How to get customers online and keep them

Posted on 6 months

The world-wide web has had an amazing and sometimes hardly believable effect on our everyday lives whether we are in business or as consumers. One of the major changes has been in the transparency of pricing. Of course this has been a huge benefit to the web-browsing consumer and presents a real challenge to the online shop as to how to catch and keep the price researching consumer.

Take, for instance, a big name UK brand like Halfords selling a multitude of consumable and other products. They are big enough to “own brand” much of their range making it marginally more difficult to shop around for the exact price comparison.

Halfords have a very respectable free iPhone app which is bright, quick and very informative right down to customer reviews of particular products. In fact, in the writer’s humble opinion, in almost all areas it’s as good as Halfords' “desktop” website. Halfords do not say what percentage of sales they take through their mobile app and I can only assume it’s a fairly small part of their direct income, however the app must do a power of good when it comes to product and price research. Once the prospective shopper has done their research online they can, if they choose, go to Halfords network of stores across the country where they can see, touch and try the product. The app does offer reserve and collect and home delivery too.

This sort of app is going to grow in importance as we see the number of smartphones in use increase (currently there are over 17 million in use) together with the use of mobiles (both smartphones and tablets) for shopping processes growing exponentially. In fact it is estimated that web traffic from mobiles will grow up to 8 times faster than from PCs. One retail strategist estimates that nearly 2/3rds of UK shoppers will be using their mobiles for shopping in the near future!

So the answer for any pro-active seller online is to consider carefully their mobile commerce strategy - it is not going to go away. As illustrated by Halfords it is even possible to “app-sell” a huge and diverse product range. Whether your offer is small or big the advantages of selling through the mobile route is manifold. However there is one simple rule – be focussed on ease of use and retaining your customers details and you’ll capture customers.

Our own investigations have shown clearly that consumers tend to became frustrated as each time they purchased from a new website they have to establish a new account together with payment details. They felt this was a time consuming and did not always justify the small amount they may have saved by choosing the cheapest. They also felt that they were maybe increasing risk by using a new supplier with such concerns as payment security, reliable delivery, unknown quality etc. The answer then, is clearly to design and build a mobile app which allows for the simplest possible purchasing process, ideally at the touch of as few buttons as possible.

One doesn’t have to look far to see how mobiles are changing the way we think and act. Look around you next time you are in a busy public area, how many people will you see using their mobiles?