Chapter 3. Architecting Your Online Storefront

Long before carpenters assemble the framework, the plumbers lay the pipes, the electricians run the wires, and the dry-wallers and painters finish the job, the architect designed the plans for a retail storefront. It’s the same for an online store. In this case, however, the programmers and graphic designers build the store, and you must first architect your e-commerce site.

Architecting your e-commerce site is the first step of customization (and improving the performance of your Yahoo! store), and it happens long before you put mouse to pad and program your storefront. In this chapter, we discuss the basic elements that should be designed into your e-commerce website; in the next chapter, we show you how to “storyboard” your website pages.

Website Development Versus E-Commerce Site Development

There’s a big difference between developing a standard website and developing an e-commerce website. Not every Web developer is an e-commerce site developer. The difference between developing a standard website such as a personal home page and a corporate information site (what’s known in the trade as brochureware) is that the unique selling position (USP) of a business is designed into the e-commerce site while it’s being created.

Let’s explain. When creating a normal, noncommerce website, the developer works from a standard set of pages, such as a home page, an about page, a contact page, and content pages. When this same type of Web-development process is applied to an e-commerce site, the Web developer throws in the product or service pages and a shopping cart to store and process orders. How the e-commerce site will be marketed is an afterthought, examined after the e-commerce site is developed. The selling position is not built directly into the design of the site.

In many cases, unless the Web developer has knowledge of selling, the site isn’t put together from an e-commerce standpoint: The home page is just a description of the company and its products. The product or service pages are not written with an eye to closing a sale. The copy of the different Web pages themselves is not optimized for search engines to find the site. Content and community pages are not used much outside the product or service pages to promote the products or services. Little attempt is made to exploit external marketing, and no internal marketing is used.

The Three Cs

Maintaining an e-commerce website is more than just selling a product or service. That is, there’s more than commerce in a well-thought-out e-commerce site.

A good e-commerce website contains the three Cs of e-commerce:

• Content —Selling products and services in a context relevant to your customers

• Community —Creating an online environment in which visitors and customers can interact

• Commerce —Creating revenue-generating streams for your storefront

That’s the e-commerce site equation. Content builds community, which establishes credibility, which generates sales.

Content: Turn Your Site into a Learning Fountain

Content is king on the Net. People use the Net to learn. That’s what drives visitors to a website. Content can consist of information and community participation—and even your e-commerce offers are considered content. Your site’s content—whether it is information, community participation, or a product or service offer—must be interesting enough to make visitors come to your site, stay, and keep coming back for more.

Keep in mind that your content does not have to be closely related to your product, but it should meet your prospective customers’ needs and desires. You need to make your Web store not only a place to buy things, but also a “Learning Fountain.”

That’s what Paul Siegel recommends. Siegel is an author, Internet marketing consultant, trainer, and speaker. He is the originator of the Learning Fountain, at www.learningfountain.com (see Figure 3.1), a website that influences visitors by helping them learn. He is known for saying, “A Learning Fountain is a website that attracts prospects—not merely visitors—by helping them learn. While learning, they linger and buy.”

Figure 3.1. Paul Siegel’s site is a great resource if you want to turn your site into a Learning Fountain.

Siegel divides content Learning Fountains into four types:

• Referrer

• Informer

• Advisor

• Context provider

The Referrer

No one knows the product or service you’re selling better than you do. So use this knowledge to help your visitors understand all aspects of the product or service you sell. You might not have all the information they need, but with a little research, you can create a directory of sites on the Net that can provide the information visitors need and refer them to it.

For example, suppose you sell computer products. You could provide on your site a long list of product reviews comparing one product you sell to another. That would be a very time-consuming task. So instead, you could refer visitors to sites that specialize in these reviews, such as ZDNet, at www.reviews-zdnet.com.com (see Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2. ZDNet is chock full of reviews on personal electronics and computer gear.

But keep this caveat in mind: Be careful about where those sites send their customers. Many sites have reviews but also have links to preferred providers or AdWords ads to competitor sites with those products. Once someone goes off your site, you have no control over that person’s experience. One way around this potential problem is to get permission from the content site to “Reprint with Permission.” This way, your shoppers stay on your site.

Or suppose you sell tools for the do-it-yourself home improvement. You can refer visitors to ImproveNet, at www.improvenet.com, which then will direct customers to design ideas and project estimators.

The Informer

Providing regular updated information on your site that is of practical use to visitors will bring them to your site and generate repeat visits. Include access to the latest news and articles. YellowBrix, at www.yellowbrix.com, aggregates content from hundreds of different providers in categories such as top news and weather, sports news, business and finance, entertainment, and lifestyles.

