How to Use Three E-Commerce Tools to Your Advantage

by Mark Rawlins

Ecommerce is one of the most overused and least understood words in the English language. Everybody has an "e-commerce solution" or they are going to "e-commerce enable their business". Anything from creating a web site to deploying a multi-million dollar web enabled online transaction processing system is considered an e-commerce strategy. Sorting fact from fiction has not been easy in the last seven years that I have worked with e-commerce software.

Before we talk about the tools to use in your business, we have to talk about what these tools can and can't do for you.

They can help you take better care of your customers and downline distributors.
They can provide an inexpensive, efficient, and effective way to communicate with and train your downline.
They can provide a reliable, convenient, and efficient way of transacting most of your day-to-day business with a company.
They can't find all of your customers and distributors for you.
They can't cover up for bad product, poor customer service or broken promises.

In other words, the Internet can increase your efficiency in dealing with your existing customers and distributors. During the "dot.com boom", companies who believed they could find all of their customers in "cyberspace" spent billions of dollars. Those companies are gone. Still now and then someone calls me and claims that they have "e-commerce" software that will magically sell my product for me. I won't need salespeople. It will just send out e-mails and "poof", I will have all the customers I want. I always ask them if their software is so good, why are they calling me? Why don't they just e-mail me? It drives me crazy.

I am not going to talk about the obvious tools like ordering, or downline genealogies. Obviously they make a big difference and are here to stay. I want to talk about the ones on the edge. The ones there are still questions about. So what are the tools that are here to stay, the ones that can make a difference in your business?

Distributor Personal Web Pages

I know I am going to get some disagreement here. Some of the original pages were served no purpose. However, I have seen personal web pages come a long way in the last couple of years. The reason web pages are the convenience they provide to the distributor's customers. The customer could go to the company page, but then all the value of having a local distributor is lost.

On a company web page there is:

No local phone number to call in case of a problem.
No personalized customer care.
No information about meetings, seminars, or party's in my area.

There are companies that are building personal web pages to help distributors in the day-to-day business of providing quality service for their customers and distributors.

Web Conferencing

So why does this make the cut? There was a study done of how we humans learn and it was discovered that we remember,

10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, 50% of what we see and hear

With web conferencing, for significantly less than the cost of a conference call, you can do a training class that has visual aids to re-enforce your message. The training is automatically archived so that anyone who could not participate live can watch at his or her leisure. If you would like to see how this works mlm.com hosts web conferences once a month. You can view the archive of these conferences by clicking the webmeeting button on the home page of the mlm.com site and clicking listen on any of the archived conferences.

The need for training in our industry is incredible. Some of my clients spend millions of dollars a year on their training programs to train distributors, how to sell the product, how to use the product, etc. Most people I know agree we only scratch the surface in providing good quality training to distributors to help them succeed. The Internet will be an enormous help in providing better training.

Voicemail

You are saying "Mark has gone off his rocker. Voicemail is not e-commerce." But wait, voicemail has made the jump to e-commerce. Almost all major voicemail products also work on the web. Most of them can send messages, pick up messages, and maintain your account; virtually anything, all from the web. So the question is why isn't voicemail, well as my kids say, out with the 90's? Voicemail still has a huge place in the network marketing business for several reasons.

About 55% of US adults use the Web on a regular basis, but about 45% don't. These people by product too, so having a toll free number in your advertising as well as a web site indicates you aren't locking them out.
This is a business built on communications, the telephone and voicemail that goes with it is still the primary method of communicating. I'm as "techish" as they come. I run a software company. However, when I want to talk to someone I still pick up the phone, I don't pick up the web (I also may have them look at a webpage or instant message them at the same time… But I still pick up the phone).

So how does voicemail apply to e-commerce? You want your customers to be able to contact you via voicemail. You want to be able to contact your customers, and downline via voicemail. The modern voicemail is a great thing, until you have to start managing all that information over the keypad of your telephone. For example if you have 40 voicemails on the telephone, you have to listen to every one of them in order. On the web you see a list of them just like e-mails, with the telephone number and name of whom they are from. You can manage them just like e-mails, forward them to others, fast forward, and rewind buttons. You can also manage all of your mail lists on the web. Whether you are on the go or at your computer, your voicemails are right there. It is a revolution in this 20 year old technology.

I am a believer in the Internet. I believe that it is a tool that can help build your business. Like all tools it cannot do your work for you, it can make doing the work easier. The first wave of Internet tools were built around the idea of transacting business, and now things like ordering, sponsoring, and viewing genealogies are much more efficient.

As you can tell by my list I am convinced that the second wave of tools will be about communications, training and customer service. And I think that these tools can help the industry make dramatic improvements in these areas.