Do Retailers Need To Become Publishers?

As online retail becomes more crowded and competitive, everybody is looking for an edge. Web 2.0 phenomena such as video, user-generated content and social media are getting a lot of attention and money because they promise that edge. Retailers are just starting to experiment with these, so of course there have already been some failures. Wal-Mart seems to have a particularly hard time figuring out how to use Web 2.0 without embarrassing themselves.

One ecommerce retailer, BabyUniverse, is transforming itself into a publisher in an effort to generate ad revenue and, no doubt, generate more sales to its store. In launching BabyTV.com, they are in effect running an internet TV station. Pregnant moms are a pretty good target audience for this--deeply engaged and seeking community. Etailer Buy.com has taken a more modest approach with its BuyTV, and it appears to be a successful marketing and conversion tool for them.

Are there useful lessons here for humble furniture retailers selling online? At the very least, it's worth keeping a close eye on these kinds of efforts. Understanding what's working, what's not, and why will help you decide when you should start experimenting too.

Better Copywriting in 10 Minutes!

Just kidding. Writing well is hard. Copywriting, or writing with the intent to persuade someone to buy something, is a bit easier. Instead of a blank page, you at least have some features to start with. Taking a list of apparently random features and turning it into a persuasive story is the topic of countless books and correspondence courses. Don't have the next 6 months to devote to perfecting your craft? Here are some guidelines you can follow to get started:

Keep it simple.
This means short sentences written with short words. Even smart people understand short sentences better than long ones. Long, complicated sentences make eyes glaze over. Use a big word instead of a small one and you're likely to annoy or confuse. For a detailed look at the virtues of simplicity, read Can Your Customers Read What You Write?

Use active voice.
This goes with "keep it simple". Simplify a sentence by using an active verb; your copy will be stronger for it. Here's what I mean:
Passive Voice:

This table is distinguished by intricate hand-carved detail which is performed by skilled artisans.

Active Voice:

A skilled artisan carves each table base and chair back with intricate detail.

It's not Shakespeare, but it says more with fewer words. The verb "carves" creates a more vivid picture in your mind than the passive "is distinguished by" and "is performed by".

Verbs rule, adjectives drool
That may sound like something your 6 year-old would say, but it's true. It's also difficult. Nevertheless, action verbs will engage the reader far better than adjectives. Here's a great article on the topic called How Verbs Help You Convert from the GrokDotCom newsletter.

What's in it for me?
No, not you, the customer. If you're given 10 product features, think about which 3 of those are most likely to matter to the consumer. Manufacturers routinely list all kinds of features that consumers couldn't care less about. Effective selling means putting yourself in the customer's shoes. As Daphne Gray-Grant writes,

...when you’re writing copy, you need to get out of the “here’s what I want tell you” attitude and into the “what does my reader want to hear?” mentality. (read the rest of her article "How to Write Copy That People Actually Want to Read")

There is much, much more to writing persuasive copy than this. Write with these four rules in mind and your copywriting will be more effective, guaranteed. This is not to say that Mitch Speers is an exceptional copywriter who can tell you most everything you need to know about selling with words. However, in my experience, these are the areas where people have the most diffuculty.
Other Resources:

I've written on this topic before. You may want to read "Getting Emotional" and "Are You Speaking Your Customers' Language?" You'll also want to look at the links in the Recommended Resources section at the top of this page. Nearly all of them have good information about effective copywriting.

Read Seth Godin

If you haven't read anything by Seth Godin, go now to changethis.com. He has great ideas and expresses them simply, without buzzwords or jargon. As soon as I read something of his (The Bootstrapper's Bible), I was hooked, and you will be too.

Should Your Customers Trust You?

As ecommerce volume rises during the holidays, so does online fraud. It's a significant problem, and one that is beginning to affect smaller merchants more. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to build consumer confidence in retail ecommerce sites. I generally assume that a merchant has good fraud prevention processes in place, but that is not always true.

If you're not sure you're doing everything necessary to protect your customers and your business from fraud and theft, it's time to do an audit.

Here are some basics:

• Don't store credit card numbers. After the order is processed, get rid of them.
• Don't rely on automated approvals for payment. An experienced staffer will outperform most automated fraud prevention systems.
• Consider getting 3rd-party verification of your fraud prevention measures, but don't be fooled into thinking that such verification, by itself, is all you need to do. I've seen merchants who pay for a "HackerSafe" badge on their website do nothing else to protect themselves. Bad idea.
• Do you promote gift certificates? These are popular targets for fraud.
• Does your site, webhost and shopping cart meet the latest Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard?
• Is your shopping cart truly secure? Do you use the highest level of SSL encryption? Has your site and your local area network been scanned for vulnerabilities?
  

If you or someone in your company isn't very clear on answers to these kinds of questions, you could be vulnerable. Large retailers have staff and budget dedicated to fraud prevention, but even small retailers can protect themselves and their customers with the right preparation.

Resources:
Merchant Risk Council (a nonprofit antifraud group that represents about 100 online retailers.)
ScanAlert (Sells the HACKER SAFE® ecommerce security certification service)
Thawte (Sells authentication, encryption and certification authority services)

Google Website Optimizer

Google is rolling out a new service called Website Optimizer that is designed to allow companies to perform real A/B or multivariate testing on their landing pages.

Why would you want to do that? It will allow you to know (not guess) whether a change to a page improves conversion or not. Sounds simple, but doing this in a statistically rigorous fashion on a website has required either buying special software, or services, or both. Now Google is offering it free. I've requested access (it's in invitation-only phase now) and am looking forward to trying it out with my clients.

For some good preliminary advice to testing newbies, take a look at Four Steps to More Effective Web Site Testing by conversion guru Bryan Eisenberg.

Also, I should mention that another free Google product that has shaken things up, Google Analytics, is now my standard recommendation to retailers in need of an analytics solution. It's not perfect, and it's not easy finding an expert to help you configure it. However, it delivers enterprise-class functionality for...free. Hard to beat that.

Wireframes & Gorillas

At the beginning of a new website project, I like to build a "wireframe site". Often clients misunderstand the intent of the wireframe and want to jump right into what it looks like instead of how it's put together. Recently I sent this explanation of the wireframe concept to a client, and it appears to have done the trick.

A wireframe is like a woman's skeleton--it shows how the parts will fit together, but tells you very little about how pretty she is. We want to check the wireframe carefully to make sure we haven't given her a gorilla skeleton by mistake, before we get distracted by thinking about what color dress she should wear. Colors, shapes, fonts, images etc. are all to be ignored at this stage.

Once approved, the wireframe will serve as the functional template we'll use to clearly communicate what's to be done to designers and coders. We can show them how each page type needs to work without building out every single page.

Wireframes are a critical tool to help site owners to focus on structure, navigation and flow without being distracted by colors and images. They save a lot of expensive re-work later in the design & development process. Why do this? Here's what Richard Saul Wurman said in "Information Anxiety 2":

There are two parts to solving any problem: What you want to accomplish, and how you want to do it. Even the most creative people attack issues by leaping over what they want to do and going on to how they will do it. There are many "hows" but only one "what".... You must always ask the question, "What is?" before you ask the question, "How to?"