Knowknot Consultancy

I always find it interesting when sites miss obvious dead-ends that can be turned into real $, engagement and product sparkle.& nbsp;

A couple of months back I was looking at Etsy.com – a website where people buy and sell handmade arts, crafts and a range of other products. I found some art that I really liked that was done by someone living in the US. [Check it out and buy some now!]

I had got near the end of the purchase process when I found out that the artist would not ship to Australia. Bum :(

I sent an email to the artist and said how much I liked her work and was sad that she wouldn’t post to Australia.

Here was her response:

I’m really glad you contacted me! To be honest, I wasn’t sure who was checking out my work from where, and when I first set up the shop, I COMPLETELY forgot to add in shipping costs for other countries!! Now that I know people are checking out my work from more than the US (yay Australia!), I’ll definitely begin shipping worldwide. My shop should update within the next 24 hours and you’ll be able to order whatever you’d like!

There are sooo many cool things that Etsy could do with this:

• Engage the artist:
  • report on who’s looking at what
  • provide easy postal quoting – ok, it’s hard to collect this data but you must be able to give guestimates based on all the data you have :)
  • Direct Marketing (DM) and Call To Actions (CTA) to encourage User Generated Content (UGC) on postage and descriptions
• Engage the buyer:
  • show where the product is deliverable
  • encourage buyers to poke the sellers into adding postage costs through simple tools and CTA’s

Closing loops on flows like this can have a big impact. I have had the ‘not available in your country’ situation happen to me so many times on so many sites, especially with postage or licensing items (ebooks, audio books are standouts for me). What I would like is for a site to let me know as soon as possible in the purchasing process if some of the stuff is available and some isn’t!

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