Making it easy for your customer to buy online should be top of your to-do list, but it often falls well down the list, behind looking after existing customers and taking out the rubbish. I know too well as a business owner all the demands on your time, but finding the time to spend on the best action always pays off. It’s deciding which actions need your time that can be the hardest. This article explores why you should focus on your digital strategy and why e-commerce is the gateway to more orders than you ever imagined.
When customers visit your website, they can probably find the products they want either by browsing your catalogue or searching for products they want. How often have you looked through your website or that of your competitors and thought, “I wonder how I could make it easier to buy?”. If you have a customer on account, the chances are they send you orders through some manual process. This manual process takes your staff time and can frustrate customers, especially those that order frequently.
In my experience, it’s because your industry hasn’t innovated yet. Everyone else takes orders in the same way, so why should you invest in e-commerce? I’ll tell you why the businesses I’ve helped transform their ordering process have grown, and not by just a little bit, by a lot! In some cases, 2-5x growth since they built their e-commerce site. Most of my clients tell me how e-commerce has changed the way they do business. And when it doesn’t work, or something breaks, I also know all about it, because they’re hot on our support team to get things running again (not that it happens that often, but you could imagine the stress when your primary source of orders has a slight wrinkle, even if for a few minutes).
You sure can. We’ve helped companies decrease the time taken for a customer to order from a standard order list (their favourites) and push the order through the cart process as a preferred customer. Those customers even can order on account, invoiced later through their existing back-office process. For retail customers, the ability to see what you ordered last, when and how frequently is helpful to confirm your purchase, especially if you only order a specialist product every few months.