Do you know how lovely it is to pop on a Web site and quickly and easily track all the purchases you’ve made from that site over time? Probably not, as there are only two product-selling sites that I know of that allow you to access information about your past purchases: Drugstore.com and eBay.
Recently I wanted to buy another color of a pantsuit I’d bought from an apparel catalog. Looking through current and past printed editions and searching on the Web didn’t help me find the style I wanted. A product listing could have cut this search time to seconds and help assure the accuracy of the find. Even if a cataloger no longer carries the item, a cross-reference to something similar might garner a sale that otherwise would not have been.
Want to understand what e-tailing can teach you about your catalog business? Start buying and/or selling on eBay. The first thing you’ll immediately notice is the unbelievable ease in customer communication. If there’s a question the consumer has, eBay has thought of it and answered it before it’s even been asked. Because half the time consumers don’t even know they have a question, eBay posts relevant questions and options right next to the task that’s under way.
We all can agree that this degree of communication is the ideal, but too many of us believe it simply isn’t possible to know what customers want before they do themselves. eBay proves how wrong this way of thinking can be.
One of my favorites is the Re-list option positioned on the same line as the notice of an item you’d tried unsuccessfully to sell. It doesn’t rely on consumers to have the sense to re-list; it plants the seed right away. This strategy lets you re-list the unsold item once more for free. If it sells the second time, the insertion fee for the re-listing will be refunded to you. If it doesn’t, another insertion fee goes into eBay’s pocket.
eBay also makes sure every transaction is as accurate as possible with sensible prompts. One example is the line that appears right under the clickable info on what you have won or didn’t win (winning is the marvelous name eBay uses for buying). This line reads,
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