BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Dealing with customers who built their businesses in the old-fashioned brick-and-mortar retail stores and offices has its advantages. You get to learn from professionals how to build your business based on personal touch, attitude and having a feeling of your customers. It’s amazing if you think of it. Almost all the marketing techniques that we use on the internet came straight from offline world. But that’s not what I am getting at here.

The downside of talking to such business owners is that not many of them truly realize what internet can offer to them. For example, one of the prospective clients I get to talk to recently denied almost any attempt to build their store’s internet presence on the grounds that the one they already have built for them earned around $1,000 for last year. That’s for a store that sells merchandise priced between $10 and $300 dollars per item! Read more »

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It should be a common knowledge already that the less the client pays for your service, the more of your time he/she consumes. Usually this happens because they try to save every penny and argue about minor things that naturally should have been let go. However, by concentrating on such minor issues, the client totally misses the major stuff that needs his/her attention.

For example, let’s take an online store. By being a royal pain in any place you can imagine the client takes about a week to decide between the two offered ways of presenting a single product on per line in the store (a decision of two hours at most, really!). Then we, thinking of a better way to promote the product the client sells, offer an addition to the store that (by our calculations) should increase product exposure by large volume. It’s a trendy perk, not many stores have it, so it would naturally rise confidence in web site. Client impolitely declines, since it will be more expensive and push us to complete the project. Which we, of course, did.

On the closure meeting that lasts two hours instead of 40 minutes client politely listens to the presentation on how to use their store (almost without taking any notes), after which goes on about how he wants us to change the design since “we never discussed that there would be only one item per line”. That is - after they have agreed on the draft, confirmed (no less then two times) that no additional changes are necessary and that web site will look exactly like on the picture. And after the week-long heated discussion on how to present single item per line in a best way. They delay the last installment. We offer that they keep the last installment and go with another web design studio, since they are dissatisfied with the job we did (although we did everything according to the specs, offered additional functionality and features, accommodated their shoe-string budget and so on).

Now, I am not writing this to bash clients - they are in their right to make mistakes. They probably just need to learn how to take responsibility for them, but that’s not my concern. The more clients come in our way the more I see a trend where people who pay more money for essentially same product (i.e. web site - in any of its form) take less of your time by managing important parts of their web sites and leaving technicalities to us. After all - that’s exactly what they are paying us for. People who can afford to spend more money value their time and our time more then those, who spend less. In different terms - they know how to delegate responsibilities because this makes them more money. This knowledge, as far as I understand, comes after certain level of acquired business experience. What’s cause and what’s effect - knowledge or money - I think is obvious.

So the next time I see this client (hopefully it won’t be as painful as it was last time) I will give them couple of links to a good articles on delegating responsibilities. No matter how much hard time our clients give me, I still believe in educating our customers. Can’t vouch for this particular case, but the general trend says that it helps.

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Heavy sellers are upset about eBay’s recent changes to the feedback policy. And they should be: it’s hard to carry on a conversation when only one party gets to do any real talking.

However, there is no real alternative, at least the way I see it. Part of my web development company’s clientèle wants e-commerce web sites - natural web stores to sell their stuff. Some of them are heavy eBay sellers. They always were more focused on selling on eBay then selling through their web site, since eBay has more natural ways of reaching buyers.

So now that I think of alternatives to eBay, since some of the members suggest to “take business elsewhere” - what “elsewhere” are they talking about? Professionally designed web store that is able to accommodate large volume of buyers isn’t exactly cheap, so what alternative do you REALLY have?

UPD: My discussion on eBay forums.

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