Episode 2: How to Add Value to Your eCommerce Customers

 On this episode we review methods to help eCommerce retailers to add more value to their customers experience. This helps to differentiate you from your competition and standout in the crowded world of ecommerce. On this episode you’ll learn: How to better organize categories Use specialized products that can not be found anywhere else Use custom products/POD products Add detailed reviews, descriptions and videos to help your eCommerce store to stand out Episode Transcript                         Welcome to episode two of The Business of eCommerce Podcast. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi. In today's show we'd like to cover a topic that we get very often. Usually folks starting off want to know how to add value to their customers. We find this very common in things like drop shipping. Different sorts of sites where they're usually just starting off. Where they're using a lot of products that are very similar to other folks. Maybe you work with one of the big vendors out there, big manufacturers, and you get their products and you're not really sure how to actually differentiate yourself in the market. You want to be special. You want to do something a little different. But it's really tough sometimes when everybody's selling the same products in the same places. What you don't want to do, to get started there is, you don't want to basically just take the products from a vendor and dump them on your site. Dump them on Amazon. Have the same descriptions right from the vendor. The vendors usually give very basic descriptions. They also give very basic images. Really no details. Their categories are very either simplistic, or relevant to them, not really relevant to your site. For example, they would be very general, the categories. The manufacturer might be selling different product lines to different industries. But you, your site might be much more targeted to a certain type of people. Let's say the vendor just sells outdoors products in general. You might be selling products specifically to folks that hunt deer outdoors. Something like that. Deer hunting. The categories you'll get from the vendors aren't very tailored to your specific audience. They're just general, broad. We want to jump in with some ways we can actually make your site much more individual and stand out from the crowd, so that it's not just taking products from vendors. Taking their images. Taking their titles. Taking their descriptions. Dumping it into Shopify. Dumping it onto Amazon, and just try to compete on price. Because I think we all kind of know by now, that's not really the way to go. You're not going to beat the big players like an Amazon price, so you have to add something else of value. Just some general housekeeping before I get into that. This is episode two. Kind of the goal here is to have some information that's more for experienced eCommerce retailers. Some things for folks just starting off, and kind of go back and forth. I'd like to cover in different episodes some different topics. Maybe this one's right for you. Maybe you're beyond this. It really depends on where you're at, but we're hoping to kind of do both with this, and see what people like. It might be kind of choose your own adventure on some episodes are right for you. Others, honestly you might just skip over. Because maybe you've already seen this. It really is just up to you, but we're hoping to add value to a lot of different people in different places in getting started. I've outlined four different general categories here of how to add value to different eCommerce retailers. To get started, and I was kind of implying this, is the categories topic. Over here, let's see. Kind of what I was implying is, when the vendor is setting categories, they might be relevant to them and their entire catalog of products. They might have 500,000 SKUs. They're sending you all 500,000 SKUs. The categories might be outdoors. This. Sports. That.