You??™ll learn how to use some of these methods in later chapters; by the end of this book,
you??™ll have a good idea of how to add more features for yourself.
Finally, it??™s much easier to learn about your customers via e-commerce than in face-to-face
shops or even with mail order. Even if you just gather e-mail addresses, you can use these to
send out updates and news. More sophisticated sites can automatically analyze a customer??™s
buying habits to make suggestions on other products the customer might like to buy.
Another related benefit of e-commerce is that there??™s no real cost in having people browse
without buying. In fact, getting people to visit the site as often as possible can be valuable. You
should consider building features into the site that are designed purely to make people visit
CHAPTER 1 ?– STARTING AN E-COMMERCE SITE 4
regularly; for example, you might include community features such as forums or free content
related to the products you??™re selling.
Reduce the Costs of Fulfilling Orders
A well-built e-commerce site will be much less expensive to run than a comparable offline
business. Under conventional business models, a staff member must feed an order into the
company??™s order-processing system. With e-commerce, the customer can do this for you??”the
gateway between the site and the order processing can be seamless.
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