The Considerate Designer
Every team needs a good designer. But what makes a designer good?
I'd say the most important virtue a designer can have is to be considerate to the users of her creation.
And by users I mean everyone from the people using the website, to the people coding the HTML, to the marketing guys promoting the site, to the people that run the search engines.
This means that the designer should have knowledge that goes beyond aesthetics.
The designer should know that his design can be implemented across browsers without giving the developers many sleepless nights.
The designer should know that keywords shouldn't be written in images.
The designer should know that the HTML generated from Photoshop is next to worthless for putting into a real site.
She should know that CSS is preferable to spacing elements on the pages with images.
A good web designer understands accessibility, usability, limitations of the medium, and designs maintainable sites.
I Like the Like button.
Who doesn't like free traffic? Even better: free, quality, traffic!
What about traffic that increases your trustworthiness? Look, lots of people actually think this site is great!
Facebook has had these 'Like' buttons all over the internet for a while, but I'm just seeing them on online retailers now. The big advantage behind these buttons is that when a Facebook user clicks 'Like', the page link is automatically added to their feed: for all of their friends to see.
There is a snowball effect; each Like brings more qualified visitors. Friends are trusted more than advertisements. Word of mouth my friends.
The only problem, from a users perspective, is that the button is only useful for Facebook users, if you were to click the button without a Facebook account, you are presented with a registration screen. But since there are 400 million active facebook users, this is a rather small issue.
People like to share with the world their interests and like to show off what they buy. Help them do just that.
Trustmarks
Warehouse your products? Promote this pronto.
If you warehouse your own merchandise, and you can ship it quickly, you better be promoting the hell out of this fact.
Drop-shippers misplace orders, don't always have best support, make mistakes on inventory levels, and sometimes just do a really poor job getting the product to your customer on time.
This isn't to say that using drop-shippers is a poor way to run a business. But as with most things, the more you can control the process, the more consistent you will become and the more happy customers you will have.
If you look through the bizrate.com ratings of any large online retailer, you will see many of the complaints are centered around the delivery process. They got the wrong item, it took 3 weeks, they ran out of stock. If you do this with your own stock, you can improve the process; with the drop-shipper it's in their hands.
Very savvy customers also know that the returns process is going to be easier with a company that stocks goods versus one that has ship them back to the distributor. This puts her mind as ease and as we will talk later, this is an important part of selling online - trust!
One more thing:
If you can ship the same day, promote this everywhere. Amazon likes to promote "Buy within the next 7 hours and receive it by X date". Not only does this build a sense of urgency, it gives the customer confidence that she won't have to wait too long and that it would be a better use of her time to buy this right here and now instead of going into town.
Never miss an opportunity to educate your customers on the ways you provide unique value.
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Postnote:
Of course, the sheer selection of merchandise that working with drop-shippers can provide is also a value proposition to present and push hard.
