Can you sell a house with e-commerce logic? To us in the e-commerce world, the question sounds almost absurd. 'Of course you can!' we all shout, fire a confetti cannon and laugh happily.
Can you sell a house with e-commerce logic? To us in the e-commerce world, the question sounds almost absurd. "Of course you can!" we all shout, fire a confetti cannon and laugh happily.
But it is an interesting question that has come up at Commerce Mind several times now from companies that traditionally have not thought about e-commerce, and it is worth thinking through. What do we mean when we say of course you can?
There are many sales managers out there thinking about how to inject drive into their business, and eyes turn to the e-commerce world. Many are sitting with complex products (buying a prefabricated wooden house has quite a lot of configuration on the way to checkout, for example) and everyone mutters that if you can sell a Tesla online you can surely… But a Tesla is easy: the branding is enormous (trust) and the choices are actually few. There are 8 choices from start to finish on a Model 3. Anyone who has ever even started renovating a bathroom knows that eight choices barely gets you a toilet and toilet roll holder.
It is, for example, streamlining the purchase journey so the customer has it as easy as possible to find a product and buy it. In many cases that means cutting down the choices, presenting simple default options with clear, simple ways to change them if choice absolutely must exist.
It is about creating confidence in price, quality and delivery with clear information in easily accessible form up front, but which can lead into more depth if you want. Work with short, simple and reinforcing messages, so-called USPs, that also happily drive buying behaviour:
5-year warranty
Easy returns, no questions asked.
Fossil-free fast deliveries.
It is also about, once the customer lands in a checkout, stripping away distracting obstacles. Have you noticed that many checkout pages often remove search functions and menus and are very stripped-down and clean? That is simply because when the customer is finally on the checkout page, you do not want them getting the idea to do anything else. Same with checkout itself: do not force the user to log in and fill in lots of things, offer them a guest purchase.
E-commerce logic is largely about conversion optimisation quite simply, but also about being relevant across geographies. Have the right payment methods in each market, have the right kind of campaigns, the right communication, a customer service that can be reached the way people expect, and so on. Knowing your customer and market, quite simply, and adapting.
Adapting, speed, testing, data-driven, adjusting. Those are keywords for e-commerce operators who succeed. Always trying to analyse what you do and how it works, and then testing new strategies and analysing them. Work KPI-driven and evaluate and let go of your darlings. Data talks.
It is also about product relationships and working with up-sell and cross-sell. How can you compare what you present on your site? Can you make it easy for the customer to find information that relates, adds an extra dimension somehow, and holds the customer on the site if the first thing they encounter is not quite right?
Remember that very many customers do not land on your homepage, but start their journey directly on a product page. There you have to catch the relationship immediately and present different options if that landing page is not 100% what they were after. You do that by, for example, showing different options or USPs that hold them. It is a tricky balance, but can most easily be measured by engagement rate (or the older inverse, bounce rate in GA), meaning how many landed on their product page and chose to stay and do something meaningful versus those who left quickly without any activity. If you can lift that a few percent, a lot is won. Engagement rate and bounce rate levels are things we often get asked about, what is normal, and there is probably no truth there. Just start measuring and try to raise it. Adapting, speed, testing, data-driven, adjusting.
E-commercifying everything is no magic. It is simply about streamlining the journey and letting that shape how information is presented on your site. Using the classic "Don't make me think" principle. That is, fewer decisions and less design-by-committee, and more of putting the customer and sales in the driver's seat. We have successfully discussed these questions with many e-commerce operators. If you want to talk more about this with us, get in touch with us at Commerce Mind.
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