Volusion, Inc., an e-commerce software provider, today began offering at its site a free live chat application for any vendor wanting to incorporate the feature into its Web store.
Live chat enables online merchants to communicate instantly with their Web store visitors and helps retain customers because those seeking answers to a question about a product or wanting more information can quickly get it while still shopping at the site.
Volusion Live Chat is a "hosted" application, meaning there's nothing to install on your servers and came about in response to customer queries. In a monthly meeting, members of Volusion's sales staff mentioned that several clients had asked questions on how to find and install third-party chat software on their sites. What started out as a way to make the documentation clearer quickly turned into the development of Volusion's own live chat software.
"Lots of folks pay $100 a month for this," said Clay Olivier, Volusion's chief operating officer, "but we're offering it for free. And it's quick, since speed is important."
Real-time live help at sites reduces the rate of drop-out customers and can be especially helpful for sites that sell luxury products. For instance, Isaac Gottesman, a Chicago-based diamond seller who owns dimendSCAASI, began using LivePerson's chat application a year ago and says sales have increased 26 percent.
"People looking to buy a diamond ring for $15,000 are not going to just click and add it to a shopping cart," says Gottesman. "It's not like a book at Amazon. They need to be educated and have a certain comfort level. They see a diamond at our site for a lot less than what they saw in another store and think it's too good to be true. But before they think 'I'm getting out of here, it can't be this cheap, something's up' we have a chance to talk to them and build confidence."
Gottesman says he initially thought live chat would be a waste of time and energy but was persuaded by his younger brother to try it. "I said, 'You're kidding. That's crazy, I'm too busy and not hiring more people to run it," says Gottesman, who has four employees. "But my brother convinced me to give it a shot. And it turned out to be super easy to install, I did it myself, I just cut and pasted the code to my pages. And we all can use it."
In his case, another benefit of live chat is that Gottesman can track what pages customer visit while shopping at his site, which can help him answer questions and suggest links to visit for more information. Gottesman's application also works with a real-time image program. "I can magnify the diamond 300 times, show it live with an annotation device so I can teach them what makes this diamond better than another," he says. "And it works with the chat so it's very close to the experience you get in the store, they see the laser inscription with the serial number and that it matches the certificate number at the Web site and all together it builds confidence with the customer."
If you want more information on how live chat works, see Vangie Beal's ECG story "Chatting Your Way to Success with Live Support."
And listen to this advice from Gottesman: "In this day and age you can not afford not to try it. If you're selling socks online, maybe you don't need it, but if you have a service business, especially for big-ticket items, you're committing suicide if you don't have the ability to let your customers click and get an answer right now."
Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
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