Four ways to interact with customers for an online store

So, an online store is just a virtual showcase, but not yet a business.

Business is an assortment, prices and service, this is why customers will generally come to you and pay money, including through an online store.

Therefore, it is important to decide: how you will interact with customers on the exchange of goods for money. And this is important because various forms of interaction have different complexity and vary in complexity of organization.

1. “The client himself arrives for the goods”

The easiest way to organize a business.

Most people prefer to look at the product live, hold it in their hands, evaluate the quality, test the functionality before buying, and see the seller, namely the one who can be contacted for help in case of questions and problems after the sale.

Organizing such a process is the cheapest and easiest. Goods can be stored at first in your home. No deliveries, no mail and other buggers, which are already enough at the start of the business.

2. “The goods are delivered by courier: in the city, district”

To begin with, there are some categories of goods and situations in which just delivery, and not the opportunity to come to get the goods yourself, comes to the fore.

These product categories include:

1. Heavy and oversized products: building materials, furniture, mattresses, water and so on.
2. Goods for the holidays, party, corporate parties: gifts for DR, balls, hookahs and so on.
3. Categories of goods relevant to the elite from Rublevka or its analogues in the region, but which are not near this place.

Of course, you can outsource all this, but in practice - this is exactly the process I would recommend organizing yourself. At least when I studied on practice various options for organizing courier delivery, I came to just such conclusions.

One courier in Moscow can deliver 10-12 orders per day with a salary of 20-30 thousand rubles (plus feeding with a tip). At the same time, he can carry goods for resale with him, drop by a warehouse, visit suppliers, and solve other specific issues that arise from time to time.

I would recommend using outsourcing couriers as a backup option to the main one, when, for example, your couriers can’t cope with a surge in orders, but hiring someone else is not the best current solution.

In addition, it must be borne in mind that not all niches can be served by a foot courier.

3. Delivery to other cities through appropriate services

A small remark.

When I evaluate processes on the issue of “simple or difficult”, the basis is not the question of the process itself, but the question of creating cost-effective business processes, where there is a miscalculation of the time spent on solving certain problems, a miscalculation of the costs of the wage fund and other costs.

If it seems to you that there is nothing better than receiving orders via the Internet and sending them by mail, then I will disappoint: this is precisely how this process as a business is most difficult to organize with a proper degree of profitability.

And the reasons lie in the paragraphs indicated above.

Firstly, people prefer to buy on the spot, albeit more expensive, they want to receive the goods quickly, take into account the difficulties of solving potential problems after the purchase, do not trust sellers they don’t see, and so on.

Secondly, many use online stores as a convenient way to make a choice: read the specifications, reviews, and then go shopping at a local store. All this adds a large share of pseudo targeted traffic.

Thirdly, competition. It is more difficult to create a unique selling proposition for an online store. It’s more difficult to implement the full range of advertising tools (for example, when we create a local store, we can cram ads into every hole, on the Internet we limit ourselves very much).

On the Internet they write that the average conversion of such an online store is 1–2%.

I will inform you for comparison: in my online stores, I consider a normal conversion to purchase 10-15%. And the last two stores gave orders from the first click from Direct.

If the conversion is below 10%, it means that something is clearly wrong: with prices, assortment, and so on. Then I start digging and thinking what needs to be fixed. If it’s more than 20, then something painful has chocolate conditions, which means it’s worth revising the pricing policy, thinking about including new sales channels, including for less targeted audiences, and so on.

But these are shops operating within the city, where you can come yourself to buy goods, or you can order fast delivery.

There are also specific problems associated with the format itself:

• Cash on delivery, which is preferred by a substantial proportion of customers. And the overlay is a big cash gap, seriously cutting back on profitability.
• Packaging, which adds cost, both in materials and in the work itself.
• Problems on the part of delivery services that come out as soon as volumes appear.
• Refunds, including those related to errors in picking orders and so on.
• Non-repurchases and related returns, which is also not free and time-consuming.
• Not in all corners of our immense delivery service, except for "Ebizz Post". In some n.p. delivery is very expensive and disadvantageous for the parties.
• Additional organizational burden on the sales department: you need to accompany the order at all stages, including because many customers simply forget about their order before it arrives.

To summarize:

For most cases, I recommend starting a store in the first scenario: working around the city. This is organizationally the easiest and most cost-effective option.

If for some reason you want exactly the classic online store based on delivery, I recommend making the appropriate analytics, identifying the categories of goods where it is relevant.