Part 2: Retail Wrongs

The core focus of the company is on sales and selling on the web. With all the statistics showing just what a bad job most sites are doing, what do you think are the broad mistakes that retail site owners and their web designers are making?
Let me begin by quoting Roy H. Williams. For those of your readers who don't know Roy, he wrote the number one best selling business book for 1998 and the number one best selling business book for 1999, according to the Wall Street Journal. After meeting with us in New York, he dedicated an issue of his weekly newsletter to us. He suggested web developers in general and e-business owners in particular need to realize they have been building digital stores, stocking them with digital merchandise, but not even thinking about staffing them with what we call Digital Salespeople™. He continued with a challenge: "Don't think salespeople matter? Fine, fire yours and tell me how you do."

In our experience the teams designing and developing e-commerce sites, talented and dedicated as they may be, do not include a sales expert, much less a sales expert who knows how to apply that expertise to the execution of the website. Add to that the outmoded, but still prevailing, paradigm of a website as a "beautiful" interactive catalog, and it's no wonder that the very best these sites can do is allow the customer to buy. That is light years away from guiding the prospect through the buying experience, closing the sale, and leaving them delighted, as well.

So a fundamental problem is that there is no sales process; customers simply aren't being sold. Beyond that are slow download speeds, confusing layouts, poor navigation and usability, a lack of customer focus, too many graphics, weak copy; unfortunately the list is almost endless. Also, you can't look at a site in a vacuum. Enough has been written about terrible customer service and poor fulfillment that I hope we will begin to see real improvements at last. It's also frustrating that there is so much good information and research data available now on what works and what doesn't that we didn't have even three years ago, but most developers continue to ignore it. The result is, unknowingly, clients are still paying small fortunes to large consultancies for e-commerce approaches that have already been proven to fail.

There also are two myths in the way. One is because the web is self-service, you can't actually sell on the web, the best you can do is hope your customers will buy. It's a myth created, if you will forgive me, by people who don't know how to do it. We know how, and we're proving it can be done every day. But because most developers start with the belief it can't be done, and it's not their expertise anyway, they don't even try.

The other myth is the Internet has "changed everything." Forgive me again, but that falls under believing your own hype. Certainly the net empowers consumers - and companies - in ways we couldn't even have imagined a few years ago. But the Internet has not changed buyer psychology any more than the fax or the phone or the telegraph did, and if you want proof, just look at all the red ink and dot-bombs that are the result of believing otherwise. I could go on for a few more hours. You probably should hit me with another question before I do!

Continued...