If one of your site objectives is revenue generation then there is good news and bad news. Firstly recent figures show that 44% of shoppers buy online and 10% of all sales occured online.
This shows there is a lot of money waiting to be spent at your site. Interestingly and inspite of technology there are still some tactical similarities between on and offline retailing like showcasing products, make it easy to buy, and price competitively.
However new Web 2.0 technology from Pronto.com has just made online a tougher place to be for a retailer but a great space if you are the consumer looking for a bargain…..
64% of consumers use a price comparison engine before purchasing, but now that is done for you on the fly by a great Firefox add-on.
Whilst the consumer is browsing and a product is selected, Pronto tells you where the best available price online is, automatically. This is only available in the US at the moment but watch out UK retailers. Competitive pricing is all the more important and now a 24/7 job.
I will end on an example of improving revenues we have recently achieved for one of our clients, which takes me back to one of the offline tactics we began with. We were looking at the homepage layout of our client’s website and testing different product placements. We simply moved a product offer from bottom right on the homepage to a tab in it’s own right, in the main navigation. The result, sales tripled in a week!!!!! Just goes to show that your website should be constantly under review, dont be scared to shake things up.
