Nett Knowledge Blog

Innovative ecommerce today is challenging old school retailers to move forward so they can outperform their competition. The restuls of this new approach to online business is quite frankly "explosive" in the growth for those who use the new model.

You're probably beginning to wonder what the top 4 tips are?

1. In the past retailers have tried to identify their "Best Customers" and reward them only. However, the change that is occuring, espescially with online ecommerce is to look at the total life value of a client and not how much they spend one time, in one big hit.

You're much better of these days to identify and align with the top experts and "early adopters" of a niche, invite them to trial the new product or service and then give them the necessary tools to invite their circle of contacts, friends, family so they can easily leverage their natural influence and expertise on them, which in turn will allow the whole thing to grow in a viral manner.

This is particularly well suited to online invite a friend forms, however can be done just as easily with an offline by using a well thought out invite a friend program.

2. You've been taught in the past to only sell stock, knowledge, services that you have "on hand" as selling up coming resources will only frustrate customers.

It sounds logical doesn't it, but if you think this "old school way" then you're leaving out a very, very important strategic angle in your business promotion program.

What if you approached the thin niche of "early adopters" that really enjoy and pride themselves on having the latest and greatest and being first in their market by implementing the newest services?

If you were open to this idea of focussing on the early adopters, you would then only need to pursuade them to endorse your products and if you're product / service is worth it's salt, they will love it, and then go on and endorse it to their network of contacts.

Indeed this will allow you as an ecommerce retailer to secure pre-purchase commitments, be ahead of the curve and adjust from early feedback and discussions with clients (before competitors even cotton on to the new product / service and retaliate), allow them to share the new ideas with highly credible circles of influence that can massively influence viral spread of early sales, and finally, increase your loyalty and following from clients who want the latest and the greatest.

3. Overlooking the main ecommerce buyers in a niche to interact with their customers. Retailers by and large don't have any infrastructure to facilitate interaction between customers and buyers. And because most retailers aren't close to their customers, they don't make their industry expert advisors available to their clients, this is indeed a "BIG" mistake.

This has happened because until only recently, and savvy use of internet surveys it was diffucult to get the information and feedback from end customers in a cost effective and timely way.

But with the invent of the likes of Facebook Groups and many other fan based blogs, twitter, it's become much simpler for ratings, polls and reviews to take place. Therefore retailers can make good use of uncovering opportunities, threats and problems so they can make forecasts with a whole new x-ray type vision.

4. Most ecommerce retailers only have one website or storefront, you need to learn how to leverage multiple presences! As a highly savvy ecommerce operator, you can now leverage the likes of affiliates, Ebay, Amazon and so on and so forth. This in fact enables you to put your products / services, under the nose of "Where the clients are" and not wasting your time trying to lure them to your storefront or website.

This is how it might look, your affiliates enable what they call a "Widget" on their Facebook, blog, review website and this will allow your products to show up on "their website" this in essence "takes the water to the horse" and now it's even possible to allow secure transactions to take place from within the widget installed on an affiliate site, and that my friends is the part "that gets the horse to drink".

So there you have it, 4 old-school ways of thinking and unique twists to help you move forward in your business. I hope they help and give you some "AHA" moments to increase your sales.