Taking Stock of the Situation

Making sure you can deliver the products you sell is one of the most important parts of running your business. It sounds like a no-brainer, but many merchants have probably experienced an ordered item being out of stock, a manufacturer falling behind on production, or delivery of an order taking longer than originally communicated. It happens. So how do you retain the business and trust of your customers in events like these?

Prevent the situation before it happens

During a trip to Montreal last month, I experienced a good example of a bad business situation that could easily have been prevented. Several weeks prior to my trip, I made a car rental reservation online and received confirmation via email, then later received a follow-up confirmation. When I arrived at the car rental agency, though, I learned that the company had triple-overbooked their entire fleet of vehicles and could not guarantee when a vehicle would be available. The company’s oversight also affected a good number of other customers with reservations who were lined up behind me, along with any other customers still to arrive that night.

Had the company been paying attention to their inventory vs. reservations, they would have realized the problem long before being faced with a crowd of unimpressed holiday travelers, many of whom will likely not trust this company their business again. Customers could then have made other arrangements, rather than scrambling for an alternative. The company would have saved itself lost revenues from offers of discounted or free rentals if a vehicle did come in, and more importantly, a damaged business reputation among the affected customers, and any friends, family, and coworkers who heard about the poor experience.

Key takeaway:

• Keep track of your inventory. One way you can do this is by using the database inventory feature in Store Manager. Have the inventory management system send you an email alert when inventory of an item is low, indicate inventory levels of items in the customer’s shopping cart, and display a message when there is insufficient inventory available to fill an order.

Handling the situation if it occurs

If it couldn’t be prevented, this situation could have been resolved with a simple phone call or email to affected customers, as soon as the inventory issue was discovered. As Paul Boisvert wrote in an earlier post to the blog, all it takes is a call. The company may have tried to make arrangements to have cars with other companies available for the same rate (possibly having to absorb the difference in cost), or at the very least, given the affected customers time to try and make alternate arrangements themselves.

Key takeaway:

• If an item that has been ordered becomes unavailable for any reason, or if there will be a shipping delay, always notify the customer as soon as possible. It’s also a good idea to set shipping expectations by displaying the item’s availability. Many customers order items for date-specific events or occasions, like weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, or holidays, and will appreciate the heads-up on when an item is expected to ship or if there’s been a shipping delay. They can then decide if they’d like to wait for the item to come in stock or be delivered, or if they will need to make other arrangements.

  Even if the customer decides to cancel their order because of a delay, keeping in touch with the customer rather than waiting for them to inquire about their items will go a long way toward earning their business in the future.

Once might be forgivable, but…

If you can’t prevent the error, and an unexpected situation was handled poorly, learn from these experiences. Make every effort not to repeat these errors, especially if a customer gives you a second chance.

In the case of the car rental agency, I was willing to try again. At their request, I left them with a cell phone number I could be reached at should a vehicle become available. Several hours later, I was notified that a car had come in and was being held for me. When I arrived, however, I was told that the car I’d been called about had engine problems and could not be rented. Not long after, the employee who had called me had a different story, saying that the car had actually been given away during his break.

Again, a call to explain the mix-up or mechanical problem would have prevented an unnecessary trip back to the car rental agency, and ultimately, the complete loss of my trust and any future business I might have given them.

Key takeaways:

• Learn from past experiences. Develop internal processes and policies to avoid similar situations in the future, and to properly handle situations that can’t be avoided.

• Always tell the truth. If an order is delayed for any reason, telling the truth means a customer will hear the same reason for the delay from any employee they have contact with.

Whether you’re a large, established company or a smaller merchant just starting out, it’s important to remember that how errors and delays are handled can affect your business reputation, and determine whether or not you earn a customer’s trust and repeat business.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Businesss

Rob Snell Went to Vegas and Gave Us His PubCon Slides

Today’s Y! Store blog is another guest column by long-time Yahoo! Store owner and marketer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers, located in Starkville, Mississippi. Rob is a retailer who blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of the almost three year-old book on Yahoo! Store: Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies that is still somewhat current. Rob is recovering from the frenzy of the Festivus shopping season in an undisclosed location somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line.

"My marketing consultant went to Las Vegas, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."

Howdy! I would say I’m just back from Vegas, but PubCon was last year! PubCon in Las Vegas is the show of the year for me. I dare say it’s the best Internet marketing conference because of who speaks, what they say, how much they give away, and who attends. I love to "network" with some of the smartest retailers and Internet marketers on the planet, and being a speaker gets me on the guest list for some of the really cool parties, too!

As promised, here is my full presentation with 77 PowerPoint slides. This year we have audio, and I hope you enjoy my new theme song, too!

If you’d rather read it than listen to it, take a gander at an expanded transcription of my PubCon PowerPoint slides with additional info.

Here are some highlights:

• Skip to Slide 6 for Tip #1. You might want to skip three minutes on my marketing background and life story.

• One change in our company philosophy increased our conversion rate almost instantly by 20%. What did we do? We told folks what to buy.

