Selling a product online is at least as difficult as selling it offline. In the offline, traditional brick and mortar sales, as businesses discovered the hard way this recession, the problems they had were not just about getting people on to the stores. The problem of getting more pairs of feet walk into the retail space was a challenge that went on to converting the frugal consumer to making the purchase. All tricks were tried at the retail stores, right from attractive offers and colourful gadgets to shuffling of layouts and strategically placing impulse stuff at the point of sale.

By contrast, e-commerce is witnessing a phenomenon that is markedly different from what the real world retail stores are looking at. Online sales are going through a more dynamic phase these days. While businesses have experienced a marked drop in people walking into their stores, online sales are reportedly exploding in comparison. With connectivity improving all over and people spending more time at homes as a direct result of recession, online purchases and transactions are growing fast, defying recessionary logic. Broadband users in the UK, for instance, have topped at 19 million as e-commerce is now a household name. Consumers are getting accustomed to shopping online and are hunting for bargains on the web.

To cash in on this trend, however, requires a good deal of adaptation on the part of businesses as well. A simple analysis of consumer behaviour online shows a trend in online usage, where the number of people who land in a site gets streamed down into a trickle progressively with every page that the online visitor visits. For instance, a traditional online seller may have his home page that talks about his company and products. A few products may be featured on the home page while the rest of the products would be in the form of categories and product division links. The category page would lead to a sub-category page that would perhaps list down the available products. With every page that leads from the home page, traffic whittles down to a trickle and it is only a very few who go past the shopping cart on to the actual buying process. In other words, the longer it takes for a prospective customer to reach the buying stage in a product purchase, the lesser is the probability that the visit and enquiry phase would end up in actual sale.

Online retailers and sellers who want a better conversion rate have no choice but to get net savvy. Making money online and selling products virtually is not just about having products listed, pictures posted and having shopping carts and payment gateways. You may have a great website that illustrates products, you may have a blog that is constantly updated, you may have optimised your site and your blog to be ranked prominently by the search engines and still you may not be successful in converting that customer interest into the all important sale. Interactivity is the key and making websites smarter than mere brochures of information is essential. While the conventional tools of social media presence and SEO techniques would help in getting consumers visit your site, you need to build websites that actually think and make your landing pages the actual selling points too.

As a customer lands on a page, depending on what he clicks, all other relevant products should line up along side. Interactivity such as asking a few leading questions and getting the readers’ responses would help, provided the back-end is powerful enough to pour over the data as it is entered and it gives suggestions real time. The Real Time suggestions are what would take the sale to the next level. If you are a health care retailer and a visitor clicks on a health product that improves his energy levels, your site should try to find out the real reason why he clicked on the product – is it perhaps he is a student trying to improve his memory or a sports person who wants to improve his stamina or if he is a fitness freak who works out at the gym, or a researcher who wants to know more about the product. This interactivity would engage your visitor and your site should then line up products that go in line with his specifications and requirements. Compare this with the traditional way of making him go through the sitemap and product catalogues and shopping carts.

Rich interactivity and content tools enrich customer experience as you also get to know your customer better. The visitor wouldn’t have to dissipate his energy browsing through products that he may never need and you could cash in on his actual requirements to convert it into sale, then and there. Websites have to get past the first phase and evolve into thinking machines. As a web retailer, you have two choices – adapt now, or adapt later.