Top Strategies for Online Selling for Small and Medium Size Retailers

Keeping Up with Your Online Customers
How It Pays Off - Part 1

by George Kiorpelidis Jr

According to Sridhar Ramaswamy (Google’s SVP of Ads and Commerce) the way people shop is changing. Here’s a real world example. 

My wife was a freelancer working from home, going to the shopping center for a break in her day and doing a little shopping was fairly easy to do. Now she works for a large firm, has to commute downtown every day and the last thing she wants to do is be surrounded by people in a mall to wait in line to pay for something that took her 30 minutes of wandering around the store to find , sounds exhausting doesn't it.

What’s changed, now she takes that same 30 minutes while on the train and opens her email offers from her favorite online malls like Beyond the Rack and eLux and picks from the items that they believe she will like, and the boxes keep arriving at the house. She gets what she wants, the service is great and if she’s not happy all she does is put it back in the box and leave it outside the door for a return pick up.

More and more people are choosing to shop this way. According to the Financial Post, Canadian online retail sales at $18 Billion in 2010 are expected to rise to $32 billion by 2016. Companies like The Bay, Target and Home Depot are spending millions on their online marketing. How can a small retailer compete with this? It’s hard work but it's not complicated and I'll show you how.

Where to Start?

As savvy retailers know, service is the key to success. That's how we compete with the big players. We know our clientele and can quickly respond to their needs. Giving your customers what they want when they want it and how they want it.

In the past a customer came in off the street and a sales person had to learn what they wanted and then matched a product to those needs. Now customers usually know more than the salesperson and don't particularly want to spend a lot of time discussing it with them.

Step 1 

If you don't already have a website, get one. They are inexpensive and easy to find, your internet provider can probably host a site for you at little or no extra cost. If not check out GoDaddy or BlueHost they offer a very good service to price ratio.

Step 2

Create a shopping cart for your website. Now I know what you're thinking, who has time or a budget for that. We all know that retail is like the ocean, customers come in waves. Take advantage of slow periods and task an employee to add so many items per day on the website. In a few months it will all be done, the time will pass anyways so you may as well profit from it. No one knows your products and how to make them sound good to your customers better than you do, so get creative.

As for the costing factor, the two companies I mentioned above offer online shopping carts like OpenCart that are absolutely free! Now to be sure these free carts offer no support and few bells and whistles but they will put you products front and center for your customers to find. For more advanced online shopping carts I recommend BigCommerce or Volusion you can start for as little as $30 a month and they both offer top customer service and many attractive themes that you can use to give your online store a personality that matches your actual store.

Thanks for reading and I hope it inspires you to take action.

Come back next week when we will talk about how to learn what your customers want without having to ask them.

George is an experienced retailer and the marketing director of New World Collections, wholesale distributors servicing small and medium size retailers in Canada.

www.newworldcollections.ca