• Buyer’s Guides work! With buyer’s guides we have had a 50% increase in conversions when buyer’s guide pages were used as entry pages. When folks would come into our site from a search engine organically, if they come in on the buyer’s guide page, they are 50% more likely to convert. For example, here’s our dog training collars buyer’s guide.

• Write unique product descriptions. It is good for your customers to show that you are an expert and you know what you are doing, and The Google loves unique product descriptions.

• Write one new paragraph for every $10 in item price. Now I just made that up. Write what makes sense to you, but that is a good rule of thumb for creating content. You say, "Gosh. That is a $600 product. You mean I have to write 60 paragraphs about the dang Garmin Astro?" Yep.

• Play 20 questions with every single product. Start at the top with your best selling products and work your way down. Ask yourself what customers have in their mind when they are looking to buy something. Customers want to know if this product is going to work for them. I literally have over 200 questions that I can ask about any product.

• Capture killer content in any which way you can. Like I said, I lock my brother up in a room and pull it out of him. Record everything. Audio. Video. Still pictures. I mean, everything. When I don’t want to carry a professional digital camera, I have a little FLIP (video) camera over here I carry everywhere I go. I can get my brother to jabber on about some product about why this manufacturer should do this, blah, blah, blah and I have great info for the Yahoo! Store.

• Blog to build content and attract links. I do a much better job of this as an e-commerce consultant and a speaker than I do with the dog stuff or our other stores. We take email questions that my brother has answered, his content, and we stick it on the Web. I got over 1,000 pages in a Word document from a year’s worth of Steve’s sent emails.

• Make your suppliers link to you. I finally have everybody in the company used to the fact that when we buy something from somebody, they are going to link to us. Or else! Linking to us is almost a condition for doing business with us.

• Romance your suppliers for additional links and free content. Example: Steve took a supplier out bird hunting on one of his fancy Texas quail leases. He gets to be good buddies with folks he needs to have a good relationship with and we ended up getting a link out of it, which is really nice.

• Add keyword modifiers to page text. I have over 600 modifiers that I have identified that generate revenue for different businesses, and I use those where they make sense in the text on the Web page. Ask me later. I’ve got some good secrets that I can’t share over the microphone on how to do.

• Survey your customers. One of the best things we ever did was install 4Q, the free customer survey software, on our website. What 4Q does is it asks your customers four questions. "What are you here to do? Did you accomplish it? How satisfied were you with the website, and why?"

Why I heart PubCon the way I do

PubCon is always hard on my ever-present notebook. I always fill up that little black book with takeaways or ideas generated from presentations. Speakers at PubCon tend to give away real-world, actionable advice. I know it’s going to be a good show when there are multiple sessions where I can’t make up my mind which class to attend. PubCon is the opposite of the worst kind of conferences or trade shows where the sessions are bought and paid for, and the speakers pitch you all day for their company’s products and services. Personally, I’d rather sit at home and watch Vince of ShamWow infomercial fame.

I get to speak at PubCon, too! For me, it’s a chance to give back a little to the search marketing community that I’ve learned so much from over the past 12 years. The high caliber of the other speakers makes the pressure to perform really intense. My friends make fun of me for over-thinking my speech. Instead of partying and going to all the sessions, I always seem to get stuck in my room tweaking my slides the day before my session.

And I tend to spill my guts, too. Sometimes I give away too much! I figure people spend a lot of money going to conferences, and I want to make sure they get their money’s worth for the whole show from my 20 minutes in the spotlight. One thing I always tell myself is that no matter what I give away, at least the good stuff is available only to the folks who spent a couple thousand bucks or so and showed up for my panel. They may archive my PowerPoint, but all the really good stuff is hidden in the stories between the slides.

Well, not anymore…

Keep capturing killer content!

I get somewhat obsessive about getting my retailers to capture content, and this blog post is a pretty good example of what I recommend fellow retailers do all the time. You have so much product info in your retail brain. Get it out! How? When you’re talking about stuff your customers are interested in, you need to record it, whether video or audio, and then get someone to transcribe it. Edit the transcription and insert relevant links. Finally, insert that keyword rich text in your Yahoo! Store where it makes sense, like in the CAPTION fields of relevant products. If it makes sense, edit some video footage together to make a little demo for your Yahoo! Store.

In the spirit of taking my own advice, this year I taped my session at PubCon mainly so I could see what I really ended up saying. I’ve got a pretty good idea what I’m going to talk about, but I always throw stuff in I didn’t plan on sharing! Doh! I ripped the audio, sent it to a guy who transcribes stuff for me and 3 hours later I had a 10 page Word document. Did I really say all that?

Wrapping things up, I hope you enjoyed the info, and your feedback is always appreciated, so please post comments or drop me a line. Before I put all this together, I got the blessing of PubCon owner and WebmasterWorld founder, Brett Tabke, so this post is authorized and official and all that. I don’t get paid to say this, but if you want to make more money, I suggest you attend the next show, PubCon South in Austin, TX, March 11-13, 2009. Your competitors will be there…

Rob Snell
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business