The Advisor

To make a buying decision, many shoppers need advice. By making product advice available to your shoppers, you increase the possibility of making a sale. For advice to work, it must be trusted and credible.

A good example of this kind of advice is at Amazon.com. This site pioneered the concept of reader reviews for the books it sells. Anyone who has purchased and read the book being offered for sale can write a review. A peer review looks more objective to a potential customer and increases the possibility of a purchase. Shoppers trust other consumers’ opinions more than they trust the advertisers.

The Context Provider

Providing informational tools to shoppers to help them make a buying decision is another important content feature for your Web store. Consider giving the shopper the capability to solve a problem or determine a need in the context of your site using online tools, such as checklists, calculators, evaluators, and simulators.

Context-specific information can be either product specific or shopping specific.

First, let’s look at the product-specific tools. Suppose you had a mortgage brokerage service on the Web. To help shoppers of your service make a buying decision, you might offer them a mortgage calculator on your site. They could calculate their monthly mortgage payment based on the type of mortgage they want, the interest rate, and any other options that would be available with the service.

Your context-specific information need not be product specific. You could offer several shopping tools at your site to make the shopping experience for consumers more helpful. You could offer some useful general tools at your Web store, such as links to currency exchanges, international holiday listings, and a world time calculator.

Community: Building an Interactive Community

Siegel had one more important Learning Fountain: the Learning Community. People go online not just to be informed, but also to interact with other people. Filling this need at your Web store will help you turn shoppers into customers, and customers into repeat buyers.

Content can attract shoppers to your site. But to generate a continuous flow of repeat visitors, you need to provide access to an interactive community. Community is just as important as content when planning an e-commerce site. If done right, community features on your site will increase the number of page views per visit, giving you opportunities to offer more merchandise to your shoppers.

Establishing a Learning Community can help shoppers develop expertise by interacting with other shoppers who visit your site. Asking questions, discussing problems, raising issues, and enjoying the general camaraderie that develops in an interactive community breeds a kind of loyalty that is beneficial to the success of your Web store. And loyalty breeds repeat visits.

Another benefit of an interactive community is that it can add content to your site. Discussion boards and forums, chat rooms, and discussion lists can provide content by their very nature of generating information. For example, each day, you might post a short quote from one of your forums or discussion lists as fresh content to generate interest in a product or offer. This type of content can act as a traffic magnet, bringing continuous visitors to your site. Community-interaction devices, such as discussion boards and forums, chat rooms, and discussion lists, are also a great source for new product ideas and can improve your customer service, packaging, instructions, download process, and shipping methods.

You should include as many interactive community tools as possible on your website. The major tools of the interactive community are discussion boards or forums, chat rooms, discussion lists, newsletters, and, the new kid on the block, blogs. Yahoo! Small Business has integrated with two of the top blogging tools: Moveable Type and Word Press. Blogs focus on short bits of frequently updated topics, but they also foster community through comments. The blog owner also has some control by moderating comments before they’re posted, so this could be better than a wide-open forum or chat.

To choose a blogging tool and create a blog, follow these steps:

1. From the Business Control Panel, click the Web Hosting Control Panel link.

2. Scroll down and click the Start a Blog link.

3. Here, you can choose either Moveable Type or Word Press as your blogging tool (see Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3. Yahoo! Small Business has integrated with two of the top blogging tools: Moveable Type and Word Press.

Commerce: Adding Multiple Revenue Streams

The Net not only evolves quickly, but it also quickly evolves those that are on it. Take Yahoo!, for example. Only a short decade ago, it was a simple search engine. Then, it added email, games, investment information, white pages, and other services, and became a portal. In its latest incantation, it has added online store hosting and has evolved into a world-class e-commerce site.

Even e-commerce sites themselves have evolved. Amazon.com sold only books. Now, it’s chasing the e-commerce dream, selling movies, CDs, electronics, toys, games, and a variety of other products. And what dream is Amazon.com chasing? Multiple revenue streams, which go beyond simple product sales. Adding many of these streams to your site will leverage your site traffic and generate additional income.

Here are some possibilities for multiple revenue streams:

• Product or service sales income —This is the main revenue stream of your Web store. It’s what you built your e-business around, and it should be your prime focus. It’s the bread and butter of your business and should be your top priority.

