The e-Commerce Arsenal: Twelve Technologies You Need to Prevail in the Digital Arena

Overview

EDM, wireless access, listfeed programs, WAP, XML: They don't sound sweet, but these (and other) power-packed Web technologies are the honey that keep online customers coming back for more.

In the war for Web dominance, the site that converts visitors into loyal customers is the winner! When potential customers drop by a site, they expect an experience that's fast, hassle-free, and packed with useful features — otherwise they'll click that ...

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Overview

EDM, wireless access, listfeed programs, WAP, XML: They don't sound sweet, but these (and other) power-packed Web technologies are the honey that keep online customers coming back for more.

In the war for Web dominance, the site that converts visitors into loyal customers is the winner! When potential customers drop by a site, they expect an experience that's fast, hassle-free, and packed with useful features — otherwise they'll click that "Back" button and be gone...maybe forever!

The E-Commerce Arsenal explains that mere icing-on-the-cake elements such as colorful graphics or "Flash" effects just don't cut it. Instead, this savvy book presents 12 powerful existing and emerging technologies that enable a Web site to do something that's tangibly valuable to customers. For example:

  • Shopping "wizards" that help customers find an item (even when they don't know what it's called)
  • Instant e-mail that confirms an order and gives a delivery date
  • Personalization of the site for each customer's interests.

Both marketers (who don't know how these technologies work) and computer professionals (who want to grasp their profit potential) will find detailed information on these "killer apps." Divided into three areas (driving traffic, site functionality, and customer service), the book provides:

  • A jargon-free explanation of each technology (what it can do and how it works)
  • Examples of current sites using each technology (illustrated with screen captures)
  • Resource information for implementing each technology.
The E-Commerce Arsenalgives readers 12 lethal weapons that attract customers — and keep them coming back.
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Editorial Reviews

Fort Worth Morning Star-Telegram
Alexis Gutzman…has loaded her latest book with easy-to-grasp, fact-based advice on how to reel in Internet shoppers and transform them into consumers.
Booknews
Shows how to use 12 technological tools for attracting Web shoppers and converting them to buyers. Detailed descriptions of techniques are written in plain language and supported by case studies taken from actual Web sites and candid interviews with marketing decision-makers, revealing how successful e-tailers create personalized experiences for shoppers. Some techniques covered are listfeed programs, WAP enabling, and multicurrency capability. Gutzman is an Internet consultant and columnist for an online advice and resource column on e-commerce. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
From The Critics
The E-Commerce Arsenal surveys twelve technologies needed to prevail in the digital business world, from submitting a URL and web positioning to using targeted direct email. The case histories from other business experiences are particularly revealing, covering common problems and solutions.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780814406236
  • Publisher: AMACOM
  • Publication date: 1/26/2001
  • Pages: 320
  • Product dimensions: 6.26 (w) x 9.21 (h) x 1.14 (d)

Read an Excerpt

2. The Recipe for Success

THE SITE

Once you get traffic to your site, you have to keep it there and entice it through your purchase process. There's more to a site than a good interface, clear navigational elements, and cool graphics. You certainly need good site navigation, an intuitive interface, and a site that's fast to load, since even people with 56K modems are actually connecting at closer to 28K than 50K because of overcapacity of ISP phone banks, slow network traffic, and poor phone lines. Most shoppers take these elements for granted these days. What sets apart the sites that are worth recommending to friends? Mostly, the features that enable shoppers easily to find and buy the products they need the first time and every time. Part III of this book takes you through the five technologies that can help set your site apart in a positive way.

PERSONALIZATION

There are two kinds of personalization: overt and covert. Effective sites use both types, whenever possible. Overt personalization ranges from the mildly cloying "Hello, Alexis, Welcome back!" to the invaluable capability to remember billing and shipping information to facilitate a speedy checkout with minimum rekeying. Covert personalization is much more subtle and harder to find. It can be remembering what you purchased on your last visit and showing you complementary products. Or, based on your anonymous profile, it can involve recognizing you before you purchase anything and showing you products you're likely to care about.

If you've ever gone to a search engine and typed "home mortgage" or "auto loan," you've probably noticed that the banner ad at the top of the page is suddenly relevant to what you're looking for. This is a form of covert personalization. The search engine and its advertising partners may not know who you are, but they know what you're interested in based on your previous behavior. Your own site can use similar, more subtle techniques to make sure that the content the visitor sees is always relevant, or at a minimum, inoffensive.

PERSONAL SHOPPERS AND SHOPPING WIZARDS

It's no longer enough simply to give your customers a search box on your home page so they can look for the products they want by keyword. Although I wouldn't eliminate that search box for the surgical shopper just yet, for shoppers who come to your site to solve a problem, I would recommend you add a way as well to find the products that solve that problem. Sites that offer problem solving in addition to shopping will stand out above the crowd.

There are three types of shopping assistants that come readily to mind. The first is the wizard, which offers shoppers a number of options, each choice leading to an additional set of options, each selection of which eventually leads to a product. These are great for gift giving. I found a hanging candelabra for my husband's aunt and uncle at Eddie Bauer.com this way. The first question was about the amount I wanted to spend, and subsequent questions asked about the interests of the gift recipients. This wizard helped me find something unique that I would never have thought to look for in the regular Christmas inventory.

