When Rose Del Rosario and Al Klieber opened Courtside Sports 17 years ago, it was never meant to be more than a mom-and-pop sporting goods shop devoted to those who love racquet sports.
Expansion opportunities in their hometown of Victoria were limited, which was just fine with Ms. Del Rosario and Mr. Klieber. But after years of pressure from their tech-savvy friends, the married couple finally decided to set up a website.
Courtsidesports.com began as an information-only portal and offered visitors a glimpse of some of the store's merchandise. But it wasn't long before the pair began to dabble in e-commerce. In June of 2002, their first on-line Web store went live. Since then, overall sales have jumped 10 per cent, with orders coming in from around the globe. Courtside Sports has been shipping products as far as Australia, Japan, and Malta.
“When you have such a specialized business, there's a small pool to serve,” says Ms. Del Rosario, who expects sales to continue growing as the website gets more hits. “So the on-line store has given us a significantly greater audience.”
It's no secret that more and more Canadians are buying things on-line. Last year, the value of Internet sales in this country was nearly $39.2-billion, up 38 per cent from a year earlier, according to a Statistics Canada report released in April.
But as a recent study by Forrester Research Inc. shows, just because people are ready to buy on-line doesn't mean they will.
The Massachusetts-based research firm reviewed more than 200 merchant websites, and then judged them on a range of factors, including layout and design, menu clarity and accuracy of keyword searches. The result: In seven out of the 11 categories, the majority of websites received failing grades.
“It's not shocking that all companies are not executing well,” says Moira Dorsey, author of the report. “The Web is still a relatively new medium and companies are still getting their hands around how to design for success.”
Easy access to information and legibility are the two things consumers want most in a website, Forrester's research found. Trusting the site's security system and the speed with which search results appear rounded out the top four things consumers crave. Customers tended to care less about the visual appeal of the site or superiority of content, the study revealed.
Poor on-line experiences can turn customers away from a company or brand indefinitely, Ms. Dorsey says. Major glitches such as site crashes are an obvious culprit, but a series of smaller problems can be just as frustrating for consumers.
“When those minor problems start to become a major issue is when they're cumulative,” says Ms. Dorsey, who adds that consumers will flock to a competitor's site within minutes if problems persist. “When they add up in the context of a single scenario, they add up to a major problem for a user's experience. It's death by a thousand cuts.”
Conversely, good on-line experiences can build brand loyalty and life-long customers, says Mary Enderle, a Web design consultant with the San Jose, Calif.-based Enderle Group. “If people have a positive on-line experience, they're going to remember that. And they're going to remember your brand for that,” she says.
A custom-built enterprise site can cost anywhere from $50,000 to more than $1-million, Ms. Enderle says. But there is a less expensive alternative. Some software companies are offering out-of-the-box systems that allow businesses to essentially design their own websites by plugging information and images into ready-built templates.
NitroSell, a Cork, Ireland-based company that built Courtsidesports.com for Ms. Del Rosario and Mr. Klieber, offers customers 15 templates to build their own website. The company, which also maintains sites for clients, charges $1,500 for the software, plus a monthly commission that works out to about 16 cents a visitor.
Some companies have learned a good website means business.
After generating most of its sales from mail-order catalogues throughout its 94-year history, American clothing retailer L.L. Bean Inc. invested heavily in e-commerce in the early 1990s. Its clean and easily navigable site has drawn customers, and by the end of 2006, company officials say, llbean.com will become the company's No. 1 sales channel, accounting for more than 50 per cent of its direct sales.
So how do you succeed in the ever-competitive world of e-commerce? Listen to your customers, experts say.
“The sites that are most successful are checking their traffic to see where people are going, to see what's working and what isn't,” Ms. Enderle says. “Sites can be great market research tools because you can see exactly what people are clicking on and you can change your business strategy almost immediately.”
For the Courtside Sports management team, it's been a learning curve. Neither owner has IT experience, but that hasn't stopped them from building a successful on-line sales program.
“We've had lots of good response from customers about the site, lots from people in small communities who wouldn't otherwise have access to a specialized store like this,” Ms. Del Rosario says. “We came into the website business kicking and screaming, but we know the value of it now. And we'd never go back.”
