Dan Breeden, senior manager, strategic alliances, Yahoo Small Business.
Picture this scenario: you’re a smallish online retailer, in business four years and looking forward to celebrating your five-year anniversary. Your sales have grown respectably, and you feel confident you’ll be around for years six and seven, if things continue along the same path. One day, you’re doing some due diligence research and find 10 sites not completely dissimilar to yours, and a few with some enticing new offerings.
What’s happening here? Answer: you may have become a little complacent and perhaps a little too confident your relatively established site can withstand new competition. In fact, your new competitors have seen your site and are working vigorously to cut into your customer base!
Staying in retail—and this goes for bricks and mortar too—demands an ever-vigilant, ever-changing approach to keep your site fresh and relevant and make it to Year Five or beyond. Think about your current site, product mix, customer base and marketing and, as objective as possible, start seeing where you can step up your game.
Growth is Non-Negotiable
Losing customers happens. They change their lifestyle, find another site they fancy or their household budget changes. Even if they loved your site, they may have moved to another part of the country, say Florida, and they’re now looking for flip-flops while your site sells boots. Or they now need a family van and you sell sports car accessories.
You have to constantly be thinking of ways to grow your business, not only to replenish customer churn but to grow your business to the next level. Here are some ideas:
- Stale is Bad for Food and Sites. Whatever you were doing when you started, most likely, doesn’t work today. Does your site still look relevant, or is it hanging on to display techniques no longer in vogue? Refreshing your site every two years is a reasonable standard. But it doesn’t have to cost you a ton of money. At trade conferences you can get complimentary feedback on your site from professionals in attendance. Get one to three reviews, take careful notes and implement the ideas that make sense for your budget.
A relatively economical move is to update your visuals and make slight changes in page navigation. If you started with the traditional left or right navigation, it’s time to upgrade the site to accommodate mobile phone screens. - Window Dressing is a Good Thing. Sometimes, just a few changes can make your site feel fun and fresh. Take a cue from bricks and mortar stores who do seasonal tie-ins really well. Your shop window isn’t physical but you can put a border on a page with four-leaf clovers, holiday ornaments or snowboards. Spice up your pages and make it fun to visit your site. The home page is a perfect opportunity: switch up products and tie-ins on a regular basis so customers feel they’re looking at a new offering.
- Products are all Perishable Goods. Be diligent about checking sales trend data to see which products or categories are slipping and conversely, where your inventory was too low to fulfill high-demand orders. Then make adjustments to your product mix—fast.
Smaller retail businesses here have an advantage. You’re playing to a more niche market, and if you’re doing things right, you have deep expertise in your product line. You know what’s going to be on the market and what your customer wants. That gives you an advantage over larger sites with many product lines, and means you should be nimble enough to make quick adjustments to your product mix.
Also make sure you’re taking full advantage of your most popular product categories. If high-top sneakers are a best seller, extend the category to accessories like special laces. Think expansion! On that note, examine the platform solution you’re using to confirm it will enable you to scale to thousands of SKUs, as needed, at a flat rate. Some platforms will bill an up-charge after your site hits a certain number of SKUs. - Your Customer Just Left. The customer you had four years ago is most likely gone. Are you engaging current and potential new customers with personalized choices for them to purchase? Are you using social media to create a community for your site so your customers come back and importantly, refer others? Reserve some time for those dreaded analytics. It can give you priceless data on who your customers are now, what they’re buying and what they care about. Analytics will shape a profile, or persona of your customers so you can find similar buyers across the Internet.
Paper Lantern Store is an example of a well-established business that does a superb job of identifying the characteristics of its customers. Basically selling consumable paper goods, it has a thorough, continually updated product mix of more high-end decorative items that appeal to its customers who want something more special than discount store items for celebratory events or summer fun. - Spinoffs are not just for Comedies. Your customers don’t like confusion. If you see an opening to grow your business, open a secondary store for your site. It gives your new customers a defined identity they crave when shopping and it prevents them from wondering: I love their purple socks. Why is this site now selling orange golf bags?
Search-friendly names
Think about expansion in terms of where you want to be, beyond Year Five. Is your longer-term vision to have a broader mix of categories or do you want to go deeper into your current product focus? If you own a site selling dog accessories and are thinking there’s an untapped market for exotic, tropical fish, your choices are to become ‘Joe’s Pet Supplies’ or a better option, open a second store as ‘Joe’s Exotic Fish Emporium.’
‘Exotic Fish’ is a good example of branding to be search-friendly. More tightly marketing will get you a better chance of being noticed in page rankings. You can link back to your dog accessories site, but you want to make it as easy as possible for a customer to find you as they’re walking and scrolling through their phone. Plus, they will feel confident about your substantial exotic fish knowledge, as opposed to a site selling ‘Joe’s Aqua Experience.’
Getting from Year Four to Year Five, and beyond, means you need to be a bit fickle about your own site. Let’s face it: customers have a staggering amount of shopping options. They will visit your site, and stay around long enough to convert to a sale, if you have done your homework and made a site as fresh, relevant, and compelling as possible.
Don’t fall in love with your site. Fall in your love with your new customer!
Yahoo Small Business provides the ecommerce platform for five of the retailers in the Internet Retailer 2018 Top 1000 ranking of North America’s leading e-retailers.
Favorite