The next option is the kind of thing you find at Garden.com. You come to the site with a problem. I, for instance, need something that flowers to put in pots on my patio. The site helps you find an appropriate solution for your environment based on climate, time of year, sun/shade ratio, and so on. Begonias were the answer to my problem. I wasn't even sure what a begonia was when I first went to Garden.com.

The final option combines something I hate, natural language processing, in which the computer looks for keywords in the English query that I type, with something I love, context-sensitive assistance, in which each subsequent query is based on previous results returned or on where I am in the site. This type of guided shopping is ideal when the shopper knows the category of product he wants but doesn't know enough about the differences between products in that category to be able to devise an intelligent solution. The laptop computer is a perfect example of a product well suited to this type of tool because most people don't understand what the tradeoffs are and what all the product specifications mean. It's easier for most shoppers to indicate that they're looking for a good laptop for travel than it is for them to search by weight, not knowing how heavy or light laptops get.

ACCEPT MULTIPLE CURRENCIES AND SHIP GLOBALLY

It really is the World Wide Web. IDC estimates that by 2003, 38 percent of all online shoppers will be outside the United States. The barriers to global shipping and delivery are large, but not insurmountable. Chapter 10 takes you through the technical, operational, and logistical issues you'll need to address to do business worldwide.

REAL-TIME ACCESS TO INVENTORY AND ORDER STATUS

Shopping on the Web should be gratifying, because all the information a shopper needs to make a purchase decision is there when he is in the mood to buy. Too many sites fall down on the job of providing complete information. They may fail to tell customers when the products they're placing into their carts will ship, how long shipment to specific zip codes should be expected to take, where the products customers have ordered are in the shipping process, and even what the status of returned orders is.

Sites that answer all these questions will find that their customerservice costs go down and their repeat business goes up. Most organizations have access to this data somewhere in the bowels of their customer-service or order-management systems. Why not put the data where the customers can use it and save everyone a phone call?

INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH CONTENT-MANAGEMENT SOLUTION

Many sites rely on their own homegrown content-management systems. Some have a staff of technicians and graphic artists who actually make changes to the code (the Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML) that changes what you see when you load that site directly. Others have proprietary software that's administered from a desktop application that permits the content owners of the site-marketing, technology, public relations, or merchandising, depending on the site-to manipulate the contents of the site without having to involve technicians. Both of these solutions to keeping a site's content up-to-date have serious problems.

A forward-thinking site needs to be built around a serious contentmanagement solution, one that's being maintained by an organization that does nothing but keep it up. Very few sites can afford the resources to put into their own content-management solutions to make them comparable to the best third-party solutions available. Sites that want to compete will bite the bullet and spend the serious dollars required to provide this kind of content-management solution.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Customer service is typically regarded as a necessary evil. Customers demand it, but any improvements made to it come at significant cost. With the customer base on the Web growing so rapidly, few companies can afford to sustain high customer satisfaction ratings. The two most common forms of customer service are e-mail and phone support. The first is inadequate because it takes too long. The second is inappropriate because most U.S. households have only one phone line.

Part IV of this book explores the two key technologies that can turn your site into a place where your customers can see that customer service is paramount. These technologies turn the tables on the traditional customer service equation, in which more service equals more expense, by (1) providing customer-service technologies that scale with the site without incurring additional costs as more customers use them, and (2) offering service at the moment of purchase, when expensive-to-attract customers are most likely to abandon their shopping carts rather than complete their purchases.

REAL-TIME PRESALES CHAT

Real-time chat as a sales and customer support tool has definitely caught on. In September of 1999, real-time chat was almost impossible to find. Sites have realized that this form of customer support, in addition to being timely, is also cost-effective, because support representatives can assist multiple customers at once. It works because it can help you catch customers at that crucial buying moment when they've already taken the time to review your inventory and put the products they want into their shopping carts but are still deciding whether to stay and finish the purchase, whether the shipping charges are fair, and whether they think they can get a better deal elsewhere. Real-time chat is also a great tool for cross-selling customers and thus increasing order totals. Chapter 13 takes you through the technology, the business case for using this technology on your site, and the choices of vendors that can help you provide this kind of support on your site right away...

