Retail and ecommerce

For a small retailer with a considered product, the site is only half the shop. The other half is the inbox. A three-thousand-dollar ebike is not an impulse — the questions are range, road legality, and whether it survives a real commute, and they arrive at eleven at night in an Instagram message from someone who has read the product page twice and is still not sure.

Most ecommerce advice assumes the product closes itself, so it is all funnel and abandoned-cart email. That advice was written for shops with a support team. A shop run by one or two people has a different bottleneck entirely, and the bottleneck is answering — every message, every night, fast enough that the buyer has not already gone somewhere else. Miss that, and the conversion rate on the storefront is a measurement of nothing.

And the storefront itself is usually bought rather than built. A theme costs a couple of hundred dollars, arrives carrying somebody else’s layout and somebody else’s page weight, and every other shop that bought it looks the same — which is survivable until the thing you sell depends on looking considered. Changing its colours does not make it yours.