We may not think of it as a trick of the trade, but one thing every successful retailer does is spend time on his sales floor.  In this VIEWPOINT we are going to take a mid-day walk of your webstore’s sales floor.  We’ll have a look at four aspects of improving performance in your online store.  

Are the product displays effective?  Show windows, end-aisle displays, treasure islands, clearance bins, impulse displays – all these merchandising areas play a role informing customers about what your store has to offer and motivating customers to add an item or two to their purchase.  Every real-world product display situation has an online equivalent.  The home page creates a first impression for a webstore visitor just like a show window does for a walk-in customer.  On-site banner ads create product awareness just like end-aisle displays.  And if your webstore’s top-level product categories don’t include a clearance category, you need to get one added today.

Designing effective product displays online is every bit as important as in a real-world store.  Product groupings must be attractive to the eye, with consistent image rendering, consistent information placement, and consistent use of fonts and colors.  Product groupings must be targeted to a specific small, or large, customer group.  At every opportunity, product groupings must subtly, or boldly, suggest related-item purchases.  Every one of your real-world store product display best-practices has a webstore application.  Are they all in place?

What’s selling and why?  “What’s selling?” is the one question always asked during a walk-through inspection of the sales floor.  Informed answers to “what’s selling?” are valuable first indicators about current company performance in store merchandising, pricing strategies, inventory buying, product distribution, and competitive positioning. 

In a mid-day walk through your webstore, hourly and daily sales logs must be reviewed.  Not only will you get answers to what’s selling, but you will also get useful feedback on number of shoppers, closure rate and transaction value.  Is there unusual visitor or purchase activity?  Is an unexpected spike or slump in sales an early indication your webstore product displays need to be revised?  Are there any indications of broken links or misdirected navigation that require immediate correction?  You need to regularly monitor traffic and sales logs to make sure that all is well on the sales floor of your online store.     

Are customers being served?  There is nothing a retailer likes to see less than customers wandering around the sales floor lost, bewildered, or unable to find what they are looking for.  Online retail statistics can provide insight into these circumstances for webstores.  Given the ease with which visitors can enter and exit your website, there is little use in directly comparing traffic counts and closure rates.  However, other selling ratios can be compared, including average sale, frequency of purchase, gross margin per sale, and sell-though performance by item, in particular, items being given prominent display in your webstore. 

These and other performance indicators provide clear evidence of your webstore’s customer service success.  What is today’s rate of shopping cart abandonment, and where are carts being abandoned?  What is today’s turnaround time on order fulfillment?  What is today’s response time to customer e-mail and telephone queries?  How many returned purchases have occurred today?  And why?  Asking and answering these questions, including asking customers, is the best way to ensure customers are being served – with excellence.

Is the express lane open?  Our last stop on your webstore sales floor is at the customer check-out.  Do your webstore activity logs indicating any delay in processing customer orders?  Are your payment-processor partners achieving acceptable turn-around times?  Are your delivery service partners responding quickly enough with delivery fee quotations and pick-up and delivery schedules?  Is your three-click-to-buy express shopping cart being offered to customers who know exactly what they want to purchase?  Making it quick and easy for customers, online and offline, to make their purchase may be the single most important factor in gaining and keeping a loyal customer.  

As today’s walk through your webstore sales floor is intended to demonstrate, selling online is far more similar to selling in other sales environments than it is different.  One final word - while much of today’s discussion focused on reviewing performance information generated about your webstore, you must never bypass the other side of walking your online sales floor.  Take 15-minutes to surf your webstore, starting from the home page through to submitting an order.  If your shopping experience is in anyway less than spectacular, get your webstore management team together and start planning improvements to your webstore’s shopping experience. 

Along with walking your online sales floor, another daily habit I recommend is a visit to bricksNclicksPROFITS.com.  We present Internet-integration advice for progressive, multi-channel retailers - from VIEWPOINT and from other web-strategy expert articles linked to bricksNclicksPROFITS.com.

Happy retailing,

Peter

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