Why your E-Commerce Business still needs a Website in the Web2.0 World

Web 2.0 sites are a terrific place to get your message out to a huge and seemingly exploding population of potential customers for your e-business. It’s a powerful venue to share your knowledge and expertise in your field, creating informed buyers with an increased likelihood of purchasing from you rather than the competition. But, these are only the first steps in the buying process, also known as the conversion process. And Websites offer far more flexibility to the e-seller to actually get the sale.

All Hubpages or Squidoo Lenses basically look alike. If all your potential customers were identical, this would be fine. But they’re not, and different people will respond to different visual stimulus- that’s why there’s an entire industry out there of web graphics designers. It’s important to test different graphic and layout patterns with your specific traffic to determine the combination that produces the most sales. You can’t do this with a fixed layout with minimal custom graphic capabilities.

Within the ‘etiquette’ of social networking, it’s not acceptable to present all the benefits your business provides to it’s clients, things like customer support, free shipping, automatic upgrades, whatever it is that sets your business apart from the rest. This differentiation is important, even to clients who come to you already impressed with your knowledge and having liked what they’ve read on a social site. On a website, you could, for instance, offer up an entire page complete with client testimonials all about your excellent customer support.

There are certainly those who will disagree, but on any page that is working to turn a looker into a buyer, ads are incredibly distracting to the process. Everybody’s wary of making a buying mistake and then feeling foolish, so even though “This sounds terrific, but I better check this out too”, and POOF, they’re gone to the ad link.

And since all those lookers aren’t identical, they’ll have different informational needs. Put all that information on one page, and a potential buyer can’t find the specific piece of info he needs without wading through everything, and may even end up paralyzed by an overload of information. Conversely, on a website you can offer up links to the additional info for those that want it, without creating the distraction for those that don’t. And this makes for a smoother buying experience to increase the likelihood that you will make the sale.

This was already mentioned above, but it bears repeating: everybody’s afraid of making a purchasing mistake and looking like an idiot. That’s why customer testimonials are a very important part of the conversion process. Social sites provide for comments which are a form of testimonial, but this is neither as strong or as direct as a well crafted testimonial, with photo or audio. I’m certainly not suggesting that testimonials be manufactured, but getting the strongest recommendations by asking the right questions and then placing them for maximum effect is just not within the confines of the various social sites.

If you want to offer alternatives to PayPal for payments, you will probably also want to offer a secure payments page that’s on your site rather than hosted on the processors site. This gives your e-business a more professional, trustworthy feel to potential buyers. And they are certainly correct to be concerned about the security of their credit card information. An SSL secured page is simply not an option (to my knowledge) on a social site.

While Web2.0 traffic is growing astronomically, it’s not as if Web 1.0 search has disappeared. And I would suggest to you that it’s also not going to go away in the future and that the two mediums attract different users for different purposes.

Suppose I need information about my bad back or the breed of dog I should get. The beauty of Web2.0 is the ability to get the opinions, experience and expertise of regular people just like me. The strength of Web1.0 is the nationally recognized hospital site’s back pain pages or the professional breeders’ information that reflects years of experience with a multitude of dogs of a particular breed. Different people will seek to solve their problem via different routes- some by using social sites, others with standard search, still others using both. Without both a Web2.0 presence and a website, you’re business is cut off from a significant source of traffic.

The higher the price tag on your product, the more difficult the purchase decision and the more important your image. A buyer is quite likely to make a $20 purchase from an obviously ‘Mom and Pop’ web presence, either 2.0 or 1.0. But if the purchase is a high ticket item in the thousands of dollars, professional is the image you want and I would propose that Web 2.0 is not the place to conclude your sale. A social site might well be an excellent place to offer free advice that lures people to you and your website, but when it comes time to plunck down the big bucks, your image needs to project that you’re a true professional, with integrity, that can be trusted. At least at this point in time, this professionalism is projected by your website, not your social media pages.

Many would argue that since it’s “impossible” to gain search rankings high enough for anyone to find your website, that it’s not worth the time and expense to try. Not True.

Are you going to get a first page position for “Back Pain” in the search engines for your exercise video on easing back pain? Probably not. But once I’ve checked that hospital site and learned how back specific exercise can help me to manage my condition, I’m rather likely to refine my search to “Excercises for Back Pain Management” or a similar highly specific search term (known as long tail search terms). While these long tail terms get far less traffic than the big, broad “money” terms, the searchers have generally already done a lot of research and are much further along in the conversion process than the broad term searcher, and a far more valuable visitor to your website.

To the best of my knowledge, the social media sites do not give you the search information for your pages- i.e. the phrases used to find your pages. This information can be a gold mine.

Granted, search terms reflect your page rank on the search engines: if you don’t rank for “X” it will never show up in your search terms. The opposite is also true: your website or your social media page may be ranking and found by searchers for terms you never thought of, or never thought were important. Address a webpage or a social media page to those exact long tail terms and you’ll be increasing your business. Lest you think this is silly, my web business seems to draw about 50% of its search visitors from an age specific search term and the conversion for these visitors is significantly higher than for those using less specific search terms. Had I not had the data from my website to discover this fact, I’d have missed a huge marketing opportunity.

I’m sure there are other reasons to have a website in addition to a social media presence for your e-commerce business. Please add those that I’ve not covered here in the comments section below.

Building a website can be a daunting prospect- and it’s a major learning curve. There are a multitude of tools out there to help, but as I’ve not used them I don’t feel comfortable recommending any. Any pre-built site by definition has limitations, which is why I built my own site for my kids birthday party business that I can totally control, but that’s not the only way to go.

The important thing is not how you do it, but that you do it.