Better Info = Better Sales

The ability to sell your wares online is a company's dream. Products that practically sell themselves? Selling without salespeople or the overhead a storefront requires? What a moneysaver! But just because customers can buy online doesn't mean your products sell themselves. In fact, selling online successfully requires an entirely different strategy than brick and mortar selling. Customers can't pick your products up and touch them or see real life demonstrations of what they can do. They need non-traditional kinds of incentives to buy.

That's what buy.com is all about - the web-only superstore is second only to Amazon.com. Buy.com has developed methods to sell online that work and CEO Greg Hawkins is here to tell you how it's done.

Beef Up Product Information

As we just said, customers can't touch or hold your products online. Merchants can remedy this deficit by exploiting the web's ability to provide information in place of sensation. Buy.com provides a wealth of information on each product to give customers all the details they could need. "As the customer is going through their shopping experience, we've got the content there that enables them to make an informed purchase decision," Hawkins says. "The web is unique in that it can tell a much more robust informational story than can be told at retail or with any other selling environment." But what if you sell 850,000 products like buy.com? How can you provide in-depth info on each of hundreds of thousands of products? Hawkins advises companies in this situation to convince distribution partners to give up all the information they have in the name of selling. "Given the number of products we sell, it would be almost impossible for our customer service reps to know everything about every product," Hawkins says. "So we call on the support of our vendor partners, particularly in the technology space. They can directly provide additional technical information, pre-sales information, if that's what it takes."

Don't Tell Customers More Than They Want to Know

This seems paradoxical at first, but stay with us: though you should provide deep information on every product, you shouldn't give it all to every customer. Instead, make the information available via interface that allows customers to "drill down." "What we try to do at the point of entry is to give the customer, if they are relatively informed, a chance to make the purchase as rapidly as possible," Hawkins says.

Customers who wish to can go deeper. "If greater and greater levels of information are required, we allow you to dig in to the site, dig into the product, and get additional levels of content to enable you to make that purchase. We try to not bog down the shopping process at the front end for the consumer, but give you enough information to make a purchase when you look at the first page," Hawkins says.

Concentrate on Best Selling Products

Of course, it goes without saying that the information you have on every product should be as deep as possible. But most companies have scarce resources and even scarcer time. Concentrate your energies on products that sell best for maximum profits. buy.com's focus group research has confirmed that this is the way to go.

"For top selling products, the products that the customers are typically coming in and searching for that you can identify by product category, the focus group view was to give even more robust content on those products," Hawkins says. Buy.com has created entire "stores" for the hottest products like Palm accessories. "The site launches you into a store almost immediately and gives you access to a lot more detailed information more rapidly. Hot selling products get more of the information presented at the point of sale," he says.

"For not-hot products or the products that are not shopped as frequently, allow for a little harder search, but still allow access to that information. But focus on making sure the hot, top selling products are well presented, easy to find and have great content behind them," he advises. There's no one formula that will work for presenting all products. You'll have to tinker with yours before you find the best one. But always remember the web's strengths and exploit them. The web can give you so many new ways to reach your customers - don't let your chances go by without jumping on them.