How to locate and operate local e-commerce websites

How to build a successful e-commerce website from scratch? Tindie is an e-commerce website that provides hardware products for Google, Intel and space exploration technology companies. Its CTO teaches you the secrets you should know in the early stage of e-commerce website construction with personal experience, including making the website user experience to the extreme; Don't rush to search for functions; Pay attention to user feedback and grow with users. This article comes from the first round of review magazine and is edited by World Online Commerce. Tindie has become an e-commerce platform for technical hardware products, and now it attracts customers from all over the world, including Google, Intel, Space Exploration Technologies and other big companies, because they can't find such products anywhere else. Julia Grace, as CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Tindie, shared her successful experience in developing a small company with chaotic organization into a big-name supplier, which provided important strategies and experiences for e-commerce entrepreneurs to build e-commerce websites at an early stage. 1. Learn about your customers from the website 1) Don't rush to realize website search: small and micro start-ups don't have to rush to realize the search function. If your product category is narrow from the beginning and users have nothing to search for, then what you can do is to optimize the browsing performance of the website. It is best not to launch the search function of jumping to external links prematurely. When browsing plays an extreme role, your website will eventually have thousands of products. At this time, you need the search function to understand how consumers find what they want. 2) Improve the product classification system: In the initial stage of establishing an e-commerce website, we should focus on building a website classification system to classify the increasing products. This is ultimately conducive to providing a good user experience, and it is not necessary to entangle in the complicated process of establishing external search. After Tindie has established a comprehensive classification system, not only is the list of goods easier to find, but how consumers find what they want to buy also requires many data iterations and repeated classification of goods. Tindie found that the best way to divert water is based on consumer portraits. 3) Accurately locate users: Your user positioning is often not what customers think. The classification method of products is by no means as simple as advanced users and primary users, because their boundaries are vague and there are too many products that meet the needs of both. 4) Pay attention to user feedback: Tindie attaches great importance to user feedback, especially how people use the navigation system of the website. If you give consumers many interactive options, you can stratify users according to their participation in the website community-for example, users who praise a product are low-threshold users, users who write intermediate thresholds, users who send you private messages or make new product classification suggestions are loyal users. The most important thing is to make users feel involved. Give your users the right to suggest improvements to the website navigation system, but set a high threshold for users who really listen to the suggestions. 2. Effective use of search is to improve efficiency. 1) There are two ways to add search function to the website: one is to quickly "dirty", that is, directly add search service to the website, and use the third-party application interface to process the product index, saving money and time, which is suitable for start-ups that do not have enough horsepower, personnel or bandwidth to build back-end, analysis department and data correlation from scratch; The other is to build your own search tool. Tindie chose this path and established a very simple text-based search tool, just entering the product name or description. At first, they used Google Analytics and UTM (Security Gateway) variables to support search results so that they could locate the source of traffic, but it soon became confusing, especially when people shared links with friends. Tindie's team doesn't know if these links come from the search box of their website. 2) Save SEO: The most important thing is to know how your search system affects SEO (search engine optimization), especially when you intend to irritate the brand. Tindie initially generates a unique URL for each search result and product according to the parameters selected by customers (such as price range, etc.). ), but the search results are inaccurate, which has damaged the company's ranking on Google. The best way is to track every URL on the website. In other words, if you change a URL on a website, make sure that all relevant parameters are changed at the same time, and remember to change the path to avoid 404 error pages as much as possible. 3) Accurate search results: The most important thing is to know what people clicked after the search. First, we must ensure that the search results are relevant. Faceted search is a search technology to retrieve information organized according to classification system, which enables users to search a series of results according to multiple characteristics, just like booking websites and retail networks, and can search according to gender, age, price range and so on. Of course, although "face search" is very useful, it can't be added too much. 4) Use filters well: After the search system is completed, pay attention to the filters used by consumers. If you run a website like Etsy, people can see many similar products on it, so they may be more concerned about the price of the products. But if your website sells vertical products, like Tindie, consumers may not be very sensitive to the price. They just want to find the products they need and don't care much about how much they need to pay. 3. How to guide users Every e-commerce company wants users to stay on its own website, even if the desired goods are not found or the goods are out of stock, which sounds time-consuming, especially Amazon's accurate product