What is an Ecommerce Sales Funnel ?

There are any number of definitions for a so called sales funnel. Some of them you may or may not be familiar with depending on one’s background in sales or marketing or management.

I was going to simply blast out the definition of a sales funnel as it relates to a shopping cart when I thought – let me have a look at what our good friend Wikipedia has to say.

The Wiki definition is truthfully, the one that most people would relate to and in this case though its traditional for offline sales it is not the same as an online sales funnel.

Wikipedia Defines the Ecommerce Shopping cart Sales Funnel like this :

1. New Opportunity
2. Initial Communication
3. Fact Finding
4. Develop Solution
5. Propose Solution
6. Solution Evaluation
7. Negotiation
8. Sales Order
9. Account Maintenance

New opportunities are put in the top and worked through the funnel until they either issue a purchase order, or become a disqualified lead. The key to surviving in sales is to make sure that each layer never goes empty. You should always know how many companies are in each layer. The adage is “Fat pipeline equals skinny kids.” One-call closers have fat kids with better toys.

Knowing that it can take weeks or months to walk prospects through the funnel process, you better have multiple prospects at all the layers of the funnel.

So the bottom line is pretty straightforward. Make sure that you have action at all levels in the sales funnel and you’ll never be desperate for a deal to close again.

In italics above, including the editor’s opinion, is the traditional offline view of a sales funnel. It’s not incorrect, as it was the established way of looking at a sales funnel prior to internet marketing. So, its still quite valid and used in marketing worldwide.

Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software – Sales funnels

However, when seasoned Internet Marketers discuss “Shopping Cart Sales Funnels” they are really talking about the relationship building process that starts with the capture of a potential client’s email from what is/was usually a free offer on a web page on through to the process of getting or achieving credibility with that customer and on through a possible customer purchase.

A number of well known metric centers have determined that a web site must communicate with a customer, an average of 7 times before a sale is made.

If the customer bounces into a site, doesn’t find what they need and immediately bounces right back out – how can the site hope to touch that client 7 times ?

The straight up answer is that it really can’t. A strongly positioned website with an excellent interface but no sales funnel might achieve a sale 1% of the time. In other words, from 1,000 unique visitors, it might expect 10 sales if everything else were correct. There will be any number of marketers ready to correct this and remark that the number can be as low as .1% instead of 1%. I wouldn’t argue the 1/10 of a percent number either because thats inline with what many sites get now.

So, how does an Ecommerce Sales Funnel change all of this?

A Proper Online Shopping Cart Sales funnel typically looks like this

• Capture Email Offer on front page
• A series of 7-12 Pre-Sale Autoresponder Messages set to discuss relevant issues of a 30 day period
• A series of Post-Sale Autoresponder Messages for helping customer get the most out of the purchase
• Hidden Tracking scripts attached to very soft sales offer in most but not all of the messages
• Tracking script switches Converting Clients over to Post-Sale Autoresponder messages after sale

My favorite autoresponder application is GetResponse, but neither GetResponse nor Aweber ( which is also a great product ) have a truly integrated shoppingcart/autoresponder. I know some people who will say that they wrote this custom script or that custom script to hack together something similar to what I have described above – and to them I say, wonderful your technical genius is commendable – but for the rest of us, there are only a few shoppingcart solutions that include autoresponders integrated with the shopping cart.

The first and still one of the most widely used of these is the 1shopping cart product.

A sales funnel attached to a shopping cart is rarer than a flock of Canada geese in the dead middle of winter ( Yes, they flow south in the autumn ) but they do exist, lol.

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