High Street Slumps, eCommerce Soars
It was announced today that despite continued poor high street sales, online businesses are booming. The first quarter of 2011 showed a continued increase of 14% in March. This represented a combined total expenditure of £5.1bn – which equates to roughly £82 per person per month! The 2 core areas of significant increase were Hair and Beauty products, which rose by 32% in March and Business Service, which rose by over 15%.
It is the later part of that statement that I find most interesting. Business services include many utilities such as broadband, call packages, etc plus other outsourced services such a support, marketing, maintenance. Whilst the proliferation of selling products on line has continued, the services market has often struggled to implement an eCommerce solution without a “human touch”.
Selling products online really removes you from the equation and is a customer only experience. Think of the last time you purchased from Amazon or Tesco online. There was no need to talk to an employee. In fact many of us like this and it ensures a speedy transaction. Services traditionally have been a 2 way thing and this has created an issue when sat at a PC. Banks have negated this pretty well as have insurance companies but what about other services? Trust and security still play a part here. We know Amazon will take back a book and Paypal will credit our money if the product does not arrive but service requires a person.
The latest trend is to use video – show, demonstrate and promote your service first hand via a video. This gives a great try before you buy experience of the product and as long as you offer the same standards that consumer’s expect (security et al) then you should see a slow but steady take up.
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