From Car Boot Sale To Your Ecommerce Store

Lessons From a Car Boot Sale That You Can Apply to Your Ecommerce Store

Recently, I was at a car boot sale and was selling old items out of the trunk. The aim was just to make a little bit of money from things I had around the house that weren’t getting much use. What I hadn’t anticipated was just what a great learning opportunity this would be or how many lessons I would pick up that could be directly related back to ecommerce. Here are some of the top things I learned that you can try applying to your own online business.

Sometimes Professional Doesn’t Work Best

I had been selling for a while and had been quite successful, despite the fact that my items were arranged pretty much randomly and without much thought. At this point, the guy at the stall next to me told me to try tidying my items up and presenting them in a more professional manner.

Guess what? Sales slowed the minute I took his advice! So what was going on? Why would a less professional stall sell better?

The answer is simple: people thought that if I wasn’t a ‘pro’ at this, then they would stand a better chance of finding a good deal. In this case, looking like the underdog was actually a helpful thing.

This will apply only in some cases when it comes to ecommerce. You want to look professional to build trust but if you’re selling on eBay for example, then you may find you have more luck if you appear a little less slick and polished!

People Like to Rummage

Something else I found was very popular was when I would put my items into bins or otherwise make it so that people had to route through to find what they wanted.

This had a number of advantages. For starters, it meant that people would have to come and spend time looking in order to see everything I had (meaning they had invested time and would want to get something back in return) and secondly, it meant that they might find things they weren’t expecting.

If you present everything out front, then people can pass by and simply see that there’s nothing they want and decide to keep moving on. This is something you can use directly in your own ecommerce store – make sure that people know there are more exciting offers inside that they will have to hunt for!

People Like Convenience

You know what people absolutely did not like though? Me talking to them. And they hated having to ask for the price.

That’s why I found it helpful to make sure everything in my store had the price on it. On the one hand this meant I got into fewer conversations which was a bad thing as it meant I couldn’t try and sell. But on the positive side, it meant that people could make the decision to buy without any input from me. This reduced the number of steps involved in buying and thereby helped me to make more sales.

How to Use POS to Sell More Products

Using A Chip & Swipe Reader to Sell More Products

When you visit an ecommerce store such as Amazon, you probably don’t give all that much thought to the layout. Instead, you’ll probably just look for the product you want and then click buy.

But while you might not give it much though, the designers that work at Amazon will have given it hours and hours of extensive thought. That’s because the layout of a store can make a huge difference to how likely you are to buy and it can influence you in ways you might not expect.

One example of a tricky layout technique that store owners use is something called ‘POS’. Let’s take a look at what this is and how it works…

What is POS?

POS stands for ‘Point Of Sale’. Specifically, this refers to the physical point at which the sale is completed. If you’re in a real shop, then that point is going to be the checkouts and this will include the queue leading up the checkouts.

Now, if you think back to the last time you found yourself in that position (queuing to buy), then you may recall that there were probably items for sale on display there and that these were advertised quite prominently.

The places where these are promoted are referred to as ‘point of sale displays’ and they will most often include cheaper items like chocolate bars, small gifts or cheap jewelry.

You can mimic this same exact thing in an ecommerce store. The only difference is that instead of being a display in a queue, your point of sale offer is going to be any item that is promoted on the page where the visitors would normally enter their card details and click buy.

Why POS Items Work So Well

So what is the idea behind this? Why is this such a popular strategy that it is found both in real stores and on the web?

The answer is that POS items are ideal for upselling and encouraging buyers to slightly increase the amount of money they’re spending.

The reason for this is that POS points help you sell after you’ve overcome the main barriers to sale. A barrier to sale is anything that puts people off of getting their wallet out when they actually want to buy the product. And the most common barriers here are trust, guilt and hassle.

It’s a hassle to get out your wallet and enter your details, it’s worrying handing over your card details to any website and you probably feel guilty about spending the money.

But when you get to the checkout, this means that you’ve already input those details, you’ve already opted to spend the money and you’ve decided to trust the company. So then what is an extra $2 in order to get a nice extra bonus?

For this reason, it becomes much easier to convince someone to buy something at the POS – as long as it is a cheap item and as long as it still offers real value!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bjmbE7SkYE

Making Your Website Look Professional

How to Get Your Customers to Trust You and Get Them to Put Down Their Money

When you’re trying to sell products through an ecommerce store, one of the biggest challenges you face is trying to overcome the various ‘barriers to sale’. Barriers to sale are anything that discourage people from buying your products, even though they actually want them and feel that they’re worth the money.

One of the biggest barriers to sale here is the fact that people don’t like inputting their details because it’s a hassle. You might want to buy something but not have the time or patience to fill out a form – and for that reason you don’t convert. One way to overcome this is to use a payment method that doesn’t require any details – such as PayPal.

The other big barrier though is trust. When people buy from you, they are giving you their details and their address and they are trusting that the product you’re selling meets the description. They are trusting that you won’t run off with their details and they’re trusting that your site is safe and secure.

That’s a big ask if you’ve never encountered the customer before and it can be too much of an ask in many cases. So how do you overcome this issue and get people to trust you enough to bite the bullet?

Here are some of the best strategies…

Make Your Site Look Professional

One of the most straightforward and effective ways to increase trust among your visitors, is to make sure that your site looks professional and modern. If you’ve ever been to a website that looks like it was made in the Geocities era, then no doubt you will know how off-putting this can be and it makes it very hard to trust the security of the site or even that the business is still operational!

Get a Security Badge

There are a number of companies that offer to perform security checks on websites and to provide a ‘badge’ or ‘seal’ that you can display if you pass. This is then used to communicate to your visitors that your site is safe to shop on.

Don’t spend a lot of money on this though: these seals vary in quality and a lot of customers won’t put much stock in them (what’s to prevent you creating your own seal?). But if you can find a cheap and well-recognized one, then it doesn’t hurt.

Use a Recognized Payment Processor

People will feel much more comfortable buying through PayPal than they will filling out a form to give you their details.

Have Cheap Items for Sale

If you’re trying to sell a big ticket item, then you’re creating a lot more risk for them. They’ll worry that you might never keep up your side of the bargain and they’ll lose all their money. A way around this is to sell them a cheaper item first. This way they can check that you’re true to your word in a much safer capacity and then only decide to spend more once you’ve proven yourself.