“Everyone lives by selling something.” Sounds very much like a statement that Lee Iococca or Bill Gates might have made. In fact it was Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), famed writer and author of Treasure Island who said it.

Selling is the engine room of free enterprise economies and with the advent of the World Wide Web, millions of adults and adolescents in the USA alone have been added to the great army of selling agents. Ecommerce and online marketers function without national or international borders to hamper their appetite for trade. Oceans and continents are crossed at the speed of light. The world shrinks and the economies expand.

So, what is selling one might ask, given that it is the genesis of a large part of world commerce?

The definition one gives to selling will determine in large measure the way in which one positions one’s self, one’s company, or one’s website to accomplish this task. In order to keep this article brief, I will suggest a definition that may challenge the way you think about the process, and therefore the way you, as an ecommerce merchant or online marketer/seller, have chosen to communicate your ‘clear compelling message’ with those who visit your website as prospective customers.

‘Selling is facilitating a willing exchange of mutual value’

• To facilitate is to ‘make easier or less difficult’, ‘to help forward an action or a process’. Are you, through what your website is saying, making it ‘easier’ for prospective clients to do business with you? Are you moving the buying process forward? How, by the way in which you are presenting your product, that is, what you are asking your prospects to buy, and, in the way in which you are asking them to do business with you?
• A ‘willing exchange’ will normally follow the buyer’s recognition of ‘mutual value’. Mutual value is best built buy concise messages that clearly elaborate the benefits of the product along with the benefits of doing business with you in your way.

Once you have the traffic, having perhaps spent valuable time and resources on search engine optimization (seo), you will want to maximize your chances to convert as much of this traffic as is reasonably possible into customers…..happy customers, who will return and bring others with them.

Spend twenty two minutes today thinking about how you can more effectively ‘facilitate a willing exchange of mutual value’.

You can do more business online-the genius is in the focused thinking. Get ahead of yourself and you WILL get ahead of the competition.

• Why People Buy (Your product solves a problem) - By Leo Talbot
• Why people buy - The lifestyle factor - By Leo Talbot
• Analyzing your competition - By Leo Talbot

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Ecommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.