I read an amazing report recently*. It listed the performance of the 500 top retailers’ online stores, and what it found was that many very prominent retailers had websites that fail to perform well.
your website”>Many of the poor performers were online-only retailers such as Scotts of Stow, Home Shopping Direct and Grattan! It’s surprising that such retailers don’t pay more attention to their website effectiveness. After all, their website is all they’ve got: they have no physical shops from which to trade.
I see this as the equivalent of a physical retail shop trying to trade with its front door locked. Just imagine, you’re standing behind the counter waiting for your customers to flood in, but they can’t. What an absurd situation.
Other large and prominent retailers languishing at the bottom of the list include Muji at number 469 and Conran Shop Holdings at the very bottom.
A number of the best performers, on the other hand, are relatively small retailers. Actually, the top 20 hardly include any big names.
The report adds that it’s not about money being thrown at a problem. It’s more about getting the basics right, and many smaller retailers are doing just that, and delivering the goods to their online customers.
What this report is saying is that by spending relatively modest amounts on your website you can achieve real effectiveness in your e-commerce operations. Just get the basics right first. This can be achieved by using web designers and website marketers who have established their credentials by doing the job really well.
If you’re contemplating setting up a new website for your business or upgrading an existing one, make sure you speak to people (preferably other retailers) who have achieved success with their websites. Ideally, do this first: get it right first time. So, when you build your website, by all means have great images and compelling copy, but most of all don’t overlook the basics of getting it to work properly.
Don’t forget, too, that traditional retailing skills are every bit as important online as they are on the high street. Online, your customers are out of sight. You can’t see a queue building at the till, you never see somebody trying out a new piece of cooking kit, and you can’t wander around your store to see if you have enough product items on the shelves. Your online shop can be invisible to a certain extent, so you have to work at looking at the virtual stock on the shelves and the virtual queue at the till.
As e-commerce will continue to take an increasing share of the retail business, it really is just not an option to stand on the sidelines. If you want to achieve sustainable success in your retail business you have to be online – and not just online, but online in a truly effective way.
*Information from Sitemorse Q2 testing of Retail 500 online stores. The testing uses automated software that reads the first 125 pages of a website, page by page. It generates a ranked table based on checks of quality, user experience, accessibility, performance and SEO capability.
