Is Your Online Presence Consistent or Better than a “Live Customer Experience?”
Call it the Amazon effect, but the service and experience online is fast surpassing what we get when we actually enter a physical retail location.
If you’ve shopped online in the last 2-5 years, you understand what I am talking about. The selection, shopping and check out experience you receive when buying online has reached vastly superior levels. This is obviously troubling to the big box retailers; just ask Circuit City and Best Buy. Other retailers have to be asking similar questions. Many brick and mortar retailers, however, have created a great online presence; however, others continue to struggle.
Your business today has to recognize the fact that a strong combination of customer experience, good content and product and selection criteria play a huge role in making sure customers continue to frequent your site. There are online drop shipping courses you could take to learn how to grow your business online, and create a more comfortable experience for you customers. As more and more B2B and B2C transactions occur, the experience has to be transparent to a customer just as if they were in a retail location working with a sales representative.
The lines have begun to blur as more and more customers become comfortable with an online experience, making it difficult for brick and mortar stores to exist with their current model. As retail websites become more sophisticated, “help” could be in the form of a real person to chat with via video display helping you with product features, pricing, delivery, discounts, and or comparable and add-on products, etc., while you sit in the comfort of your living room.
Even auto sales are trying to capture an “online experience” to lure customers to their site. A recent site, Carvana.com does just that. Carvana allows a buyer to buy, test-drive, and inspect a car with a 7-day return policy…100% online. They also provide a 360 degree virtual tour of the vehicle that will highlight any imperfection and feature and to maintain total transparency throughout the buying experience.
What does this all mean? The game has changed. Customers expect their online shopping experience to be enjoyable, easy, informative and cost-effective — and it has become exactly that. And they will continue to expect more as technology allows. Brick and mortar stores are having a difficult time competing in this arena, even though they have “real people” in their stores to “help” you. The internet has changed all that and will continue to change as we become more sophisticated and smarter about our online purchases.
Full-on disruption on the horizon? You tell me.
