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4. The entrance to your storefront is a critical place to create comfort and give people specific products to buy. Ties, and shoes, lead to suit. The small decision leads to bigger buy, by gradually working consumer into right state of mind. It is a passage to sales process.
==== How To Offer Products and Get People to Buy ====
Imagine if you could take same lessons learned in retail and apply them to your online storefront. Instead of a huge physical store, you have an entry point called a Web Page. Most people crowd this page with products, and force all their visitors to first go through this entry point, or home page, to enter site.
They design whole customer experience around that home page. It is crowded with products, and since everyone has to go there, Web Page may be slow to open because of traffic. They are making mistakes of retail, and ignoring consequences.
Customers come to your store for a variety of reasons; they come based on season, based on a life event like a birthday, or even just to browse. Each one of these people want a specific entry point, a specific Web Page with a specific product, to introduce them to everything you offer.
You have a choice; do what majority of people are doing (which fails), or create an entry point and process for your customers to get comfortable, and to buy.
You can be different. Now that you know real secret of retail, apply what you have learned to your online storefront. Focus your customer on that specific product, like Men’s Wearhouse focused me on tie, in order to buy whole suit.
Patrick Anderson is the founder of Active Marketplace and author of "Right On The Money", from which this article is excerpted. You can find out more about the book at http://activemarketplace.com/righton