recommendation mechanism. In fact, there is a way to retain users without specific user data: if you can't show consumers substitutes for out-of-stock products, then recommend supplementary products to them. Tindie used to identify other alternative products that consumers might like based on the portraits generated by the website browsing function, and also used Google Analytics heat map to track and record what people clicked after searching. In fact, as long as consumers carefully study their choices between products, they can infer their identity. You can also use data to improve the user experience. It is very important to segment users according to their needs and interests, so that the products on your homepage will be exactly what consumers want. In guiding users, here are some suggestions: 1) Don't force users to register their accounts before buying. For most e-commerce, it is meaningless for consumers to register their accounts before placing an order. Big e-commerce companies like Amazon and Etsy have enough influence and capital to do so. After Tindie canceled the mandatory login, the conversion rate increased by 50%. 2) Avoid cheating consumers with tricks. When you want to know consumers, you must first make sure that they trust you. Unless your website is about big deals and special products, you should use coupons and discounts carefully. If your difference lies in providing hardware products, not only consumers don't care much about the price, but your brand will also pay more attention to the difference of the products themselves (rather than discounts). 3) Minimalist "fool-level" payment experience. If you allow consumers to buy products without a registered account, then you can't capture their information and preferences, and they can't come back to check their consumption records. Tindie set up a system to send a unique URL to consumers' emails, so that they can check the order status even if they are not logged in. If they finally decide to register an account with this email, Tindie will integrate all the previous links into the account so that consumers can check their purchase records. 4) Minimize the "About" section on the website. People shop on e-commerce websites instead of knowing about e-commerce companies. Consumers need a simple and clear experience, find what they need, buy it and leave, and respect this. Many start-ups often say a lot about the company, but they can't make consumers remember it, so they concentrate on creating a good buying experience. But if you are actively recruiting talents, it is necessary to add a page to describe the background and culture of your team. 5) Think of a place to "impress" consumers. Some of your consumers may be more sensitive to price, but others may pay more attention to quality, which of course depends on what you are selling, but in any case, you need to group consumers according to these characteristics. For example, if a product doesn't sell well, you should pay more attention to how to provide better and more participatory similar products. 6) Know your consumers' personal tolerance limits. Although some consumers may receive customized push products during the consumption process, it may still make others feel monitored and uncomfortable. At this time, you should tell consumers very frankly that you are tracking and recording their consumption behavior anonymously, and improve the website and service without infringing their privacy. Understand the core purpose of users, and then communicate with them, so that they will start to think that your brand meets their needs. 4. Create the best shopping cart. Although shopping carts are largely out of date, it doesn't mean that you can stop innovating. Most people stop building their own shopping carts after Amazon and other large e-commerce websites appear, because they think people are used to the structure of large e-commerce websites. But what you have to understand is that those companies have their competitive advantages and can guide consumers to do anything on their own scale, and they don't always take the best interests of users into account. But start-ups don't have this advantage, so what big e-commerce does is not your best choice. Similarly, how many steps in the payment process will also affect the conversion rate. Tindie needed a five-step shopping cart settlement process at first, but it was eventually reduced to two steps because of the high bounce rate, which had a great impact on the smooth completion of the purchase. 5. Don't miss the opportunity to get payment 1) Choose a good payment system: It is wise to integrate three payment methods on the website, and then choose the best one according to the user data of the website. The most important thing is to make sure that you don't join the payment methods demanded by a few people or popular in Silicon Valley but unable to integrate with the outside world. The quality of payment system is related to the life and death of start-ups. If we build an international business platform for global distribution, we need to guard against fraud, and consumers can easily become victims. That's why it's best to use a payment system like PayPal or Stripe. They are very good at dealing with fraud. 2) Simplicity is the best: In shopping carts and payment systems, the biggest challenge is to prevent over-optimization and keep everything simple. If you add too many innovative but unnecessary things, you will go astray, and as a startup, you can't afford those time and resources. 3) How to send gift cards: Sending gift cards to consumers on holidays can encourage them to spend more, but you should consider all the corresponding settings in the back end before doing it. For example, when does the gift card expire? What products can't be bought by credit card? What if someone has opened two accounts and used the gift card twice? At the very least, you should build your own liquidation model and then consider all possible situations and scenarios. 4) Deliberate change: It takes time to change the way people buy, including engineering, debugging and user adaptation. So small startups should think twice before adding every extra function or page, because it will change people's behavior and consumption.