Why Pure E-Commerce Is A Poor Web Strategy
This post is about a very big point that almost every e-commerce site misses. Here it is:
Most e-commerce sites aim at that little green circle: they only cater for visitors who are actively looking to buy. This makes sense to them because their business model is purely to cater for active buyers. Shops have been doing exactly this for years offline & it’s worked perfectly well, so why do things different online? Why would you want to focus on more than just active buyers?
How Moving Away From A “Sales-Only” Website Benefits You
Here’s a breakdown of two sites & the visitor activities they cater for:
While ‘Site B’ is following the old shopping-mall model of catering purely for active buyers, ‘Site A’ recognises that web users do more than just shop online.
All other things being equal, Site A’s strategy gains them:
- More visitors (= wider brand awareness)
- More share of their visitors’ time
- More recommendations
- More inbound links (= better search results, easier to find)
- More sales, because, when the time to purchase does come around they’re at the front of their prospects’ minds & have become the natural choice
Each of those individually can mean the difference between failure & success online. Considering them all together, why would any business continue to stick with the old model? To put it another way - say you’re selling digital cameras. Why would you want to be A “camera sales” website, when you could be The “camera” website?
