FORGET REACH, START SELLING. What e-commerce should learn from retail

E-commerce has conquered a lot of market share. Making profits, however, turns out to be hard for most companies. If price competition and high marketing costs squeeze your profits too, this book is for you. In our Onlife era, in which online and offline experiences confluence, consumers are overloaded with information. The key to success is found in customer centricity, customer flow, and individual attention. This creates a new potential for companies with a strong history in retail to win online as well.FORGET REACH, START SELLING starts by explaining why most companies find it so hard to make e-commerce sufficiently profitable. Ger van den Buijs uses well known retail sales strategies to explain what the strengths and weaknesses of e-commerce are. Due to the lack of differentiation, price is the only marketing instrument e-commerce currently has. The focus in e-commerce is to grow sales by expanding reach. This strategy backfires, because the total sum of digital marketing is overloading the customer. The cost of marketing is rising, while its effectivity is decreasing. As a consequence of the information overload, attention is a customer's most scarce resource. This requires new strategies. Ger van den Buijs hands you three new strategies. The direction of these strategies is first demonstrated in three showcase interviews with salespeople that managed to be successful in a time of hefty competition.The first strategy is 'Vocification', meaning: "activati...