The ideal startup website for any small retailer is simply an online product catalogue or ‘e-Showroom’. This can be used to display from 50 to 5,000 products.
The purpose is not to sell online directly with all the cost and complexity of an eCommerce system. The purpose is to help those searching for products that you stock, to be able find you online.
This type of site can work wonders for those selling to the public or a trade group. Traditional ecommerce developers would prefer you didn’t know this, but the reality is that most online searches, result in a sale at a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ store – Not an ‘online’ purchase. We’ve elaborated on this topic in a recent article entitled “Want in-store sales? Put all you products online”
The Objective
To reiterate – The primary aim of our catalogue is not to tell people how wonderful you are or to bombard hapless customers with good looks and ‘branding’. The catalogue is there to help those searching online for your products, to discover you on page one of their search result.
The real trick here, which is rarely achieved, is to make sure you have ALL your products listed online. And then encourage people to contact you by phone or email for more product information and pricing. We provide some neat tricks to make this aspect incredible easy.
A secondary role of the site is provide readers the latest data on new products, plus pages for competitions or surveys to gather more information for direct marketing purposes.
But having people phone you is good – It provides a higher ‘close ratio’ than eCommerce sites now a human is in the sales loop…
Google ‘Findability’
A key, hidden feature of our e-catalogue is not just their good looks, but more their ability to be found, often referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
This is what most design-focused websites lack today. Designers are content to add in a few ‘keywords’ to the site header in the hope Google will magically find the site – This simple strategy was adequate 5+ years ago, but certainly not today.
What’s the point of having a website, if it can’t be found?
Expert search-optimisation, means those looking for an item that you stock, will have you in their search results. Most people are delighted they’ve found you at this point, quite happy to then phone and check you have it, find out the price and then come into your store to buy.
Compared with a traditionally designed photo/catalogue website, or a full eCommerce website (WebStore), our product catalogue sites are:
- Affordable. Total setup cost, ready for your products – From $2,000, excl gst
- Using our pre-built design templates, it can be up and running within a week!
- Very easy to manage and maintain by store staff (no web designers or geeks required)
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