Anthony Stodart is managing director of ArdMoor, the ecommerce site he founded in July 2010. Based in North Berwick, the ‘country living’ site stocks clothing and equipment for shooting, fishing, sailing and farming – with ranges for men, women and children.
Starting out as an ecommerce site relieved ArdMoor of the difficulty of converting an existing ‘bricks and mortar’ business to a virtual one – thus avoiding familiar challenges. But selling online is not without its own particular hurdles. Here he outlines how to make the best of your ecommerce strategy.
Get the best from Google
Maintaining a high Google ranking is essential to the health of an ecommerce business.
“Google is the perpetual issue that must be overcome” according to Anthony. “A general rule of thumb is not to take any shortcuts. If you play by the rules, Google tends to reward you with good rankings”.
To stay on the right side of Google, it’s important to ensure content isn't duplicated – so a simple ‘copy and paste’ of product descriptions won’t wash.
Websites with duplicate content will be penalised – with the original keeper of the copy highest in the ranking and other sites pushed down in the search results.
Understand the power of valuable content
Another business scraped the entire ArdMoor website and put the content up as their own. What if that happens to you?
There’s a simple, if time-consuming, antidote. “We take a lot of time to rewrite the descriptions provided by the manufacturers of our merchandise...and put our own slant on descriptions. This original content is not only adding value for our own customers, it’s what keeps us consistently high in the rankings.”
Add to this Google’s frequent algorithm tweaks - presented without warning and a consistent challenge for the ecommerce business to work out the criteria which will stop them slipping down the rankings.
“For example, Google has recently started to reward sites which have added-value content and information – social media add-ons, news sections, guides, blogs etc. We don't currently have enough of these, so at the moment we're actively working on adding them...to stay up the rankings and thus get more customers.
It's all about adding extra value to your site, so you're more than a place to shop. Dynamic content is what puts you at the top of a search.”
Put your learning into action
In response, ArdMoor has added a blog to its site – covering country news and issues. Including everything from game recipes to a series of ‘country living’ tips and guides, they’ve felt the benefits of this additional ‘value’ content but Antony remains insistent that this won't be enough to keep you at the top of those all-important rankings.
“There are no shortcuts here, he states. This content also needs to be regularly updated and refreshed, and Google tracks how often you are doing this.
It’s not enough to just bung a load of extra content up all in one go and leave it there forever. Little and often is the key.”
Create consistent conversion rates
ArdMoor have evaded a common ecommerce setback – that of low conversion rates. But they did find that they were experiencing a high bounce rate – with potential customers visiting single pages on the site, then leaving before making a purchase.
Stodart explains “this could mean the page is not relevant, or not what they thought it would be. To fix this, you need to make sure your ads are pointed at the right pages – that clicking on an ad will actually take the customer to that product on your site.
However, we also noticed that we had a particularly high bounce rate from mobiles. After some investigation, we discovered that people were using their mobiles to scan the bar codes of items we sell in shops to see if there was a cheaper alternative, but waiting until they got home to make the purchase online rather than doing so from their phone.”
Tackle empty shopping carts
Another common problem for retailers is cart abandonment - when the customer leaves the site in the middle of the checkout process before completing their purchase. To counter this problem, Anthony believes understanding the customer mindset is key.
“You can't make assumptions about what the customer will already know; you must make everything very clear. For example, one way we avoid cart abandonment is to put our delivery charges very clearly at the top of every page, as well as on every item. That way there are no nasty surprises for the customer.
We are also very clear in the image and the description of the product. Good size guides also cut down on returns and exchanges. We picked up on this and improved it and our returns rate has gone down since.”
The pitfalls of offering free delivery
There is one caveat when it comes to the ‘customer as king’ theory. He warns “think carefully before you offer free delivery – it may be a way to get customers buying, but it is not free for you. Besides the actual postage costs, there’s the packaging, the time it takes to organise and pack a delivery and the wages of the person doing it.
I know of a business that offered free postage for any item to anywhere in the world – they did it brilliantly at first, of course, but they couldn't sustain that cost and that might have been one of the reasons they’re no longer in business.
We cannot afford to offer free delivery, and we are upfront about this. As long as you are honest and allow the customer to factor the postage costs into their spending, then that is fair.”
Never forget the importance of trust
Fairness and trust are key components in ecommerce, and Anthony is adamant about their importance: “Trust is what it's all about. The absolute secret to online success is customer service. Nothing will beat that. There are always going to be problems, you can never eliminate them entirely.
It's how you deal with them that makes you stand out. We call people, we email them – we contact them. This makes people trust you – we are accessible, we are visible, we are real people at the end of the phone. Our phone number is clearly displayed on every page - there's no hiding behind the screen.
“And our service is prompt and polite. Talking to customers also gives us invaluable feedback. We gain so much information on how they use the site. Loyalty equals repeated custom and repeat purchasers are vital to the business – it's much harder to get a new customer than to keep an existing one.
“For success and longevity in ecommerce, do it properly. No shortcuts. It's not cheap, but it won't work in the long term if you cut corners.”
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