Taking a Small Retailer On-Line

Most small retailers recognize that having a website is a valuable marketing tool. A well-developed website not only provides potential customers with information about the retailer and their products, it is also a critical tool for branding a small business in the customer’s mind, communicating the passion and drive that animates the retailer, and differentiating the business from the competition.

The internet, however, also offers small retailers the opportunity to capture additional sales through ecommerce. It dramatically expands the geographical reach of the business. It leverages the equity a retailer has built in its chosen niche. Most importantly, for many potential customers, the internet has become the preferred channel for niche or specialty products, the province of small retailers.

Many small retailers have established on-line stores to augment their retail business, but if you haven’t, it’s time to get started.

Getting Started
Your objective is to build an ecommerce site that will leverage the brand equity that you’ve built up with your store. Your brand equity is the understanding that your customers have of exactly what you mean to them. It is what they think of when they think of you. It is the sum of the experiences they’ve had with you. It is the source of their loyalty to you, and your assurance of future success. It is the means by which you differentiate yourself from your competition.

Your website must leverage this understanding. It is where you translate your retail customer experience to the web. Your site is the nexus where strategic positioning, merchandise assortments, written copy, visual presentation, pricing, and customer service all come together to create a comprehensive whole, more significant and compelling than the sum of the individual parts. To create the identity that you want for your website requires a singular vision that encompasses all of these elements.

Acquire ecommerce software
Many order processing and point-of-sale software packages have ecommerce capabilities already integrated into them, but many do not, especially those targeted to smaller retailers. Acquiring software that can be integrated seamlessly with your order processing or point-of-sale software is the first step in the process of building an ecommerce presence on-line.

For an internet customer, your website represents their initial impression of you. However positive that first impression is, their next impression is even more critical, and that’s the ease with which they can process an order with you. No retail eCommerce site can succeed without having the basics down cold; easy navigation and a shallow architecture, a seamless flow from shopping cart to payment and credit card processing through customer receipt and confirmation, shipment notification and tracking, to returns processing. These customer-facing basics are essential to affirming a memorable shopping experience. 

There is no room for error. Without the proper ecommerce software, and without integrating it seamlessly with your other systems, than all of your other efforts to develop an ecommerce presence on the web will be for naught.

Determine what you’re going to sell
Like any retailer, merchandising basics hold true for internet retailers. Inventory is the most significant asset for an internet retailer, and effectively managing that investment is critical to success. Excess inventories, whether a result of too much depth or overly broad assortments, invariably leads to heavy markdowns, eroded margins and weak cash flow. Effective category management and item replenishment keep the inventory turning and the cash flow coming.

For many small retailers, the inventory management practices for supporting an ecommerce presence are similar to a retail store. In a retail environment, if a particular item is out of stock, there may be an opportunity to still capture the sale with an acceptable alternative. In the ecommerce world, however, if you’re out of stock, you’ve likely lost the sale. If the item is an in-stock basis, you’ve got a problem until the next shipment arrives. If it’s fashion item that’s not been reordered, the item has to be immediately pulled down from the site, while another goes up to take it’s place in the assortment.

This is where category management comes in. Planning a season to support an ecommerce site is the same as planning a season for a retail store. You have to start with a detailed sales plan, by month by category, and then plan inventory to support those sales plans. From there you can back into monthly merchandise receipt plans that allow you to continually flow in new styles, and keep your offering fresh.

In selecting the things you are going to offer to sell, you must carefully balance the stock levels you’re going to need to maintain with how much you reasonably expect to sell of that item. Turning over inventory and generating a return on your inventory investment is just as important for an ecommerce site as it is for a retail store.

Make sure you are ready operationally
Once your website is up, it may take a bit of time before customers find it and the orders start flowing in, but once they do start flowing, you must be able to handle the volume. It’s critical that your operation is ready to process these orders expeditiously, pick and pack them accurately, and ship them out as quickly as possible. And all without negatively impacting your core retail business.

Review your operational processes and procedures to be sure you’re ready to take on this added volume. Don’t wait for the orders to start coming in before you look at how you’re going to deal with them.

Determine how you are going to develop your website
Building and managing a successful ecommerce site will require skills and expertise that you may not have in-house. You may want to seriously consider outsourcing the technical work of building your site. Outsourcing will provide you with the skills and expertise you will need but not necessarily the detailed, nuanced understanding of your business, products, services, and customers.

On the other hand, if your product line is extensive and you have the operational capabilities to process a significant influx of ecommerce orders, building and managing your site in-house may justify a full-time hire. Whether you outsource this work or ramp up to handle it in-house, you must be prepared to dedicate the personal time and attention necessary for any significant business project.

Write compelling copy, create memorable web pages
The lifeblood of any website is the written word. Photographs, diagrams and charts are also essential to communicating the features and benefits of your products and services, but the information which will motivate a visitor to take action and place an order can only be imparted through compelling copy. Copy which focuses on the customer, on the benefits the customer will derive from your product or service, and how it will make your customer feel, is copy which will drive sales.

There’s another important reason to focus considerable time and attention on your copy. When your potential customers search for your product or service, they will likely use a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. These search engines will index your website based on the copy on each webpage.  Web pages with copy that are rich in descriptive keywords will generally rank higher in the search engine’s search results than pages that aren’t as rich. This search engine optimization (SEO) is critical to attracting customers to your site.

Monitor, measure and manage your website
Once it goes up, you will need to track the effectiveness of your website. This is another area where an outsourced or in-house specialist can make a significant contribution. You will want to track the number of hits to your site, the keywords used to find your site, your positioning in search engines, and then as sales begin to build, sales per hit, sales by keyword, and units per order, among many, many others. What you track will largely be dependent upon the specific nature of your products and website.

As you learn what is working well for you and what is not, you will need to constantly revise and update your website. In addition to the normal additions and deletions to product offerings, you will need to tweak your copy to add keywords and increase keyword density.

Keep an eye on the competition
Just as you closely monitor your retail competition, you must also monitor your internet competition. But in addition to keeping an eye on their product assortments and prices, you must also monitor the quality and performance of competitive websites. Are their presentations cleaner? Are their links between pages easier to follow? Do they have more compelling copy and a more memorable presentation? Do they have greater keyword density in their copy? Are they using keywords that you haven’t considered? Most importantly, are they coming up higher on search engine results for critical key words, thus generating a greater number of hits to their site?

Many small retailers have seen the internet contribute an ever-increasing percentage of sales to their overall business. To take your business on-line is no small project. As ecommerce continues to penetrate into additional categories and gains an increasing share of the consumer’s dollar, however, no small retailer can afford to continue to overlook this potential source of additional revenue.