Page 182 - Electronic Commerce

Selling on the Web

Business Web sites need to:

• Offer easily accessible facts about the organization
Learning
• Allow visitors to experience the site in different ways and at different levels 157
• Provide visitors with a meaningful, two-way (interactive) communication link with the organization
Cengage
• Sustain visitor attention and encourage return visits
2015
• Offer easily accessible information about products and services and how to use them
©
FIGURE 3-8 Accessibility goals for business Web sites

Trust and Loyalty
When companies first started selling on the Web, many of them believed that their
customers would use the abundance of information to find the best prices and disregard
other aspects of the buying experience. For some products, this may be true; however,
most products include an element of service. When customers buy a product, they are
also buying that service element. A seller can create value in a relationship with a
customer by nurturing the customer’s trust and developing it into loyalty. Business
researchers have found that a 5 percent increase in customer loyalty (measured as the
proportion of returning customers) can yield profit increases of 25 to 80 percent.
Even when products are commodity items, the service element can be a powerful
differentiating factor for which customers will pay extra. These services include such
things as delivery, order handling, help with selecting a product, and after-sale support.
Because many of these services are things that a potential customer cannot evaluate
before purchasing a product, the customer must trust the seller to provide an acceptable
level of service.
When a customer has a positive service experience with a seller, that customer begins
to trust the seller. When a customer has multiple good experiences with a seller, that
customer feels loyal to the seller. Thus, the repetition of satisfactory service can build
customer loyalty, which can prevent a customer from seeking alternative sellers who offer
lower prices.
Many companies doing business on the Web spend large amounts of money to obtain
customers. If they do not provide levels of customer service that lead customers to
develop trust in and loyalty to the firm, the companies are unlikely to recover the money
they spend to attract the customers in the first place, much less earn a profit.
Customer service is a problem for many electronic commerce sites. Recent research
indicates that customers rate most retail electronic commerce sites to be average or low in
customer service. A common weak spot for many sites is the lack of integration between
the companies’ call centers and their Web sites. As a result, when a customer calls with a
complaint or problem with a Web purchase, the customer service representative does not
have information about Web transactions and is unable to resolve the caller’s problem.
Even today, e-mail responsiveness of electronic commerce sites is disappointing.
Many major companies are slow to respond to e-mail inquiries about product information,

Copyright 2015 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.