How do you future proof an on-line store?

Grant Leboff: Graham, something that really interests me is that, you’ve got this great online shopping website and it works, but of course we are living in a world where it can change so quickly. A few years ago no one was using tablets really, and now they are ubiquitous and everything is going mobile. We’re now getting to the realms of wearable technology as well. So how do you future proof a site to the point – to a point you can’t – but what should people be thinking about in terms of e-commerce? Where is it going over the next one or two years – I’m not going to ask for more than that! – that means these are the things companies should be thinking about now, to be ready for the future?

Graham Jones: I think it’s very difficult to predict exactly what’s going to be happening in one or two years time, we don’t really know what somebody might be working on. So I think the most important thing to do is to make sure that your business is adaptable and that means, understanding your customers, making sure you know what they are doing, making sure you know where they are going, making sure you are constantly in touch with them, so you know where they are likely to be heading. Then, with all of the business processes that you have, you can adapt quickly.

There’s one important online brand that hasn’t done very well with their website and, at the beginning of the year they said that they would have to get their website sorted in about six months. They needed to get their websites sorted in about six hours. It’s that kind of traditional long process of thinking that is no longer suitable for adapting to the future. You’ve got to be quickly adaptable, which means you’ve got to be much closer to your customers.

Grant Leboff: How do you that? If you’re looking at the analytics, you will be able to see the changes and the trends on your own site, and that’s fine but that gives you quite a one dimensional view in some ways. Are there any monitoring tools or ways to monitor, online, the bigger picture that you suggest companies start to utilise to make sure that they are staying abreast of what’s going on?

Graham Jones: Well as an example, I was with a company last week that has a monthly meeting looking through their analytics and they were very proud of this meeting because it showed them the people were spending an average of 10 minutes on their website. When I asked them how much money do they spend as a result of those 10 minutes, it turns out that they spend nothing.

And so a monthly meeting to analyse how much time people were spending on the site was irrelevant and when I asked them how much did that meeting cost you, in terms of management time, it turned out to be nearly £4000 worth of management time to discover that no one spending any money with you!

When I looked at the website, it was because it was too cumbersome and too difficult. People were spending a lot of time on the site because they couldn’t find their way around properly. Now if they had only spoken to the customers, they could have understood that. So the one thing is, not really worrying about the analytics – that’s useful information – but really focus on actually being with your customers in the real world. Talk to them, get to know them, so what ever else happens with other businesses, with other websites and with other services, you can carry on providing what your customers want.

Grant Leboff: So how do you recommend doing that? Let’s say that you’ve set up an e-commerce site. Customers come to you, you optimise it right, it is talked about in social, you get some decent traffic and people are spending some money with you as well. How do you then switch what has then been an online relationship, almost exclusively into, with some of those, taking it off-line? How do you do that comfortably so that you can, perhaps, talk to customers and understand a bit more about them?

Graham Jones: You can ask them to join groups, you can ask them to join a community where you can talk to them, phone them, you can get them together in focus groups, you can have parties, you can have events, you can do all kinds of things that get you together with people – either on the telephone or face to face in the real world – that allow you to understand them better. Far too many businesses think that the Internet is the only way to communicate with your customers. There are plenty of other ways.

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