One of the things I loved most about Jim Wilson was his knack for stating the obvious as news. Jim's philosophy on marketing was a combination of "Keep it Simple, Stupid" and "You're obviously an idiot if you don't do the obvious" that is, "Nobody will call if you don't put your phone number somewhere that they can find it." Duh. But still, half the sites I almost do business with don't put their phone number up there. Anyway, I thought I'd publish a Jim article here, one that he wrote in November of 2000, addressing an "Obvious" thing that ecommerce folks should be doing around the holidays. It was true then, and it's still good advice today...
WE KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST CHRISTMAS
The early indicators are coming in for this year's holiday shopping season.
Many e-commerce sites are reporting a rise in the percentage of abandoned shopping carts. Think of it as shopping carts being left in the aisles of your local toy store, full of toys but left to sit while the shoppers gets in a car and drives away. It was great having them in your store but a real bummer to see your checkout employees fixing their nails and looking bored.
So what might be driving this trend to fill up e-carts and not finish the order?
Maybe the store owners did a great job last year of getting all of their orders shipped in time to be sitting under the tree on Christmas morning. Maybe they did better than anyone in their industry.
But they are the only ones to know that.
If you did great last year in meeting your customer's needs, tell someone. Heck, tell everyone. Paste it in big gaudy letters across the top of every page of your site. You either blow your own horn or get painted with the same brush the media used to paint Toys-R-Us last year.
"Gee, Susie. Santa was really sorry but his Elves didn't finish your present but he left you this really pretty piece of paper. He'll send your gift in a few weeks."
No parent wants to have little Susie open a gift certificate from the e-toy store just because the e-store doesn't know yet how to run a business. They want Susie to open a real toy. The parents either got burned last year or they watched any of the thousands of hours of television media firestorm and want to be comfortable knowing that the gifts will be there for Santa to place under the tree. Santa seldom delivers gift certificates. At least mine never did.
Don't be shy about blowing your horn. SCREAM to your visitors that you are the absolute guaranteed place to get gifts on time.
Delivery will be more important this year than having the lowest price.
That's a nice trend!
As always, good advice, Jim. Thanks again, for all you've done, for all of us. We miss you, buddy, but we know that you're always with us, helping to guide this ship.
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