Retail Web Site Must Haves

1. Retail Web Site Must Haves

2. Store Locators Almost all, online retailers, or e-tailers, have included store locators in their web sites, like an example below of the Wal-Mart store locator. Most store finder features will let you search by city, zip code or address.

3. E-mail Marketing Anybody with an email address has surely received email from some retailer promoting something. As a matter of fact, we receive so many emails that many people have activated filters to weed out the unsolicited emails that arrive each day. This has made it more difficult for e-tailers to take advantage of this cheap and easy to track marketing tool. Marketers caution that email is highly effective when used to retain customers not acquire them. Therefore, savvy marketers have decreased or ceased sending out acquisition emails. This doesn't mean that they are decreasing the numbers of emails they send, on the contrary, they expect the number of emails they send out to increase as their customers lists grow. They are just trying to customize the emails and make them stand out to make them more effective (Forrester, Effective Email Marketing, August 2001). Marketers have seen the result of flooded email inboxes and realize that in order to make their email initiatives effective they have to stand out. In order to make these changes email marketing is being brought in-house.

4. Club Registrations & Wish Lists Registrations and Wish Lists are two items that have not truly caught on with mainstream online shoppers, but have shown to have a dramatic impact in sales by those who use them. They work in the same fashion as wedding registrations or a child's Christmas list posted on the refrigerator, except now that list can be accessed on the internet and can be emailed to other people. These lists allow friends and family to log into a retail web site and see what items are on a wish list.

5. Real Time Inventory& In-store Pick up and Return of Online Purchases Items that require real integration of web sites and back office operations like in-store inventory and in-store return of items purchased on line are some of the more complicated tasks to tackle when trying to improve a web site. These are also some of the features that provide cross channel consumers a real sense of continuity in a company when dealing with multiple points of contact. Too many times when cross channel consumers walk into the retail store they get totally different prices and possibly even products. This tends to turn most shoppers off. They feel like they are being taken by the company.