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.