Designing Your E-Commerce Site for Service
September 15, 1999
Whether your customer is buying flowers, financial
information or family holidays, her perception of you
is a critical factor in the purchasing decision. Getting
your shop into shape is a make-or-break phase of building your e-business.
Your Public Face
In a seminal article,
David Siegel outlines the three areas of activity into which the Web
was to be ''balkanized'' - here they are from our point of view:
Information - provision of corporate, technical, topical and general information;
Exchange - interaction, communication and purchasing; and
Entertainment - involvement, enjoyment, and simple fun.
There should always be a healthy mixture of these areas in any successful
e-business. A visit to your site should be stress-free and enjoyable (entertainment), even
if you''re selling scrapped monitors to the recycling industry.
Visitors need to
be able to find you to be the people they want to do business with, using
content you provide (information), and then they need to act on that information, by
contacting you, ordering your product, and giving you some money (exchange).
Before they Find the Door...
Your visitors - unless they are relatives of yours - will not find your storefront
by themselves. You need to market your business just like in the
real world. Check out the advertising resources
on this site for in-depth information on this, a topic in its own right.
In general, though, remember these points:
Word of mouth (whether real or by endorsement by well-known directories and awards sites)
is the most powerful form of online traffic enhancement.
Banner advertising can be an expensive mistake, unless you (or the guy selling you
the banner slots) can prove its worth.
Promotional tricks, from competitions to mailing lists, can slowly build a useful
and appropriate customer base for you, but you need to avoid overdoing it.
Offline advertising (printing your email and Web address on your stationery, posters,
and all printed material) may eventually move all your offline customers into your
e-business.
Plan and budget for promotion and advertising for six or twelve months at a time, and
regard it as one of the integral costs of your business online.
Do your homework, invest conservatively, and show plenty of patience - and your
customers will begin to trickle in to look at your offering.
The Front End: Building for Business
Your ''online presence'' (as too many people call it) is a vital part
of your e-business. You will need these watchwords as you proceed:
Style - your visitor needs to experience the correct
impression of what kind of business you run, and they''ll get a lot
of this from the style of your site.
Function - what your visitor can do in, through and
with your site. Providing your visitors with the bare essentials
of locating and ordering your products is never enough - you should
use the effectively infinite size of your site to give them everything they
need to make that decision.
Navigation - how visitors move around inside your site. Navigation
is a form of prompted search, and visitors should very quickly and
confidently travel around your site before handing you your
paycheck.
Interactivity - a shockingly overused word, but how your site appears
to respond - to visitors'' actions and questions, as well as to the passage of time -
is critical in ensuring that the visitor doesn''t leave thinking nobody''s home.
The single thing uniting all your front-end design work is
its style.
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