Customers research period

customers make an avg of 2 weeks research prior to making decisions

[Habtom]

During an avg customers research period on this specific market, according to a publicly available research made by a company, customers tend to visit a few websites and compare similar products and do it over the period of 2 weeks before making any decisions.

Assuming one of the sites visited is yours, all things being equal (prices, shipping period . . . ), what could you do to help your customer get back to you by the end of their research period?

Prominent requests to bookmark the site

Tips to help them make the research, and research guide template PDF files of some sort with domain name on it.

Do you think anything else can be done?

[LifeinAsia]

"Special short-term sale: BUY NOW before the offer ends!"

"Signup for our mailing list to be notified of special sales"

Non-expiring (or expires after a much longer period) shopping cart to make it easy to buy if/when they come back and for on-going comparison. This is especially important if the item is highly configurable or people often buy several items together. (This is exactly what Dell and CDW do- I have a couple servers spec'ed out at both and it makes comparison shopping very easy. I especially like that CDW allows you to have multiple carts.) Added bonus (Dell does something like this)- peridoically go through carts and send e-mail to the users that their cart is about to expire or (better) one or more items just had a price decrease.

[edited by: LifeinAsia at 5:55 pm (utc) on April 10, 2008]

[ByronM]

There are extremes to both sides. Some people know what they want and just await availability so if you can lockin inventory they're a quick & easy sale. Some people research but more often than not those people will choose something familiar before taking a risk on a new site so YMMV ;)