ways that you can do this. The first is the idea of creating multiple personas of model customers and so scenario planning on how they may interact with your site. Create like 3 to 5 customer types (the hard-core enthusiast, the casual rider, the spouse or parent of a rider, the total noob, etc.) and then imagine a few different scenarios for each type (a major part broke and they need to find a replacement right now, they are new to riding and need everything but don’t know anything, they need to buy a birthday gift for their wife, son, friend that rides, and so on). Pretend to be these various types in various situations and try to organize your site so that there are obvious categories and product assortments that make each customer’s shopping experience as fulfilling as possible.

If your site has been live for a few years and you’ve been using a good analytics package, you can use its data to see how people use your site and utilize real-world data in your scenario planning. Where they go, what they buy, what they look at and don’t buy, etc. etc.

Obviously this is all a lot of work. It’s so much easier to just buy a site from a 3rd party vendor with all the catalogs pre-loaded, or build your own and dump a product feed into it, have a few general categories like helmets, exhausts, etc., and be done with it. That’s what 99% of the sites out there do, and that’s why 99% of the sites out there suck and don’t sell anything! Not only does merchandising make it easier to shop, it’s just about the strongest tool you have to differentiate your site from all the other sites out there!

That doesn’t mean that you should do away with the potentially millions of other products in your online catalogs. More often than not, you’ll want to present that potentially overwhelming selection on a second layer behind the your primary merchandising and allow customers to drill down to explore. Always have a “See all of our chain lube products” link next to your hand-picked selection. Of course a robust and powerful search tool is your best bet to handle these kinds of shoppers.

So now that we’ve dealt with the product selection and organization ideas, let’s move onto the final piece, the presentation of those products.

There are so many cool technologies these days that can help you communicate the features, advantages, and benefits of the products that you sell. You’ve of course got the good ol’ custom written and compelling product description. You’ve got the ability to take your own product photos that show things like the product in use, various angles or views, mounting options and so on. You’ve got videos that you can post on YouTube and embed in the product page. You can post sound files of exhaust systems. The limit is really only your imagination and the amount of time you want to devote to it.

At the very top you can even go big time and use rich-media technology like Adobe’s Scene7 (www.scene7.com) that can provide a huge range of presentation and interaction opportunities.

Try to remember that you are the expert in what you sell. Use that expertise to help customers figure out what they should be buying and communicate it through professional merchandising on your site.

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