The Three Cs | Succeeding At Your Yahoo! Business

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 participationand even your e-commerce offers are considered content. Your site's contentwhether it is information, community participation, or a product or service offermust 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."

Tip: Encourage Contributions

Offer a way for visitors to submit articles, to include their experiences on your site or in your newsletter. Not only do you get free help in building your site content, but you also gain long-term repeat visits from people whose content is included on your site.

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 prospectsnot merely visitorsby 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.

Tip: Consumer Opinions on Your Site Pay Off

According to Forester Research, 65% of community users rate the opinions of other consumers as important or somewhat important influences on their buying decision.

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.

Tip: Let Your Shoppers Find the Exact Time Around the World

If shoppers need to contact a merchant or order by phone, they should know which time zone you are in. Place a link to world times on your site and offer this service. Find it at www.worldtimeserver.com/current_time_in_DZ.aspx.

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.

Tip: Free Currency Converter

A great little service to add to your site is an international currency converter. This way, shoppers from anywhere in the world can determine the price of your products in their currency. Find it at www.xe.com/ucc/.

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:

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

Scroll down and click the Start a Blog link.

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.

Yahoo! Talk: Business Control Panel

The Business Control Panel is another name for the Manage My Services page. It's the hub where you can access your Store Manager, Web Hosting Control Panel, Domain Control Panel, and Email Control Panel.