• Advertising income —When you’ve built up traffic to your site, you can consider turning some of that traffic into revenue. Advertisers are always looking for ways to get their product or service message out to potential customers. They know that placing ads on websites that cater to shoppers who might buy their products is a wise way to spend their advertising dollars. Banner advertising can generate $5 to $75 CPM (cost per thousand per impression). That means you could earn anywhere from .005¢ to .075¢ each time an advertiser’s banner ad appears to your site visitors. It might not sound like much at first, but if thousands and thousands of your site visitors view an ad, the dollars add up fast.

• Referral income —Another income source is to refer your shoppers to another company’s website. These are the affiliate programs that we discussed earlier. You might consider referring your shoppers to a noncompetitive merchant in exchange for a paid click-through or a percentage of the sale. Income can vary from 5¢ to $1 per click-through, or from 5% to 20% of sales.

If you develop several of these income streams simultaneously, you can grow your site revenue beyond your product or service offers.

There’s a bonus attached to building community interactions on your e-commerce site: free refreshed content. And refreshed content attracts both shoppers and the eye of search engines that list you.

Your USP: Unique Selling Position

As explained before, what separates a standard website from an e-commerce website is that the USP is deliberately designed during the creation of the site. The USP takes into effect the three Cs and immediately tells the following to a shopper at your website:

• Portrays in consumers’ minds a compelling image of what your business will do for them that others cannot

• Gives consumers a distinct reason to buy from your company

• Gives your company a unique advantage over your competition

Advantage, reason, and image are your goals in creating a USP. Your USP creates the framework and lays the foundation for your compelling offer. Here’s another reason to have a good USP: It keeps your business pointed in the right direction by helping identify your target audience for marketing. An effective and distinctive USP is specific and measurable, and conveys a customer benefit.

In a way, every organization’s website is “selling” something: a product or service, information, membership for profit or nonprofit, or perhaps a political or social position.

So, put your mouse down, take out a pad and pencil, and answer the following questions as simply as you can. You’re not creating a corporate mission statement here, so keep your responses simple:

• Why is your business special?

• Why would someone buy from me instead of my competition?

• What can my business provide a consumer that no one else can?

• What’s the benefit to the consumer that I can deliver on?

Keep your answers specific and measurable, and show a benefit to the buyer. If you’re confused by what you offer your customers, visitors will be, too. FedEx and Dominoes Pizza are great examples: “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight” and “Hot, fresh pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed—or it’s free!”

The Four Ps and Your USP

You need to consider some additional aspects when fleshing out a USP. They’re called the four Ps:

• Pricing —If you’re going to compete on price, don’t just say you’re the lowest: Say why. For instance, perhaps you can sell at such a low price because of your ability to source product from the closeout industry, and you buy products at pennies on the dollar. Play up this uniqueness in your USP.

• Positioning —The Marines are looking for just a few good men—not all men, just a few. This is a great positioning statement because it makes the “business” of the Marines unique and differentiates them among the armed forces. Look for a similar positioning with your business. Perhaps your focus is gender based. Perhaps it’s age based. Sell to a unique segment of the population, not to all of it.

• Packaging —Consider repackaging a common product that others sell. For instance, consider the iMac. It’s just a PC, but look at the packaging. Not only did it sell, but it sold at a premium price! It also had two positioning statements with it: Get on the Internet in 20 minutes! and Think Different!

• Promotion —Look at the promotional possibilities of your product or service. Can you tie your product or service with a season or holiday? If so, you can benefit from the promotional activities and mind-share of consumers that already exist at that time of year.

Pulling It All Together

A marketable USP involves properly integrating the three Cs and four Ps, and communicating to customers what you will do for them. All the elements we’ve discussed, if done well, support each other and deliver a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

The content pages speak to your prospective customers’ needs and desires, providing grist for the conversational mill for your site community. There’s a bonus to this constantly refreshed content: Search engines find this type of content desirable when listing your website in search results. Content is one of the main criteria that search-engine spiders look for when ranking your site. Content generated especially from the community tends to have fresh text rich in keywords. The community interaction that you provide visitors to your site can help shoppers by allowing them to ask questions, discuss problems, and raise issues that can help you understand the needs of your target audience. This then breeds a kind of loyalty that is beneficial to the success of your business.

If promotion is one of the four Ps that you will use to identify your USP, the content pages of your site should reflect this. Similarly, the market niche you pick should enable shoppers to discuss with other shoppers the pluses and minuses of the product or service that fills that niche.

Above all else, remember that your USP is not about you or your business: It’s about your customer. One final thought: Whatever you promise in your USP, be sure you deliver on it. Don’t make the mistake of adopting a USP that you can’t fulfill.

In the next chapter, we discuss how to storyboard your e-commerce website.