Everything comes at a cost. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and you’ve heard this expression a lot of times. The “Cost” analogy isn’t referring to those green dollar bills here. Cost means the tradeoff phenomenon that comes in exchange of selling something off your electronic distribution website.
For example, consider the following issue:
- Language Barriers In Electronic Distribution – A General Example:
Imagine that you have an electronic distribution website, which sells components on a global level. Someone from Latin American regions recently bought something off your website, and came back with a replacement complaint about it. Now this person doesn’t know how to speak English and he probably got someone to help him place the order.
If you have a small scale business and you don’t have that much of a customer support going on, other than you being at the other end of the “help line” most of the time, you wouldn’t be able to understand a word. Seeing that you don’t want to dis this customer, what is the proper solution here?
A) Invest a small amount of money at local level, to hire people for your customer service department. This example is going to cost you a bit of a fortune, but if your customer service representatives are more of a multi linguistic type, they’ll know how to deal with Latin American people.
B) You can sign up for one of those 1-800 Toll Free number services. Afterwards, you can hire some people to do the customer service thing for you. The biggest benefit of this example is that the people who’re going to do the representation for you, they can do so by working at their homes.
a. You can cut down the cost of establishing an office, and all the fixed cost issues regarding electricity, water and gas payment.
C) If you have a large scale business model, hiring customer service department folks is a lot easier. You can create small virtual departments all over different major regions where you trade. For instance, if you send your shipments to Nigeria, Mexico, UK, Spain and etc., you should be able to hire people in those regions to represent your services. This network is a little bit complicated but it is worth all the so called “hassle”. With the right standard of services and right kind of people to serve you, your customers will never complain about anything.
- Shipping Charges – The Extra Expenses That May Just Surprise Your Customers!
Almost all kinds of vendor websites nowadays have support for different shipping modes and payment options. You’ve got your usual USPS mode that takes the longest to ship any kinds of good. There’s priority mail, and lastly there is expedited shipping options.
Right after placing the order and paying the shipping price, the customer is under the impression that he or she has paid for everything. However, they do not realize that the custom services department at their country’s airport, will also charge $5 – $10 as a payable tax. Actually, this small fee kicks in as soon as the delivery guy knocks at the customer’s door, with a due payment receipt and the ordered electronic components.
Do know that these kinds of fees and any other bills associated with a customer’s regional profile, are unavoidable. But in many cases, consumers who order things from websites for the first time; they think that they’ve been “cheated” on, as no one said anything about extra Custom Department or handling charges.
The best way for you to avoid this issue is to display warning messages on your “Order Now” pages. This way, your potential customers will know about all the charges related to the electronic components that they’re considering buying. (A small change can create huge positive differences for you from a long term perspective.)