Ecommerce “best practice”.
Believe it or not, searches for “Christmas” are surging on Google Trends. Not a surprise as it was the same around this time last year. What it means is that there’s no better time than right now to prepare your business for an online onslaught of shoppers. Use the amazing data inside Google Trends, learn from it and improve the experience for your customers.
- Christmas is coming.
- Ecommerce is going to benefit again this year.
- Does your site have “best practice”?
- Focus on your customer.
- Make it easy to purchase.
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers. How are you going? I was going to talk to you about a lot of different stuff this week, but I thought I’d just bring it down to a conversation I had about 15 minutes ago. I’ve been looking at a whole bunch of searches on Google Trends. So, I’ll just get out of there. I’ll go to this one. You’re saying, “What, Jim? Christmas gifts?” I know, sorry. I just had to show you that because it is trending right now. And why? Because that’s when people started searching last year. Here it is. Last year they started in August, end of August. And you can see it started a little bit earlier this year. So, if you go to the last seven days, people were looking and you’ll get all the related queries. And there is a lot of information in there you can go and have a look at in Google Trends. But it’s going on right now. It’s already happening. A lot of stuff.
Prepare for Xmas
So, I had a certain conversation with a very large organisation. They have different brands, and they have different e-commerce sites for the brands and that sort of stuff. Fast-moving consumer goods, obviously in a space where a lot of people can’t get their product currently because they are only in supermarkets and those sorts of things. And if your supermarket doesn’t stock it, then you can’t travel to another one to get it, all that sort of stuff.
So, they’ve obviously gone through a large growth period over the last year like a lot of businesses have, and a lot of businesses haven’t, and he was asking, “I know what the logistics issues are around the business, around delivery and all those sorts of things for our product. But what I need to know is what are the best practice stuff? What are the things that people are doing that we need to build into our systems? What are the things we need to be thinking about, because we don’t want to miss out anything.” And then he said, “I know what’s wrong with my sites now.” And most people do.
I try to simplify it for people. I’m not a website builder. I have built them back in the 90s, but not now. And we don’t like building websites mainly because, well, I’m not great with people telling me, “Can you make it bluer?” I just can’t. I can’t handle that. Sorry. So that’s why we focus on the money, not the colours.
And I said to him, “Look, one of the things that you’ve got to look at, whatever CMS you jump on with or whatever developer you go with,” and usually you’ll have to choose your CMS before you choose your developer, because your developer usually is going to have a specialty. So, they’ll probably specialise in a CMS for e-commerce. Some don’t. Some work across multiple… I mean, we work obviously for shopping optimisation, we work across all e-commerce platforms, Microsoft ones, open-source ones, all sorts of things.
Don’t forget your customer
And I said to him, “Look, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last five years that’s just blown me away is that we’ve forgotten about the customer.” And that might seem simplistic or fairly vague. But what I mean by that is in digital, we’re so focused on making the screen look pretty and looking at the screen, we’re not focused necessarily on e-commerce and in having people or understanding what people are doing when they’re shopping on your site. They might be having a cup of coffee and they might be scrolling with one finger. They might be standing on a train somewhere, trying to buy something off your site. They might even be in bed, trying to buy off your site. They might be drunk in front of the television, trying to buy something off your site.
Who are these people? How are they shopping? You should know, and you should understand what the peak shopping times of the day are. If you don’t know that, you can go into Google Analytics and see that with your client. Is that the right peak shopping time for the day? Is there a reason they’re shopping at that time? Would they prefer to shop at a different time? Do you know those things?
So, all of the things that we talk about are understanding your customer and understanding your customer through the data that you already have in Google Analytics. It’s all there. So, my advice to anyone these days about e-commerce is just make it easier for me to buy from you. And that goes for everything from the site is fast, it works well, plus I understand exactly how much this order is going to cost me, as quickly and as easily as possible. Some of these things like shipping and delivery times and all those things have to be made really simple and clear and easy to understand. And really, it’s that simple, but it’s kind of that hard as well. Hopefully that’s helpful. If you want a second opinion on your website, I kind of said that funny, didn’t I, send an email to [email protected]. Make sure you sign up for our email list. Stewartmedia.biz. You can go there, or www.stewartmedia.com.au, of course, we have both. And please like, share, subscribe, tell your friends. Stay free and I’ll see you next week. Thanks very much everyone. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
