Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Online Retail: It's Not an Easy Journey
Author: Paul Ratcliffe
As a garden centre trading in the Weald of Kent, the giant step into the unknown world of 'cyber-gardening' and online retail was a daunting prospect. Of course, it could be seen as a natural progression, the business itself having been running successfully on a local scale, why not go national, or even, potentially, international. What was stopping us; the horizon was there, just waiting to be broadened, and so the decision was made, Pleasant View Garden Centre would become an Internet entity.
It became noticeable very early after launching that the hardest thing was going to be attracting the custom. As a physical presence, the garden centre attracts shoppers by being visible, by being a building that passing pedestrians or drivers can see, the name and address aren't so important. As a business, so long as it is obvious that you are a garden centre or a fishmonger or a second hand car dealer or whatever else you care to be a trader of, custom will be continuously drawn through impulse, and more importantly, impact. Online; not so. The online shop cannot be seen, it cannot be passed by accident and it will not attract impulse buyers in the same way a building would. It has to be found through searching, through somebody wanting something you offer before they even know of your existence. Aside from direct advertising methods, the only way to be found and to gain a reputation is through the driving forces of the Internet, those most used of online services, the search engine! I was foolish enough to think that submission alone would be enough, that after I'd placed the site into Google's little black address book, millions would put in 'gardening', and there we would be, shining on top of the pile, 'www.pvgc2.co.uk', everybody's first choice for, well, everything! Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work in this way, and it was a rude awakening to find ourselves back on around page 30 or whatever, beaten by irrelevancies, mistakes and most importantly, almost every single competitor out there. Clearly, this wasn't going to be the easy, freewheeling job we had anticipated, the bubble was burst by our underestimation of the work and by overestimation of easy, instantaneous custom. Our tactics had to change, our mentalities had to be tweaked. It was suddenly glaringly obvious that we were quite unlikely to make millions of pounds in the first week, and that the yacht and Ferrari had to be put on hold, at least for a while. Adding stock to the site was put on a back burner, and due to the fact that we ironed out mistakes and cleaned up images during our early soft launch, the site looked basically how it had been envisioned, and so the emphasis was put onto raising our profile, to start showing ourselves to customers and pull ourselves up through the web. The first plan was to invest in a 'sponsored links' advertising scheme, a pay-per-click method that didn't mean risking a large sum of money on a potential failure, we would only pay if people actually went to the site. With some figure balancing and a little juggling between good and bad words, we finally came top of the page in a Google search, albeit through the miracle of payment. It was amazing seeing the reaction. From the multitude of keywords that were thought up, some were getting tens, some hundreds and others thousands of impressions as people searched for what we were offering, and some days, the number of hits from these impressions totalled almost as many as the times the link was viewed. This was the design, this was the objective from the beginning, to get known, to get traffic and ultimately, to get custom, and finally, it had come to fruition. The next step was building upon this, by submitting the site to directories throughout the internet, to as many as possible as quickly as possible. Although a long, arduous process, within a couple of days we were populated throughout, available across the world for anyone and everyone to see. It became very important to monitor traffic, to carefully see where customers were buying from and which pages were most effective, altering the least popular areas accordingly. With this tweaking and adjusting, the site was able to get better daily, attracting more and more people as word spread and search engine placements improved.
Custom is now at a very pleasing level, and although it has taken a while, it has been worth it, and the journey slowly but surely moves onwards and upwards. From the very first order months ago, to the three I have processed simply this morning, we are just as careful to keep our standard of service as high as possible and treat our customers as though they were actually in a shop with us, not hundreds of miles away. After the early struggle it's important to keep those people that had faith in us loyal and pleased, something we aim to do with every single visitor to www.pvgc2.co.uk.
About the Author:
N/A
As a garden centre trading in the Weald of Kent, the giant step into the unknown world of 'cyber-gardening' and online retail was a daunting prospect. Of course, it could be seen as a natural progression, the business itself having been running successfully on a local scale, why not go national, or even, potentially, international. What was stopping us; the horizon was there, just waiting to be broadened, and so the decision was made, Pleasant View Garden Centre would become an Internet entity.
It became noticeable very early after launching that the hardest thing was going to be attracting the custom. As a physical presence, the garden centre attracts shoppers by being visible, by being a building that passing pedestrians or drivers can see, the name and address aren't so important. As a business, so long as it is obvious that you are a garden centre or a fishmonger or a second hand car dealer or whatever else you care to be a trader of, custom will be continuously drawn through impulse, and more importantly, impact. Online; not so. The online shop cannot be seen, it cannot be passed by accident and it will not attract impulse buyers in the same way a building would. It has to be found through searching, through somebody wanting something you offer before they even know of your existence. Aside from direct advertising methods, the only way to be found and to gain a reputation is through the driving forces of the Internet, those most used of online services, the search engine! I was foolish enough to think that submission alone would be enough, that after I'd placed the site into Google's little black address book, millions would put in 'gardening', and there we would be, shining on top of the pile, 'www.pvgc2.co.uk', everybody's first choice for, well, everything! Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work in this way, and it was a rude awakening to find ourselves back on around page 30 or whatever, beaten by irrelevancies, mistakes and most importantly, almost every single competitor out there. Clearly, this wasn't going to be the easy, freewheeling job we had anticipated, the bubble was burst by our underestimation of the work and by overestimation of easy, instantaneous custom. Our tactics had to change, our mentalities had to be tweaked. It was suddenly glaringly obvious that we were quite unlikely to make millions of pounds in the first week, and that the yacht and Ferrari had to be put on hold, at least for a while. Adding stock to the site was put on a back burner, and due to the fact that we ironed out mistakes and cleaned up images during our early soft launch, the site looked basically how it had been envisioned, and so the emphasis was put onto raising our profile, to start showing ourselves to customers and pull ourselves up through the web. The first plan was to invest in a 'sponsored links' advertising scheme, a pay-per-click method that didn't mean risking a large sum of money on a potential failure, we would only pay if people actually went to the site. With some figure balancing and a little juggling between good and bad words, we finally came top of the page in a Google search, albeit through the miracle of payment. It was amazing seeing the reaction. From the multitude of keywords that were thought up, some were getting tens, some hundreds and others thousands of impressions as people searched for what we were offering, and some days, the number of hits from these impressions totalled almost as many as the times the link was viewed. This was the design, this was the objective from the beginning, to get known, to get traffic and ultimately, to get custom, and finally, it had come to fruition. The next step was building upon this, by submitting the site to directories throughout the internet, to as many as possible as quickly as possible. Although a long, arduous process, within a couple of days we were populated throughout, available across the world for anyone and everyone to see. It became very important to monitor traffic, to carefully see where customers were buying from and which pages were most effective, altering the least popular areas accordingly. With this tweaking and adjusting, the site was able to get better daily, attracting more and more people as word spread and search engine placements improved.
Custom is now at a very pleasing level, and although it has taken a while, it has been worth it, and the journey slowly but surely moves onwards and upwards. From the very first order months ago, to the three I have processed simply this morning, we are just as careful to keep our standard of service as high as possible and treat our customers as though they were actually in a shop with us, not hundreds of miles away. After the early struggle it's important to keep those people that had faith in us loyal and pleased, something we aim to do with every single visitor to www.pvgc2.co.uk.
About the Author:
N/A
