The main benefit for sellers is that it allows them to reduce costs with regard to employing staff and the numerous overheads. There are cleaning, building maintenance and rental that can be avoided. Some companies may reduce costs further by not printing catalogues and solely allow their customers to visit the website for product pictures and descriptions.
The current technology also allows sellers to track customers’ product preferences, with their permission, and alert these customers of new products they may be waiting for or could be interested in. Whether the customers actually make purchases or not, this can benefit the sellers because they are regularly contacting their customers and keeping in touch with them business wise. This may help the business increase their visibility in the marketplace and assist buyers to remember the company. As a result, customers may be more inclined to buy from that company when they decide to make their actual purchase. Raisch (2001, 261) also believed the importance of customer relationship when he asserted “the ability to interact with customers at any moment creates the opportunity to gain more wallet share and increase brand loyalty�.
An underlying benefit for sellers is that the products displayed on their websites may prompt people to make in store purchases. Hof (2001, 34) found that “half of consumers use a retailer’s website for research before buying a product in its physical store�. A survey indicated approximately $500 million dollars worth of appliances purchased in-store were the result of prior online research (Hof 2001).
At present companies also have the means to monitor their online stores in order to achieve maximum sales. Web analytics help online retailers to discover how shoppers are using their websites, and can even indicate which websites customers are perusing before and after looking at the company’s own website. The online electronic retailer CompUSA.com identified that their “product compare� feature needed to be more easily accessible to customers by employing web analytics. Immediately after they adjusted the problem the company found that the number of people leaving the “product compare� feature had decreased by 56 percent, and that consumers were also placing larger orders (IOMA’s Report on Financial Analysis, Planning & Reporting 2004, 1).
Web analytics helped Overstock.com discover that they were losing sales because many consumers were not completing the full checkout process. Web analytics helped them to check how far through the checkout process potential customers travelled before they abandoned their purchases. As a result, they reduced the checkout process from seven steps down to three and saw an instant improvement in sales (IOMA’s Report on Financial Analysis, Planning & Reporting 2004, 1). Overall, web analytics assist online retailers to identify any weaknesses their websites may contain and ensure that their websites are working to their full potential.
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Julietsneddon 14:52, 25 Oct 2004 (EST)
