Customer Relationship Management and eCommerce… is there a more happy marriage to be made in online heaven? In many ways, e-commerce applications, such as online storefronts, are great examples of CRM theory come to life. Your storefront is like a laboratory, with the aspects of sales, marketing, customer service, and analytics all there to be adjusted and perfected, without the unknown variable of employee quality to contaminate the results.
While there may be no definitive beginning to the e-commerce era, for the sake of argument, let’s just say that it all began in 1995 when Amazon.com started selling books. Never mind that it took almost eight years for the retailer to turn a profit in all four quarters of the same year… e-commerce’s time had come.
However, not all things retail translate easily into “e-tail.” For one thing, those pesky shopping carts seemed to be abandoned at extremely high rates. Hardly a surprise: If consumers don’t have to invest any time traveling to their local shopping malls, why shouldn’t they just leave items unordered in an online cart and surf off to another site, looking for better selection or price? For e-tailers, the downside of impulsive purchasing is impulsive shopping-cart abandonment.
E-commerce is also fraught with other problems unique to the online experience: secure payment, shipping, viable customer service, returns, instantaneous price comparisons, and now the re-emerging threat of state-by-state taxation. But, there are upsides as well. The technology provides the ingredients for perpetually efficient, automated, commercial activity (24 hours a day, every day of the week) and e-commerce managers now have access to a mass of consumer data and virtually unlimited quantitative analysis and business intelligence.
Wendistry realizes that creating strong relationships with customers online (and ideally, expanding those relationships to include offline customer interactions) presents special challenges. So, this week, in a series, Wendistry will explore new technologies and techniques that offer insights on how to maximize your online channel. Get ready for Part 1 tomorrow and happy SHOPPING!!!
About Wendi McGowan