Product Sellers: Making Buying Online Easy For Your Customers

Welcome To Episode #11!

I recently had an experience with online shopping that made the problems you may be having selling your physical products online hit home for me. So many little things can make the buying process annoying, if not impossible online.

My experience also reminded my of my friend Jessica, who had a really hard time buying a swimsuit online and wrote about it in her blog.

So, I thought I’d put together an episode of tips to help you avoid losing customers with a hard-to-use website.

If you would like to have your website evaluaated, I’m offering the second Physical Product Power Up in October. It’s four weeks of group coaching that will help you improve your website. Go check it out!

And if you have an under-equipped website that you’d like help with, enter our Flip That Mom’s Website contest. We’ll be giving away a free Shop Kit Plus, coaching, and more. Enter your website by Sept. 14!

Are You Catering To Your Customers In All Stages Of The Buying Process?

I mentioned the four stages of the buying process several months ago. These stages include:

• Need/Want Recognition
• Information Search
• Evalutation
• Purchase

Most online retailers, including at least 90 percent of my clients are reaching customers in the purchase phase of the buying process. If you’re one of these online retailers, this means that you are only reaching those people who have already decided to purchase your product.

But what about everyone else?

The people in the need recognition stage have realized that they have a problem or need, but do not yet have a solution. So what are they looking for is possible solutions to their problem.

For example, an expectant mother knows she is going to need to diaper her new baby. so, she decides to look for diapering solutions online.

Naturally, she will find information about disposable diapers — and also cloth diapers.

As a cloth diaper seller, you firmly believe that cloth diapers are a better choice, and you also know that thousands of other cloth diaper sellers are competing with you for sales.

So, what can you do to attract this new mom, who has just discovered cloth diapers — and has now moved into the Information Search phase of the buying process?

Capturing The Information Searcher: You already have a product sales website. Now, you need an information website, preferably a weblog. Why? The weblog will enable you to quickly and frequently add information to your new website about why one should use cloth diapers, which cloth diapering options one should choose, and why your cloth diapering products are the best (naturally!).

Now you’ve convinced the new mom that cloth diapers are the way to go. She is ready to move into the Evaluation phrase. What happens here? Most likely, she will consult with friends in real life, on message boards and other social networks to find out which cloth diapers are really the best. How do you influence her decision at this stage?

Serving the Evaluator: Start an affiliate program. The more affiliates you have promoting your products, the greater chance you’ll have of running across this new mom. Post to message boards where new moms are members, with a link to your weblog in your signature line (making sure to follow the message board rules). Include your link in your email signature. Make sure your blog has an RSS feed, so you’ll be indexed by blog search engines. Exchange links with other cloth diaper information site and cloth diaper sellers. (The best way to do this is to join each other’s affiliate programs.)

So, new mom’s friends have convinced her that your products are the best. What now? Well, you’re right back where you started, except now you have a new customer, ready to buy your products.

Why You Should Separate Your Information Content From Your Products

So, we all know that content is king in gaining PageRank in Google and attracting people to our websites. For product sellers, that typically means adding articles to your existing product selling website.

That’s the conventional wisdom.

The new wisdom: My internet marketing mentor Alice Seba recently advised a member of her Mom Masterminds group to separate the content (information) from her products, by setting up separate sites.

Her basis for this advice appeared in an article by Bobette Kyle, who wrote that customers have four stages to their decision making process, or buying process:

• Need/Want Recognition
• Information Search
• Evalutation
• Purchase

You need to make sure that your site is attracting visitors who are in the right stage of the buying process. If you are wanting people to purchase products when they arrive, you don’t want to bog them down with lots of information. Conversely, if your visitors are still seeking information, you don’t want to shove Buy It Now buttons in their face.

Once you have your new site up, you fill it with articles that will provide information related to your products — and links back to your sales site for the appropriate products. I also recommend you place a mailing list signup form on this site, so that you can send ecourses and update information to your prospects.

So, how do you accomplish this with the [tag]Shop Kit Plus[/tag]?

The easiest way that involves the least amount of design work and money is to setup a new site on a subdomain of your existing site. This method will get you up and going for the cost of a domain name — and you can scale the customization level to meet your budget needs.

So, you have your Shop Kit Plus installed on your hosting account, which you access with your main domain name. Just purchase the domain name for your information site and set the nameservers to Watersweb’s. Then, login to your cpanel and click the [tag]Addon Domain[/tag] button and follow the directions.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll want to go back to the home page of cpanel, scroll down to the Fantastico button and install Wordpress in your new subdirectory. It’s easy. Just click the link, fill out the form and click the button. (And if you have any questions, just contact the Helpdesk for help.

Once you have Wordpress installed, you’ll be able to access it through the new domain name.

At this point, you can find a free Wordpress theme to install on the site — or you can hire one of our Design Partners to customize the templates. The first way is less expensive, the second way will give you a more customized look.

Now, for the fun part: You need to publish articles on your new weblog, related to your products and that will help your prospects through the process of deciding what to buy.

You can write articles yourself, find free articles online, buy affordable Private Label Articles for moms or hire a ghostwriter. Once you have this setup and a few articles/entries under your belt, start spreading your link around with forum signatures (where available), blog comments and memberships at technorati (for example).