Would you like to sell online for 0$/EUR/DKK in start-up fee

Update ultimo august 2009 *** I'm closing for new companies :)

Many mid-sized companies would benefit from online sales - a supplement to their wholesale business or existing retail presence.

I've recently offered a couple of companies to establish online sales without any cost to creatives, organization, setup and similiar expences. Only paying a share of the turnover (and for own systems) for a full-service when agreeing a longer contract where I guarantee the following services:

Design and set up shop, daily / weekly maintenance and optimization of side products, descriptions, cross sell-sales and up-sell pages, information pages and other pages. Support of company for the handling of orders and payments. Search engine optimization, management of advertising partners - including affiliatepartners, paid search words, etc., as well as optimization of the page for the highest possible conversion rate. Moreover, possible structure and administration of customer club on the main countries with the collection of members and posting of newsletters for text material from company.

The overall design shall be generally approved by the company, but the optimization on the sale is determined by me.

I prefer an agreement where the company pays for it's own affiliate programs, with me optimizing them, so the company hold the ownership. It's easier to calculate the share of turnover when it's rensed for expenses.

If you have a healthy company with good products - and would like to sell online in Europe, please don't hesitate to contact me on kim@imd.dk or +45 4244 0011 (GMT+1).

Skills - building up eCommerce

This article in number 3 in a series of 4 articles about skills that needs to be covered in order to built up eCommerce and multi-channel marketing and retailing.

Online retail is not something the retail department 'just' can handle. Everything we previously discussed, in article 2 and 1, are fundamentals for succesful online retailing.

Far to many retailers think that good retailers in the physical world also knows how to do online retail. The playground is different out here - the lack of tacit knowledge - the ability to touch the products - and the fact why people buy online needs to be taken into concideration.

Basically you need to cover the following skills - both online and offline:

• Product selection
• Merchandising and stock responsibility

Retail collaboration is very important. For succesful implemented multi-channel, and even just eCommerce, retail the training of in-store employees are fundamental. One can say that enabling online sales, when you do have physical retail, automatically makes you a multi-channel player in the minds of the consumers. They expect that you have some sort of aligned assortment between the channels.

• Online marketing has nothing to do with marketing on a strategic level. Online marketing is the nature of being able to handle SEM (Google Adwords and others), affilite based marketing as a disciplin, CPM, CPA, CPO and similiar banners and text ads, CPL - leads and any other way of paying for online exposure.
• SEO and SMO are often placed under online marketing.

The last article will do a complete summary - and focus on all aspect of photography and the internal organisation needed.

Strategy brief when turning retailer into e-retailer and multi-channel player

Inspiration to online strategy for B2B and B2C

Vision:
To secure the retail future of RETAILER by implementing multi-channel retailing and multi-channel marketing using customer intelligence to increase sales in all channels by turning more prospects into customers and customers into active advocates.

Explanation:

• Retail future - here the fact that store only retailers are facing decrease in turnover - and lost loyalty from consumers.
• Multi-channel retail or merged channels are joined channels like catalogue, store, online, mobile, ekiosk and so on.
• Multi-channel marketing is marketing messages addressed for more than one channel - or for one channel seeking to foster loyalty for more than one channel - best used with tailored and targeted communication for the customer.
• Customer intelligence is the crunching of tracked/collected data from web-analytics, debtor databases, permission marketing databases and similiar.
• Turning customers into active advocates is propably one of the most difficult things to do. It requires so many things from your brand and profile. This is covered in a previous post - and will be in detail next week again.
  

You're very welcome to copy and use this vision as your own.

Copywriting for eCommerce

Copywriting for eCommerce is like writing postcards or SMS messages - short, meaningful and appealing.

Friedhelm Hillebrand, the father of the modern text message, invented the magic limit of 160 characters. He dreamed up the 160 character limit while working at a typewriter in the mid-1980s, trying to see how long sentences needed to be to convey something.

He found 160 characters was the magic number he kept arriving at. But the deciding committee for SMS still wasn’t sure until they looked at postcards and found that most of those had messages of 150 characters or less. Please consider the 160 limit for item presentations - if you write less you'll damage your SEO ranking - if you write too much nobody will get the full meaning and it will literally lower your conversionrate.

When you're writing for eCommerce you should really think in templates - especially if you're going to have several language version of the shop.

If use to devide the items card text down - it should consist of:

• The emotional sales part
• The feature/fact part (fabric description if it's fashion or other products beyond tacit knowledge - where you can't feel or touch it through the screen).
• Washing instructions or specifications (specifications can we many pages - so please do like PixMania or others - make it extendable).

The emotional part is hard to make a template for, but any other text on the item card can come either from an open source catalogue - or be from true/false statements in your ERP system.

Don't ever fall for the temptation of copywriting into bullet points - you will hardly get any organic search traffic - there'll be no text to follow for Google and other spiders.

Challenges in building multi-channel

When deciding to go for multi-channel marketing and retailing - there are many factors you should consider. Just aiming at it on a tactical level or even worser on an operational level is simply a road into big spending and lost opportunities.

Here is a list form, first in a row, of things you need to make a stragy for - and have the board, owners and CEO to sign off.

Organizational readiness? (this will drive some big changes in the organization).

As senior management (owners, CEO ...) you shall be ready to handle the management task of setting sails for the biggest change ever. And also dare to identify and front all stakeholders - all the way from the board to store managers. What 'cheese' will be moved from each of them?

Some of the major requirements are:

• Excellent communicational skills?
• The task of aligning retail IT-systems can be huge.
• I've earlier selected Websphere Commerce because of it's openess through other systems like DOM's and POS/Kiosks.

Brand marketing should be able to identify/produce:

• Marketing strategy including the brand DNA's.
• Mock-ups on new directions for the web-designers to follow and implement.
• Produce the universe or branding part of the site.
• The brand identity and personas.
• Give the communicational guidelines.
• Marketing plans shall be much more detailed and start focusing on how to influence the customer to purchase.
• Retail events are to merge with online plans - therefore marketing needs to be involved (follow guidelines).
• Produce the content for the web, campagins, also the social- and mobile content - new channels will evolve over time. Also image based photos.
• Handle the overall "Expression" of all channels.

I'm offering these services on consultancy basis with attractive rates, please contact me on kim@imd.dk or call +45 4244 0011.