Are you getting an e-commerce website? Or upgrading? Or have you had one for a while?
Either way – a lot of small business e-commerce websites miss this critical element.
That critical element is you.
You are what makes your business unique when people walk into your store. Don’t make your website bland and generic.
- Include a blog
- Add videos of you demonstrating the product
- Include how-tos and suggestions
- Provide advice on pairing products and “this goes with that” tips
- And the list goes on…
You would do this of someone walked in to your physical store. Do it online as well.
Transcript
This is a direct transcript of me talking, so it’s pretty conversational and may be hard to read. You have been warned 🙂
There’s a lot of small businesses getting online stores set up and moving to e-commerce in the current environment, which is great to see.
But there’s a really critical step that gets missed a lot of the time.
What is That critical step?
Let’s have a talk about that today.
G’day, my name’s Jason Foss and that critical step that we’re going to talk about. The thing that’s missing from a lot of small business e-commerce web sites is, quite frankly, you.
When somebody comes into your store, you don’t just stand behind the counter and ignore them until they actually get to the COUNTER and pay for their stuff and walk out the door.
That’s not that’s not what small business is built on.
You know, you have your knowledge, your experience, your advice on how things go together. If somebody came into your store, you would approach them and say “can I help you with anything?”, and you’d offer them some advice. You’d answer their questions.
And yet with a lot of small business E-commerce websites, products get uploaded and photos get uploaded and the descriptions arepretty brief & that’s all – like it’s a pretty cold environment and the thing that’s missing is you, really.
Just as important as uploading all of the products is getting what makes your business unique up there as well.
Run a blog, have some product tips and advice and how to use them. Some explainers. put together some things where this thing goes with that thing that goes with that thing. And here’s how they go together, the sorts of advice that you would offer somebody who came into your store.
You need to move them online as well.
They’re the sort of pages that are generally going to show up in Google. If Google rankings an important thing for you, whereas the general product pages generally won’t because product ‘X’ becomes pretty generic across the Web.
What makes it different is what you bring to it.
So make sure that you inject some of you into your e-commerce website.
Don’t just put up brief product descriptions and leave it at that.
You is what makes your small business unique.
You know you can’t compete against the likes of Amazon based on price, and even if you have a look at a product page on Amazon you’ll see the description is pretty detailed and there are reviews and there’s a lot of information around the product there to help people make a decision.
So although you’re not competing against Amazon on price, the level of knowledge and expertise and experience that you bring to the table is what you can, so make sure you put in the extra effort in terms of your product descriptions, your advice, additional content, a blog, a series of videos, whatever you feel comfortable doing.
But you definitely need to make sure that you inject you into the website.
And don’t just have a generic product list, because that’s not what your business is about. Tha’s not what your shop about, that’s not what your store is about.
Make sure that what happens online is a reflection of the level of service that you would expect to provide in store.