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Table of Contents

Preface XIII
Acknowledgments XV
Part I The E-Commerce Climate
1 The Struggle for Survival Online 3
The Causes of Competitiveness 4
Increased Customer Expectations: The Consequence of Competitiveness 6
Don't Hurdle; Pole-Vault 6
Baby, You Can Drive My Car 12
Opportunities for Those Who Come at the Eleventh Hour 13
What Are Investors to Do? 13
Narrowing the Field 14
2 The Recipe for Success 15
Driving Traffic 15
The Site 22
Customer Service 25
Turnkey Growth 26
Part II Technologies for Driving Traffic
3 Search Engines for Customer Acquisition 31
Search Engines versus Directories 32
Submitting Your URL 37
How It Works Today 40
Winning Strategies 41
Outsourcing Your Web Positioning 53
Resources 54
4 Viral Affiliates Programs 57
Cost of Acquisition 57
Affiliate Programs 58
Viral Marketing 61
Case Study: OurHouse.com 63
Loyalty Programs 65
How Viral Affiliate Networks Should Work 68
Resources 68
5 Listfeed Programs and XML 71
Knowing When to Bring Them to You and When to Go to Them 71
Aggregators 72
Listfeeds 77
The What and Why of XML 79
Categorizing Products 80
Universal Shopping Carts 81
Case Study: NIC Commerce 82
Resources 83
6 Targeted Electronic Direct Mail 85
Customer Loyalty 85
Getting the List 86
Compiling Customer Profiles 88
Honing the Message 90
Case Study: Garden.com 92
Cost Effectiveness 96
Testing the Messages 96
Event-Driven E-Mail 97
Case Study: Musicland 98
Why Not Send the E-Mail Yourself? 100
Resources 101
7 WAP-Enabling for M-Commerce 103
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) 104
After the WAP: IMT-2000 (aka 3G) 105
Wireless for Messaging 106
How Web Surfing Differs from Wireless Web Surfing 107
Profile: Internet2Anywhere (In2a) 108
Going Mobile the Easy Way 110
Do-It-Yourself Mobile 112
Click-to-Voice 113
Case Study: GiantBear.com 114
Resources 115
Part III Technologies for Making Buying Easier
8 Personalization for Customer Loyalty 119
Overt versus Covert Personalization 120
Overt Personalization 121
Motivating Shoppers to Give You Their Preferences 127
Covert Personalization 128
Case Study: G.U.S. Home Shopping Limited 129
Profile: Net Perceptions 130
Profile: Shop Tok's TokAdvisor 132
Profile: Angara Converter 134
Profile: Blue Martini Software 135
Resources 136
9 Shopping Wizards and In-Context Search 139
Who's Shopping Online 140
Shopping Wizards 142
In-Context Shopping Capabilities 145
Profile: Soliloquy 147
Natural Language Search Tools 148
Profile: Ask Jeeves E-Commerce 149
Knowledgebase 151
Resources 151
10 Globalization and Multicurrency Capability 155
Minimum Requirements to Compete Globally 156
Profile: From2.com 159
Profile: E-Commerce Logistics 161
How to Be a Major Player in a Market 162
Profile: Uniscape 163
Profile: Welocalize.com 167
Resources 169
11 Real-Time Access to Inventory and Order Status 171
Product Information 172
Order Information 175
Customer Information 179
Resources 183
12 Robust Content-Management Systems 185
Customization 186
Baseline Features 187
Profile: NCompass Labs 188
Profile: FatWire 195
Differentiating Features 196
Profile: BroadVision 196
The Importance of Your Vendor Relationship 199
Why Not Custom-Build? 200
Internationalized Solutions 200
Resources 201
Part IV Technologies for Customer Service
13 Real-Time Presales Chat 205
Online Support Options 206
Presales Support versus Customer Service 210
Real-Time Chat: Help When It's Needed 213
Service with a Smiley Face 215
Knowledge(base) Is Power 218
How Real-Time Chat Works 219
Resources 224
14 Multichannel Customer Service Systems 229
Customer Service as Differentiator 230
Building a Customer-Centric Organization 231
What "Multichannel" Really Means 232
The Isolated Data Phenomenon 233
What Is CRM? 235
CRM versus ERP 236
Selecting a CRM Vendor 237
CRM at Work 239
Building the Relationship 241
Resources 242
Part V Turnkey Growth
15 Outsource Everything 245
Why Outsource? 245
Case Study: Paytime 250
Case Study: Ask Jeeves 251
Case Study: eWonder.com 252
The Ins and Outs of Outsourcing 253
In Celebration of ASPs 256
No Longer Vogue with the Venture Capitalists--So What? 258
16 Feed the Lions 259
Guard Your Crack in the Sidewalk 261
The Service Economy 262
Everyone's Doin' It 264
Case Study: Web Trends Live/Click-Stream Analysis 264
Case Study: E-Commerce Support Centers/Customer Service 265
Case Study: Digital Impact/E-Mail 266
Case Study: The Kringle Company/Private-Labeled Personalized Letters 268
Epilogue: A Baker's Dozen: Alternative Payment Systems 271
Consumers Are Rarely the Victims of Fraud 272
Protecting the Merchant 273
Alternative Payment Systems 280
Major Payment System Vendors 281
Resources 285
Notes 287
Index 291
About the Author 303
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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 4, 2001

    Everything You Need to Know Clearly Explained

    This book is the first book I've seen that explains (for the non-technical reader) all the things that an online merchant needs to do and why. It is also full of useful lists of additional sources of information. The chapter on real-time chat, for example, explains both how it works and how to implement it. I can see this becoming the training manual for many online merchants, or merchants that are thinking about going online. The author isn't so wild about online commerce that she's blind to the realities of being profitable. This is a very clearly written guidebook for online merchants explaining what technologies they ought to be implementing and how to do it. I plan to use it with my clients to make the case for personalization and other technologies they're reluctant to implement.

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