I saw a very interesting article on the Financial Times online today and thought I would share it here.  Entitled “Maturing ecommerce means web retailers must think differently” Michael Ross, director at eCommera, put some interesting points forward for small businesses.

Read highlights below or the full article here

...But the indicators of ecommerce’s problems are not so obvious as long queues or a tired looking store front are to a physical high street retailer.

For online retailers, store layout means optimising the position of their most popular and most profitable products; check-out queues equate to the ease and speed of completing an order and the time from order to delivery. For the friendliness of the affable village butcher, online retailers must think about their after sales care and the tone and tailoring of their outreach.

Online, a company with a compelling and competitive service has an almost infinite catchment area, and it is often the big names who are investing most in understanding the science of effective retail and will prevail in the land grab.

So to avoid going the way of local stores, squeezed out by the major players – the supermarkets of the physical world – online retailers of all sizes must monitor and understand the importance of several key metrics.

First comes the number of visits and orders, and the source of traffic. This allows more sophisticated analysis than physical in-store footfall as it not only reveals total consumer number but also how they are finding the site – whether driven by direct marketing, banner ads, affiliates, search or other means…

And finally, the most obvious KPI for businesses to monitor – customer satisfaction. Many say they do so but their methodology is often based on the wrong metrics.

Businesses need a holistic view of end-to-end customer service and the efficiency of the website and back-end in delivering what those consumers want, when they want it…