Shop ‘til You Flop (Into Your Armchair) –
Why Online Shopping is Best
Words of wit and wisdom from our very own Mr Know-It-All, Mark Carter
Picture the scene. You’re standing in an aisle at Asda feeling frustrated because they don’t stock the one thing you need. So you click your fingers and - hey presto! - you’re in Tesco!
No brain-draining driving, pesky parking, toe-curling queuing – or lugging bags and boxes to and from the car.
This may be just a teleportation fantasy, but it is a fantastic reality for the growing number of online shoppers with a simple click of the mouse.
How often have you walked into a new store and wandered the aisles looking for that trendy blend of ‘Mocha-Java-What-ever-it’s-called’ coffee before realising you’ve wasted 20 minutes of your life?
If only you’d read the microscopic signs above the aisles or asked the student shelf-stacker who has spent the last three hours straightening loo rolls so the puppies are facing outwards.
Ok, now imagine someone surfing the internet for that exact blend of coffee. Step one; they open the browser, step two; they type in the coffee’s name and step three; a million links come up.
Do you click on the first result? Does my wife wear the pants in our relationship?
Hell yes!
So now you clicked the first page and it opens with loads of great, glossy images of coffee beans, from those only found in Kuala Lumpur to the lesser spotted leopard coffee bean which gets its flavour after being fermented in the excrement of a blind two-toed sloth from the remote regions of the Amazon (expensive, but tasty, by the way).
You surf the said site with the usual ‘oooohs’ and ‘ahhhhs’ which often accompany the marvelling of flashy websites.
But after 30 seconds you still don’t see the coffee bean you want, so you click back to the search engine results to look for the next page.
Ok, so the website had all the bells and whistles but did it have the coffee bean? While it is of the utmost importance to get potential punters to your website – make sure you’ve got the information they need when they get there. (Read more in our ‘SEO Made Simple’ article.)
But the odds are stacked in your favour because the reasons for shopping online are endless, that’s why 34 per cent more of the world shopped online last year.
Let’s face it, we all have busy lives and who wants to waste time traipsing the high streets looking into the dead eyes of bored shop assistants and standing in queues that never seem to move? Not me – especially when I can surf the shops in my slippers and underpants with a nice cup of coffee which I previously bought online.
If you can erase that vision from your mind for a moment, the message is this…
There has never been a better time to make sure you have a good, well-written and optimised website to get a hearty slice of those potential profits.