I’m currently in the middle of reading Chris Anderson’s book “The Long Tail”, which speaks of the endless opportunities the internet is providing online retailers to cater to niche markets, and the resulting increases in sales that are possible. Within the book, there is a particular example that stood out to me.

Anderson speaks of the example of two mountain-climbing books, one released in the 80’s and one just a few years ago. Although it did not originally see large sales, the book from the 80’s suddenly exploded following the successful release of the newer book. How could this have happened?

The book from the 80’s became a “delayed bestseller” simply based on Amazon.com’s recommender system, which suggested it to people who were purchasing the newer book. That’s all!

This simple example underlines the importance of studying trends within your e-commerce store. It doesn’t matter whether you sell 3 products or 3000, your business is missing fantastic opportunities if you don’t have a clear picture of customer habits within your e-commerce solution. Although the above anecdote was nice for the author of the original book, it was definitely pretty great for Amazon too.

If your business doesn’t do online sales, the study of different areas of your website can be equally important. A company website will always sell at least one product: the company itself. When considering your online presence in this sense, it opens up a new set of questions: what is our conversion rate of people visiting our store or placing an order after seeing our site? What products or services are those people eventually acquiring from us? What does this tell us about our site?

We live in an exciting era in which not only can we study our sales data like we always have, but also know exactly how a customer got to that point of purchasing that service or product. This leads to a better understanding of influencing factors, taking the majority of guesswork out of marketing.

The trends exposed in Anderson’s book reinforce what most of us already know: whether you sell online, or just attract new customers online, some form of internet presence is essential nowadays. That being said, why not make the most of it?

Tags: conversion optimization, ecommerce

This entry was posted by Danny Wood on Friday, January 28th, 2011 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Business, Sales and Marketing, Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.