Less than a year ago, you could be forgiven for thinking that your e-commerce efforts were just a minor add-on to your bricks and mortar business. Sure, you needed a website so potential customers could find your phone number and address, and maybe get an idea of the products. Having the facility for customers to purchase online, take delivery, and happily enjoy their product without coming to your physical address seemed an unnecessary luxury for the exceptional few.

Skip forward one year and one global pandemic (still underway). Are you still trying to get people in your door? Are you still thinking of e-commerce as a nice-to-have instead of essential?

The only thing worse than an abandoned or out-of-date website is an abandoned e-commerce effort. Or one that doesn’t function well. To potential customers, it creates more questions than it answers: are they still open? are they legit? am I giving my credit card number to the Russian mob? For the truly uninitiated, this is called a poor customer experience.

Canada has been particularly slow to take up online selling, coming in at only 10% of total, surprising given our geographic challenges. But let’s be fair. It’s not easy to build a quality online sales platform and develop business processes that will support it, particularly during a period of crisis and chaos and staffing problems and confusion. My heart goes out to businesses that were humming along quite nicely without a significant online presence in late 2019, feeling confident that that would continue.

One way to look at your e-commerce site is to think of it as your best sales person. If you have a superstar in sales you make sure that everyone else in the organization supports them and gets out of their way. You’d give them what they need to work with the customer, close the deal, then hand it over to operations to fill the orders and follow up.

What are the attributes of this salesperson in your business? Knowledgeable, personable, easy to get along with, quick to respond and to follow up, attentive but not pushy, under-promises and over-delivers? Feel free to name your e-commerce site after your favourite superstar (a little Barbara Corcoran anyone?)

The most successful sales people understand that their customers join them in a exploration of their needs, wants, and desires. This joint adventure can lead to growth, joy and discovery. Can you bring that to your e-commerce site?

This point of view can help define the customer experience. I know that just getting the damn thing up and running is challenging enough, but when you’re making those thousand small choices, keep the customer experience in mind by imagining they are dealing with a person, as opposed to a piece of tech. Then give them both the support they need.

Yours in online shopping

Linda