E-Commerce: A New Breed of Customer
The average web consumer is mostly the same as the variety you'll find roaming wild on the High Street. Mostly.
Here are few of the exceptions that are worth knowing about:
Type 1: The Informed Consumer
The web is packed full of information about pretty much everything that you can buy. There's the manufacturers own site, there's industry news, there's editorial reviews, there's users reviews and there are forums and chat rooms for pretty much any speciality, interest or obsession. The informed consumer already knows what he wants. He didn't just seen it in in some brochure; he's compared the specs on every alternative, he's discussed his decision with half a dozen acknowledged experts, he's read every opinion, looked at every test. He knew what he wanted long before he got to your website.
It would be tempting to assume that the only way to lure the informed consumer to your checkout would be to offer better prices that anyone else. This is not true. This is far from true.
Think about it; you've gone to the effort to make sure that you're spending your hard-earned on the exact, specific thing that you need/want/are no longer able to live without. Now, how much of the RRP are you prepared to pay in order to get it delivered, to the right place, at the right time? What's the value of the peace of mind that comes with the knowledge that you can return the item if you need to? How about the importance of buying from a company that know more about their products than where to find the barcode.
Once these people are set on a purchase they're a pretty determined bunch, but there are limits... if your site crashes their browser or the delivery address form refuses to remember where they life, you won't see them for dust.
Within their fields of expertise these people are better than the best and most knowledgeable sale staff you'll every meet in a shop. And they can tell you where they get their information from, and where other people are going to be getting information from. Communicate with the informed consumer, they are a valuable resource. Encourage feedback, give them the opportunity to add their user reviews to your site and you site could become the kind of place these people come to first.
Type 2: The Mystified Consumer
Walk into the average high street electronics shop and you'll find yourself buried under an avalanche of enthusiastically-cologned sales men. (Unless it's a Saturday afternoon, in which case you'll be let roaming the isles, alone and confused, desperately waving handfuls of money in the air to indicate just how seriously you want to make a purchase). When the sales critters close in it gets scary and confusing. They babble on about incomprehensible details and invite you to run simultaneous equations in your head in an attempt to understand the ever-changing ratio between cost, desirability and acronym-density.
This is probably only going to be a shock to High Street electronics retailers, but most people don't enjoy that kind of shopping. A lot of people are shopping on the web specifically because they want to be able take their time, calmly and methodically acquiring the information that will allow them to buy the fabled Right Thing.
These people are as easy to please as they are to scare off. Feed them information about your products. Keep it simple. If you need to use jargon to make useful comparisons between products, provide them with a glossary. Point them to the kinds of resources that your Informed Consumers have told you about. And whatever you do, don't sell at them. If you stock whatever it is they turn out to need, they'll be back and they'll bring credit cards, not least because they'll remember you as being helpful and impartial. Being helpful buys so much more loyalty than being pushy.
Type 3: The Inveterate Bargain Hunter
Strictly speaking, these are not unique to the web. These are the people for who the 'Closing Down Sale' sign was invented. What these people want or need becomes utterly irrelevant in the face of significant discounts. As long as your site actually works, you basically just need to sell something at half the RRP to keep them happy.
Happily, the bargain hunter also tends to be what we call 'postage aware'. Many sites that offer a single flat-rate delivery charge will find that the bargain hunter, once lured in by the prospect of a very cheap thing, will be reluctant to leave until they've added enough additional items to their order be sure that they are also getting a Good Deal on the postage.
The tried and tested "free delivery on orders over x" is virtually irresistible to the determined bargain hunter and is believed to be the primary income of several large online stores.