Design Store Operations for Ecommerce Brains

When you’re running a retail store, who’s your competition? It includes more than the local shop down the boulevard or the Big Box across town. No, it also includes the computer on the consumer’s desk and the mobile device in their pocket or purse. Ecommerce changes the ways people think about shopping. If your business is to thrive—and maybe even to survive—carefully note what ecommerce is doing to the brains of your target markets.
     Clearly, there are wide individual differences in ecommerce brains. Some differences are related to age. Younger consumers’ brains are more likely than older consumers’ to enjoy multitasking when shopping. Some has to do with gender. As a general rule, women’s ecommerce brains are more likely than men’s to miss the social and sensory experiences store-based shopping provides. Their brains will search for those experiences.
     Then there’s a different sort of search all ecommerce brains continually perform: The search for information filtering shortcuts. When shopping now, there’s too much to know. The brains look for ways to categorize and subcategorize so purchase decisions can be made in stages. To depend on resources—like rating sites or acknowledged experts—to make part or all of the decision. To decide what to buy based on intuition or emotion instead of a thoroughly systematic analysis of the data. And for some ecommerce brains, to be satisfied with a less-than-ideal purchase choice so we can get ’er done and move on to enjoying what we got.
     The smartest ecommerce retailers are regularly testing their web pages and optimizing them to achieve best results based on five sorts of questions their shoppers’ brains ask:

• “Why am I here?” “Is it to make a repeat purchase, consider changing to a new item, gather information for future use? Was I brought here by an ad that promised me a discount or other distinctive shopping advantage?”
• “What are my options?” “Now that I’m here, what can I do? Are there attractive possibilities I didn’t know about?”
• “Which options should I choose and why?”
• “How do I do it?” “Is that the button to click?”
• “What should I do next?”

     You want to be in the same league as the smartest retailers. Use those five questions as the basis for designing your store operations as well as your ecommerce presence.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

Click below for more:
Use Signage to Categorize Items
Know How Much Emotion to Deliver
Have Shoppers On a Mission Look at Possibilities