Turn Browsers to Buyers

More and more people like online shopping today. Of course, you will choose online shopping, because it takes only a few clicks without limitations of time or places... if there are not other concerns. Well, the truth is online shopping is not easy to accept.

Research in 2008 shows 45 percent to 55 percent shoppers looked online for information, but  relied on brick-and-mortar stores - or human agents - when purchase. However, shown in the figure below, researches in 2011 (E-commerce 2012) indicates 72 percent shoppers are buyers and 15 percent are browser among 87 percent shopper of Internet users.

For online merchants, looking is obviously not enough, while it's purchasing that make sense. The condition did improve among last few years, but now convincing customers to purchase online instead of just look or converting customers from browser to buyers is still a big challenge for most merchant. How? Trust may be the first step.

Groundswell is, of course, one of the best way to build the trust. Five steps are giving in Groundswell's part two:

• Listening -- Tell your customers that "we are hearing you" and "we are always here for help and improvement", and try to understand them better through listening.
• Talking -- Spred the words about your company or products among "friends" (Like Facebook friends) instead of releasing from companies. Let your customers know you and participate in distribute the message.
• Energizing -- Encourage the "fans" or "followers" of your brand or products to convince others to purchase.
• Supporting -- Build effective system to help your customers to support each other. They may refuse to trust your company when facing trouble, but they would like to receive help from their "friends".
• Embracing -- Involve your customer in creating the products or building the brand. Let them be part of your family.

I learnt a lot from these chapters, and the most important think I learnt is groundswell is a system rather than some tools. That means we need to build groundswell as a system to support the selling of the company instead of just tools to connect with customers.  If we did, our brand and products would be greatly supported by the system, and our customers would trust us and be part of us. As a result, they will buyers instead of browsers.

Then I have the question how we support the groundswell system and keep the trust while purchase. The case of LLBean gives some clues. There are two things may important -- free shipping and easy return and live customer service. Why? Let's see two charts.

The blue chart (E-commerce 2012) shows why customers do not purchase online, and the red one (E-marketer) shows aspects that online shoppers would like retailers to improve. Both of them indicates two issues I mentioned before are significant for online shopping behavior. In fact, these two mainly contributed to the big improvement of online buyers.

So if we failed on these two parts, the groundswell system may fail at last.

Free shipping and easy return

Many companies provides free shipping and at least free return for customers. Does free shipping that effective? Ken Kikkawa gives the anwser -- yes! For me, I give a quality yes too. I buy from Zara much more after they launched their free shipping strategy; while even I put A&F's clothes in the shopping cart, I may still leave the page for shipping fee concerns.

Live customer service

Many merchants knows they must answer customers' question whenever they have one, which is also what groundswell tell that "we are always here for help". Amazon.com has an amazing live customer service which at least impress me a lot. They provide three ways for contact, and make sure they can help you whenever and however you need.  From my own experience, I feel "Call me now" is the most effective one, because sometimes when I was nearly driven crazy by the seller I always get instant help to make me feel good again.