How to Compete with Internet Sellers Top Secrets of Marketing & Sales

I think for people who are looking to compete with internet sellers, one of the things they can do is say, "Yeah, you know, now anybody can set up a website. Anybody can say anything they want. But what if something goes wrong? Who are you going to talk to? You know, if you and I are working together, if there's a problem, I'm going to be the one to handle it. Do you know who'd be handling it on the other end?"







David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing how to compete with internet sellers. Welcome back, Jay.







Jay: Thank you, David. So glad to be here, and this is a big deal. I've found sometimes I don't even know that there's an internet seller that I'm competing with.



In fact, the other day I was trying to send somebody to our website and we found out somebody had grabbed a domain very close to ours. They're offering a close product of ours. And now, every time somebody mistypes in our domain, they're going to go to one of our competitors. And I'm incredibly frustrated by it and dealing with that very situation right now.



David: Yeah. Squatters, they call them. Domain squatters. Very frustrating.



Jay: Yeah.



David: Yeah. Well, I know a lot of people, particularly people who have brick-and-mortar businesses, for the most part -- but they may have an online presence -- often struggle with the fact that internet sellers can sometimes seem to create better deals. Because they have lower overhead or they have more connections, or they have different connections. Or because of the fact that the client themselves are doing more of the work.



Because if somebody can go to a website, pick something out, order it and not involve a human being, they can certainly save money if they've got that technology set up.



But there are limits, and depending on the industry you're in, depending on what you're selling, very often human beings can have a bigger advantage, and human beings can also justify higher prices because of the level of service they provide.



And I think that's something that people tend to forget about. They tend to think in terms of, "okay, I can't compete with this. These online sellers are able to provide stuff faster and cheaper." But faster and cheaper is not always everything that people are looking for.



Jay: I would say most times faster and cheaper...



David: yeah.



Jay: is not. But I also think that we've kind of accepted faster and cheaper in a lot of ways. You know, it's another one of those things that's changed with the pandemic. I think one of the other problems is that you can put anything on a website. You can say anything.



It's not like when you walk in a store and you can see how clean the store is. You can see. You can feel the quality of the product. You have all of this tangible nature to it. That's all gone and we're ordering stuff that we just see pretty pictures of. That makes it very hard to compete on the internet.



David: It can, but actually that knowledge and the ability to communicate that can also do something that's very important for terrestrial sellers, shall we say. People who operate in non-internet businesses.



And that's that they can. Or so the seeds of doubt, they can basically say pretty much exactly what you said. Yeah. You know, there's a big difference between seeing an image on your screen and then getting it, and having it arrive, and having it be different or look different, you just don't know that.



And that even goes back to printed catalogs. There are a lot of times you get a mail-order catalog, you look at something and go, Wow, that looks great. And then you order it and arrives and it seems nothing like what it is that you thought you ordered.