I can remember times where everyone believed we couldn’t have enough online stores.  Selling online was the next BIG thing.  Everyone started their own little shop and became online marketing experts.  It was easy and cheap.

What happened?  The reason growth in e-Commerce is threatened, slowed, or stopped altogether isn’t because the market is saturated, it’s because there’s been a failure of management.

Every major industry has once experienced significant growth.  The ones that made the right decisions grew, the others… well, here’s a simple example.

There once was a time when railroads were the hottest and trendiest way of transportation.  The railroad industry didn’t stop growing because the need for passengers and transportation declined.  Year after year, more people were traveling, just like there are more people buying online today.

Sitebrand says don't treat e-Commerce like railroads!

People didn’t move away from trains and towards cars, trucks, airplanes etc… the reality is people stopped using  trains.  Railroad companies let their customers leave because they saw being in the railroad business as their top priority, rather than being in the transportation business.  They were railroad oriented and not transportation oriented; they were product oriented and not customer oriented.

Do you see were I’m going with this?

Assuming growth is assured by an expanding population or by the adoption of technology might be as fatal as believing if visitors find your site; they will buy from you.

Over the last few years, most online companies haven’t needed to think, at least not a lot.  More and more people were buying more products and services online.  In times where everyone was spending, there wasn’t a growth problem.  If thinking is the intellectual response to a problem, then the absence of a problem leads to the absence of thinking.

Weird? Well I’m a technology guy, that’s how we rationalize.

So let me come back to my railroad example.  Online retailers finally have to understand that they can’t be railroad oriented.  Their business is not to perfect their SEO, find more ways of driving traffic or analyzing why someone didn’t buy.  They have to be transportation oriented.

It all starts with the customer.  Everything else are tools to help you take good care of what is important in your business: your customers.  Tools can be dangerous and can be misused if you don’t ensure your customers are happy.  Streets were built to bring people to trains and were later expanded so people could use cars and not trains (Don’t you feel that Google sounds a lot like those streets?).

You think we would have learned from our mistakes with railroads?

Think again.  Review how happy your visitors and customers are.

Look at your bounce rates or ratio between new versus returning visitors and tell me that you have not failed so far.  Now tell me that you didn’t think further than buying more keywords in the past.

So far you’ve built the trains, tracks and streets that bring people to your train stations.  You’ve looked at reports that tell you visitors come, look into your trains and leave to take the bus or go home or… who knows.  You don’t even know if they actually wanted to take the train, ah… I mean buy a product.

Put the customer in the center of your business.  Use review tools like Powerreviews to ask for opinions.  Use Sitebrand to personalize & optimize the session.  Help them find what they are looking for with tools like SLI-Systems.  Make them feel welcome and special.  Give them the feeling you have when you get on an airplane, first class from Hong Kong to New York.  You get pampered.  Give them the first class experience they deserve.

Don’t give visitors the lousy second class train ride experience with stops at every milk can.  Don’t make the same mistakes the railroads did…