Search Engine Journal

Can you tell the difference between Amazon.com and Books.com? How about the difference between Walmart.com and Target.com? Okay, so the colors look a little different on these sites and they are operated by different companies; but how about at a deeper level, are they that different?

Much has been written about positioning since the concept was first introduced to the world of marketing in the early 1970’s. You hear about positioning so many times that the word can almost become meaningless. Yet, with thousands of ecommerce sites offering very similar product lines and looking almost identical, it is either that these sites ignore this very simple marketing concept or that differentiating themselves is much more challenging online.

Back the basics

Whether you have an established ecommerece site or you are thinking of starting one, you must keep the following principles in mind when defining your positioning:

1. Your site must offer real benefits to potential customers: It is not about your business, your experience, or who you are. It is about what your customer will benefit from using your product or service.

2. The benefits must be difficult for your competitors to offer: In other words the benefits must be unique to your site. This is much more challenging with technology nowadays. Within day after Amazon offers a new service, many ecommerece sites will copy the new idea. Many ecommerce sites suffer from “me-too” syndrome. Catalog listings looks very similar, product pages are designed the same way, and visitors except to see product reviews in every ecommerce site.

3. The benefits must be of great value to potential customers: The benefits must be strong enough to convert a site visitor into an actual customer.

4. Convey the unique benefits to your visitors: It is great that you know what sets you apart from competition; now make sure that every visitor of your site knows what is different about you. I do not mean for you to fill the site copy with words about how great you are. We are talking about unique benefits your business offers to clients which they need or must know about.

You should be selling more than products

Why do many ecommerece sites struggle defining a real differentiating factors from competitors? At a very basic level, they all sell the same products. It is very difficult if not impossible to differentiate based on product by itself. Instead any successful ecommerce site must resort to using other methods to establish their unique value proposition. To start on the right track, you need to understand what customers are really buying from your site when they buy a product. If you think that the online shopper is only buying just a product from your site, then you will struggle at best and fail in the worse case scenario. When a consumer buys something from your site, he should be buying more than the product itself. He might be buying the comfort of a 100% satisfaction guarantee, or fast shipping policy at no extra charge or even the unbiased product reviews which your site offers. You need to spend time understanding whatever it is the customer is really buying from you; then design your site to clearly convey that value to your visitors.

How can you stand out from the competition?

There are 5 strategies you can implement as an ecommerce site to set yourself apart from the competition:

1. Be the first: We all understand first-movers advantage. Amazon is a leader in selling books because they were the first ecommerce site of its kind to sell books online. Ebay is the first auction site online. You would think that at this point all website concepts have been taken. The truth is that new concepts are introduced everyday to the market place. Pay Per Post service started only last year and they are a leader in their space. Love Mahalo or hate it, but they are doing search in a new way that has not been done before.

2. Specialize: There are hundreds of ecommerce sites selling books online. And while Amazon is the leader in selling books, many technical people would rather order books from BookPool. Why? Because BookPool focused their services on technical books. Sphinn will not compete with Digg, however the service will be successful with the search engine and online marketer because it’s stories are focused on them.

3. Establish a community around your site: if you can establish some sort of community around your site, you can be sure that consumers will come back to you again and again. Apple is very successful in establishing a community amongst its users. Sometimes it is a lot easier to tap into an established community. Imagine an ecommerce site that allows you to view what people who live in your city or work at your company are ordering. The site is not creating a new community, they are tapping into an existing and established community.

4. Get creative supporting services: When I ran Quill books in the late 90s, we focused our services on selling books to university professors. We doubled our sales in one month when we offered next day delivery for the same price as regular shipping. Of course, I would not recommend doing so without full financial analysis. In our case, I had worked out a deal with Fedex to allow us to provide such service. The point is that when we offered this supporting service, our sales sky-rocketed.

5. Price: Price is not a good strategy to differentiate your business online or offline. However, one can not ignore all the price comparison tools available online that allow consumers to compare products prices from different ecommerce sites. If you have the capital and margins you might be successful in creating an ecommerece site that competes on price.

So, tell me what you think? Do you agree that ecommerece sites do a bad job in positioning themselves? Can you suggest other ways for an ecommerce site to differentiate itself?

Khalid Hajsaleh is the Co-founder and President of INVESP consulting, a marketing consulting company that helps clients increase site conversion rates. Khalid has over 10 years of software industry and consulting experience. He was a lead consultant and architect on several major ecommerce sites for companies such as Motorola, Levolor, and Frontier.