The following strategies can help set your operations apart from the competition:
Hundreds of ecommerce sites sell books online. Although Amazon.com is the leader in selling books, many engineers or developers would rather order from Bookpool.com because it focuses its services on technical books. Internet marketing news and discussion forum Sphinn.com will not compete with Digg.com, as Sphinn.com’s focus on the search marketing industry is what propelled it to success.
If you can establish some sort of community around your site, you can be sure that consumers will come back to you again and again. Apple has been very successful in establishing a community among its users. Sometimes it is a lot easier to tap into an established community. Imagine an ecommerce site that allows you to view what people who live in your city or work at your company are ordering. The site is not creating a new community; it is tapping into an existing and established community.
When I (Khalid) ran Quill Books in the late 1990s, we focused our services on selling books to university professors. We doubled our sales in one month when we offered next-day delivery for the same price as regular shipping. Of course, I would not recommend doing this without a full financial analysis. In our case, I had worked out a deal with FedEx to allow us to provide such a service. When we offered this supporting service, our sales skyrocketed.
Price is a difficult strategy to differentiate your business online or offline. However, you cannot ignore all the price comparison tools available online that allow consumers to compare product prices from different ecommerce sites. If you have the capital and margins, you might be successful at creating an ecommerce site that competes on price.
It is difficult to focus on product benefits or features when competitors offer the same products. But it is not impossible. You can do several things to draw visitors’ attention to product benefits:
Most ecommerce websites use the standard product description provided by manufacturers on their sites. As a result, visitors find the same uninspiring descriptions as they navigate from one site to the next. Although this is a cost-effective approach, it does not take into account how different personas react to different types of copy. We do not advocate rewriting all of your product descriptions, but it is a wise investment to create custom descriptions for the top-selling products on your website.
This is another chance to move away from the standard images manufacturers provide for their products. Product images that show the product from different angles with great detail have a direct impact on conversion. Again, you do not need to take new pictures of all your products. Start with the top-selling products and analyze the impact the new images have on your bottom line.
If you are a B2C site, consider utilizing videos if your products lend themselves to physical demonstration. For example, Skis.com offered the same ski equipment as many of its competitors. However, Skis.com took a unique approach to selling these items. Each year, it asked its staff to shoot videos of themselves using the new equipment, and the results have been great. Of course, you need to consider any technical requirements for supporting video, such as bandwidth issues, video format, and server utilization.