E-Commerce and What Can Be Read between the Lines

2007-06-23 19:37 | ,

Any Web site, whether a private home page or an e-commerce platform, follows certain plans and motivations that are related to the idea of the whole. Media companies therefore use their Web site to bring the latest news to the public; computer systems companies intend to sell computers and accessories; hobby Web sites try to entertain people with animations, interactive jokes, or games; and publishers of serious content provide concise facts about specific topics. So, information on the Web always serves certain functions and ambitions. For this shall be the context of my concerns, I will make a few remarks on e-commerce in this and the following postings.

Firms’ Philosophies Do Matter in Online Communication

Imagine an IT company running a Web shop, such as dell.com. It is Dell’s primary objective to promote and merchandise their desktops, notebooks, printers, and server solutions as well as their financial and warranty services. To tell you the plain truth, this is all about making money – and that’s alright for heaven’s sake. Therefore, technical features and – of course – the price of a product are certainly important for a purchase decision. However, to communicate such issues throughout the content of a Web site is not quite challenging. I assume that there is something else that turns an e-business into a successful one…

Staying with this example, it seems to be Dell’s approach to innovation, Dell’s excellence in design and research, maybe even Dell’s contributions to preserve the environment that one ought to read between the lines of Dell’s Web site(s). To my mind, and according to my experience with our agency’s clients and their needs, it is such ideas that customers shall identify with – it may be even these ideas that make a customer buy a Dell product instead of buying the one of another manufacturer. It is a company’s basic belief, their corporate missions and goals, say, a certain philosophy that needs to be transported to the customer and that makes effective communication with the visitors of any e-commerce Web site so important and interesting.

A Company’s Image Is Challenged by Information Overloads

In my introduction I have announced that the growing Internet usage has given impulses to almost any type of business. The Web helps to more effectively distribute products, to reduce the costs of storing, transportation and transactions, but on the other hand it has also challenged the traditional structures of the industries. More than ever, products and services are sold by popularity, brand, and image. Companies who do e-business may have cheaper means to get in touch with their customers but on the other hand they are directly exposed to public censure, i.e. customer rates and reviews, or even scathing criticism – whether being appropriate or not. Such information overload is accompanied by a much lower transparency due to the global dimension of nowadays markets, which is of course an economic problem rather than a communicative one. But to some companies even this seems to be more than they could take.

Understanding the Global Dimension of the Web Is a Factor of Success

In fact, customers do not really care about firms that do not keep up with globalisation. As long as businesses will continue to stick to old-fashioned structures and centralised trades, there will not be any good profits for them at the sight of still growing Internet usage. One should rather ask why customers should continue to give money to those companies that have yet to understand the necessity to adapt themselves to new rules and evolutions. Dell, for one, has quickly based many of its business processes on Internet services and has consequently risen to one of the high-performance companies that have consistently out-performed the computer market over the previous 15 years. Dell and – to be fair – several other companies have as well understood that a Web site works – and by all means must work – on every market parallel to the company’s local range; the Internet even represents a market in itself – a market of people who are used to using the Internet.

It is a factor of success being able to somewhat satisfy them all. The Web is a global medium, and the basic problems and needs of customers are (assumed to be) the same in every place in the world. Therefore, if a company wants to reach its (global) market over the Web, all of its efforts, products and services must be applicable to anybody, elsewhere. Textual communication must subordinate itself to these circumstances, and this is not only a question of providing multi lingual content.

In any case, the success of business on the Web depends on the quality of its Web site. At least this represents every Web professional’s business model, as we are claiming, that it is the online marketing strategy, a Web site’s features, the quality of the code, the attraction of the design, and last but not least those aspects of style, intentionality, acceptability, and informativity of its content.

Provoking ad hoc decisions among a broad clientele of users

Summing it up again: The more visitors can be motivated to become customers by perfectly meeting their requirements and by communicating the right things the right way, the more profits can be made. On the Web (as well as in a supermarket) this often means to provoke an ad hoc decision. One key to this achievement – besides usable design and innovative programming – will be appropriate textual communication with the users of a Web site, even if they may belong to various parties, i.e. business partners OR potential customers OR journalists, and so on. There are in fact many roles a user can occupy. Companies need to make their ideas clear in order to motivate all of their users either to become a retailer (i.e., since many companies in e-commerce nowadays bank on affiliate programs) or just to buy their products.

Thus, corporate philosophies must be embedded in Web texts; these ideas also influence the type of these texts, as I will demonstrate with a later article. In the first instance, it was the aim of this posting to encourage corporate writers to become aware of their employers’ or sponsors’ beliefs and intentions in order to compose Web texts skilfully, which is essential for effective communication.

With the upcoming postings, I will deepen the linguistic aspects behind authoring English Web content, firstly by characterising Web texts generally. You will thereby see how such communication works.

This article has been co-edited by Marcel Hartwig M.A.

Published by Christian Kuhn

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