Being in the online business, my friends always ask me how they can “do e-commerce”. If they have no experience of selling online my answer is always the same, “get yourself on eBay and have a go”.  eBay is a great place to start; it’s bootcamp for e-commerce with a tough set of rules to follow that will shape you up for retailing online.

Why should I start on eBay first?

• It teaches you retail discipline
  eBay forces you to provide good customer service; the feedback system demands you do nothing wrong.
• It teaches you good product choice
  If you can’t sell your product on eBay with all those ready made customers your chances of selling it from your own site aren’t so good.
• It teaches you how important a good product description and pictures are
  Look at the guys with huge feedback numbers and notice how they all have great descriptions. They do this for a reason; awesome long copy descriptions sell harder and show good intent.
• It teaches you how important pricing is online
  Selling on eBay is a reality check for traditional retailers as your normal margins often disappear in two seconds flat.
• It teaches you about e-commerce in a risk free environment
  You don’t have to invest in a shiny new web shop to retail online. With eBay, setup costs are tiny and the worst possible scenario is that you don’t sell anything.

If you can you go onto eBay and sell over 25 items in a month with 100% feedback & high DSR in shape then congratulations, you have passed basic training and it’s time for you to go-large.

Why eBay isn’t for Wimps….

Be prepared for eBay. If you’re going to get serious expect the following:

• It requires your time to maintain an eBay business
  Managing the eBay process is time consuming so you have to be prepared to devote time & effort to making it a success. 
  
• It requires exceptional Customer Service
  eBay never feels a particularly fair environment to deal in, particularly if you are a distributor not used to dealing with consumers directly. You will find yourself having to give away product or pick it up with no good reason other than to keep your feedback high. Poor feedback at the early stage could see you struggling to recover or being banned. Don’t blame eBay for this though – if you can’t cut it here then look in the mirror, not at eBay rules. And if you are thinking of doing Amazon instead, it’s tough x 2…. that’s another story.
• It requires you to understand pricing & salesmanship
  Do you have have descriptions that are only half as good as other eBayers? Look at yourself to see if you’re up to scratch. Good descriptions create happy customers and good feedback. They also create lots of social buzz. Want to know what we’re talking about? click here

Acceleration on and off eBay

Think you have mastered eBay? Great, now you’re ready to REALLY jump-start your online retailing. We would love to hear from you.

What’s your thoughts on eBay? Let us know by commenting below.

Who are we looking at?
Ebuyer | Asos | Argos | Boden | B&Q | MyDeco | Apple | Tesco | Ebay | Amazon | John Lewis

1. Layout

Its appears to be true that there is now a way e-commerce should look and feel. There are standardised design elements throughout big brand e-commerce

The Header

Consistently menus now reside on the top, with logo on the left, search & shopping basket on the right.

Home Page

Always featuring a big picture of some kind, normally full width with no side navigation

Category Pages

Sidebars to narrow searches are commonplace and getting more intelligent.

Products – full width

Once you get to a products page its now mostly full width, with no side navigation, and heavily product focused above the fold.

2.  Video

Video is a trend that seems to be cropping up regularly and I love it! Video provides masses of extra emotion and trust on any product it appears on. For me the best use of this is at ASOS, fantastically emotional salesmanship on the kids cloths and great runway videos for the products in adult fashion. Its also in use at  Ebuyer with selected lines giving QVC style buying guides. Do your videos have to be flawless to get a response? If you take a look at this youtube clip of somebody unboxing his new ipod with over 650,000 views you’ll see that real user videos are also a massively powerful customer conversion tool.

3. Quality of photography

If your retailing online and want to roll with the big guys there no excuse for an under exposed 50×50 jpg anymore.

I see a few consistencies from my chosen retailers:

• Giant images are OK for homepages (see examples below)
• Branded commodity items image quality isn’t so important (have a look at Argos, Tesco and John Lewis sites for examples of this)
• Providing more that 1 image if possible is most definitely better
• Modern e-commerce layouts absolutely place focus on product shots
• At each of the sites I looked at there was no genuinely poor images.
• On a number of sites I saw standard product images teamed up with “in use” pictures with people in them

4. Search tools

Search results on all the sites I looked at were pretty good. I loved the search on ebuyer, it was intuitive and helpful. Apples search was awesome, extremely polished I’d recommend you try it.

Second stage filtering of search results was an absolute requirement for all stores for me mydeco ruled on this one, the colour chooser was a nice touch. Despite Apple having a great search it was one of the few stores were I didn’t feel a need to search as the navigation was incredibly clear.

5. Delivery

A constant frustration for me with online shopping is poor delivery information. I started out in Automotive parts and its shocking how poor many of  the distributors of these parts are compared to leading online shops.

ebuyer and asos stood out as excellent examples of going above and beyond for customers.

• Ebuyer offers next day delivery on orders up to 11.00 at night. WOW!
• ASOS offers same day delivery in London. WOW
• Zappos in America stood out with its free delivery both ways promise

2 consistent elements cropped up.

• Free delivery is commonplace (and so it should be, it removes all confusion)
• Delivery on a nominated day is gaining traction

Conclusion

If there is one thing that’s clear above all else is that the strength of modern platforms means its all about high quality content. Many of the sites I used looked and functioned in pretty much the same manner.

Selling online now is more about the determining why somebody should buy it from you. Is it the quality of the service, the great video help, the  awesome delivery or something else.

I wouldn’t use any of the companies because they have a great site, but because they are great companies. Good sites are just a  tool to that may provide enough extras to push customers in your direction rather than some other retailer.

If you have favorite sites you think I should be checking in on I’d love to hear them.