| Customizing your store doesn't necessarily mean doing a complete redesign of your site and spending a lot of time and money. Although you can do a complete redesign, you might just want to improve your store by adding advanced features, such as a Recently Viewed Items section like the one on Amazon.com (seen Figure 5.1) or a Tell a Friend email component (see Figure 5.2). Figure 5.1. Amazon.com offers a Recently Viewed Items section. Visitors can easily navigate back to products they were interested in. 
Figure 5.2. The Tell a Friend email feature is a great tool for spreading the news about your website and products. Visitors can send an email to friends and family about your site without having to use their email account. They can send an email with a personalized message with an online Web form from your site. 
Let's take a look at some of the reasons you might want to customize your store. Knowing why you should do it will help you determine whether you should do it: Branding You want your website "look and feel" to be unique and consistent with your collateral material, such as your logo, business cards, brochures, and flyers. The out-of-the-box Yahoo! store template might not give you the brand recognition you desire, and you don't want your site to look like other Yahoo! stores. New look You want your site to look new and fresh. A newly redesigned website can create excitement and a new experience, especially if you have a lot of recurring customers. New features You want to implement new features, such as multiple product-image views, a shipping policy pop-up chart, discussion boards, subscription pages, shopping and customer service tools to help customers, or a "Send this page to a friend" component. You research other competitor websites and see features that are working for them that you would also like to implement. We discuss specific advanced features in this chapter. New technology You want to add new technologies, such as Flash video, to describe your products; or integrate other payment options, such as PayPal, to increase sales. Keeping up with and implementing new technologies can make your website more efficient and create a better buying experience, which results in more customers. Expansion You started out with only a few products, and now your product line has increased so much that it's impossible to maintain. You need a solution for updating and uploading products quickly and as easily as possible. Search engine optimization Search engine traffic has become an important part of your marketing strategy. You want dynamically generated features that will help your site achieve higher search engine ranking. Search engine traffic can help reduce cost of per-customer acquisition. Navigation and flow The way you thought your customers will navigate through your store isn't the way they actually move through it. You discover that they don't see or pay attention to your main navigation bar. You need to add other navigation options, such as breadcrumbs, to help them navigate your site. Maintenance Adding new products, updating images, and editing descriptions has become time consuming and more difficult with the volume of orders that is coming in. You need a better solution to manage your products. Ease of use You want to improve your website's ease of use. You don't want to have the customer click five times before getting to certain products. You're getting more customer service calls and emails because the site isn't user-friendly and the customer is confused about how to order a product. Your site must be intuitive, not ambiguous. Retention and acquisition Why are customers abandoning the site when they get to the checkout page? Are you losing customers because of the way your site is set up or the way it looks? A professional layout and design will help improve customer acquisition. Cross-selling If customers are going to purchase from you, why not introduce them to other products that relate to or complement the product they are purchasing? Displaying cross-selling items in the right place will help increase sales. Complex buying choices You need a new solution for the complex buying options for particular products. Products such as computers have many features that can be upgraded and customized during the purchasing process. You want a customized solution that will allow your customers to easily choose which features they want. Competition Your competitor(s) have a better website with advanced features and a better design. You're afraid that customers would rather purchase or do business with them. You want to at least be equivalent or superior to their websites. Reduced support phone calls and emails Confusing and unfriendly product layout, ordering process, and site navigation can cause unnecessary support calls and emails. Solving these issues could reduce or even eliminate these tasks.
On the other hand, the old saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." There are plenty of reasons to customize your store, as we just mentioned, and there are many reasons not toor, at least, to be aware of. Just because you can doesn't always mean you should. Before you dive into any major website modifications, be sure you've done your homework. Address the pros and cons of each change and determine how each change will help generate more traffic and more revenue. Survey customers on how your store can be improved. Talk to your support staff on the type of Web-related support calls they receive. Examine your competitors' websites and see what they are doing. Put together a focus group and get feedback on design, experience, and ease of use. |
