Designing Your E-Commerce Site for Service
September 15, 1999
People think that Marketing is just about selling. Just as important
in marketing yourself and your product is your ability to hold up
your end of the deal.
Behind the Scenes
While front-end aspects of your site are important, it usually takes
even more careful planning, design and plain hard work to get the
invisible elements working - and more again to keep them working.
Let''s look at the most important behind-the-scenes activities
in a well-built e-business:
Inventory and resource management - knowing what you have on offer,
managing its timely availability, coping with supply.
Customer and order management - keeping the customer relationship
alive, providing prompt responses, moving revenue-generating information through
your system.
Delivery and payment tracking - making sure that goods or services are
at the customer''s disposal and generating money, and ensuring that money owed is
in your hands quickly and correctly.
Monitoring of site performance, trends in order/transaction activity,
fulfilment, staffing costs, and time-and-motion costs.
Converting all of these activities to a Web-based, integrated platform is what people
are talking about when they talk about ''business process re-engineering for the digital
age.'' As long as you''re heading towards this, however, you can get most of the benefits
without the huge price tags associated with much of this well-marketed but
dubiously-value-for-money industry..
Inventory: Managing Resources
Your resources in an e-business may include:
Physical Stock - whether books, fine art, or soap powder. You may have a
computerized stock management system already, or you might do everything by hand. Either
way, it''s often necessary to have some kind of inventory database both on the
Web site and in your back-office environment.
Staff and Service Resources may be the ''raw material'' for your service or
customized product (e.g. software support or maintenance). You need to be able to
schedule your staffing to provide the correct amount of person-hours per project. This
can be automated, or best left to human planners. Either way, you''ll need to let your
customers know the timescales of delivery involved in getting their purchased service.
Outsourced Resources may be physical or non-physical. Examples would
include out-of-stock books (may be ordered from publishers and wholesalers), and
third-party service capability (which can be drafted in to fill a gap). Either way,
these resources represent a ''virtual stock'' which you can use to extend or round
out your product range.
Management of resources in e-business is almost identical to that for the real world.
Consult good real-world expertise if you need help. In particular, look out for the following:
Keep your own expenses - both fiscal and mental - to a minimum by
avoiding ''putting it all online.'' Restrict your inventory to products which
will be most attractive to visitors, most profitable to you, or both. That way,
you''ll have less work keeping the connection between availability and
appearance on your site.
The time lag expected in online sales is highly variable. Everything from
one day to one month is ''normal.'' Figure out what kind of time lag you expect,
double it, and tell your customer.
Customer and Order Management
Whether or not you are moving from a paper-based system, you should have a
tight grip on your customer and ordering information. This information
is the bloodstream of your e-business, and it''s critical to keep it
available at all times.
While there are myriad software packages to help you do this, any system is adequate
if it gives you access to:
Customer Personal Details - name, contact numbers, mailing address, company name etc.
Ordering History;
Details of individual orders and their status;
Financial details, account status, etc.
You need this information before you can adequately deliver anything. If you are
using a computerized system, take advantage of the technology by sending e-mail updates
to your customers when something relevant happens to their delivery schedule (such
as the completion of a phase of service or the arrival of an out-of-stock item).
Delivery and Fulfilment
Depending on the size and nature of your e-business, delivery can be a large
or small part of the job. In either case, it is of vital importance that
you take care of it. Automate it if the cost-benefit picture looks right,
but automate your staff to be constantly on guard for deliveries ''lost
in cyberspace.''
Getting paid is just as important. On the Internet, watch out for expensive
payment methods (foreign checks can be tricky). Stick to simple methods, or
at least methods which involve others worrying (credit card companies being perhaps
the best example). Don''t forget to keep an eye on the Net for the up-and-coming
e-payment systems.
Monitoring
Whatever you do, it''s important to realise that the whole purpose of the
back end of your e-business is to match up to the front end: to
actually deliver and get paid for the product or service you are selling.
Monitoring, whether software-mediated or done by hand, is critical to
measuring the success (or failure) of your enterprise.
If you are outsourcing large parts of the work in setting up or running
your e-business, expect the level of reporting and responsibility of your supplier
to match your investment in her. It is often useful to pay your
''presence provider'' using commission on sales (and we sometimes charge this way).
A few things you should try to get information on:
Statistics from access logs will give you information
on how site traffic to your site is progressing, and roughly what
kind of people are coming in. This ''first cut'' is afast-and-cheap
way to judge your site''s performance, but treat any mention of ''hits''
with caution.
Advertising tracking information should always be
available to you so that you can track where visitors come from
to your site, and hopefully what they do when they come in. You''re
paying for the ads, so try to find out whether your paying to get
customers in, or just lurkers.
Penetration Rates are statistics outlining how many people
ended up transacting business, out of (i) total visitors, (ii) people
who made enquiries, (iii) people who looked at product information pages,
and so on. You''ll probably need to use some kind of cookie-based
tracking system to get this information.
Bear in mind that some patience will be helpful here. The Internet is, as
Bill Gates said, a place where a lot of people are going to make a lot of money.
He also said that it''d be made by people we don''t expect in ways we don''t expect.
As long as he''s not referring to himself, he''s right. It''s not easy, takes a long
time, and sometimes doesn''t happen at all.
So, while digesting that cautionary morsel, let''s do a
final recap.
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