Two men who have looked extensively at online buyer behavior are the Eisenberg brothers, Bryan and Jeffrey, who together with Lisa T. Davis have written "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? Persuading Customers when They Ignore Marketing" (Nelson Business, 2006).

The idea behind the title is that customers in this day and age don't respond the way they may have traditionally, when, say, most of them were exposed to ads via fewer media, usually television, print and radio, and often were easily persuaded. In other words, you can't expect your customers to act like dogs when they are really cats.

Today we have the Internet, cable TV, satellite TV, satellite radio, and a whole host of choices for consumers to spend their precious free time. Some of this thinking is also reflected in the current bestseller by Wired Magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, "The Long Tail." The "long tail" is the low but long horizontal curve of a sales graph, where many more types of items sell in lower numbers because the world is splitting into smaller niches.

In general, the Eisenbergs argue, customers are becoming more sophisticated; they can skip through TV ads with their Tivos, and their "BS meters" are finely tuned. They often research their purchases beforehand online. For example, they may gather information about a car that they want to purchase ahead of time.

But if the bad news is that sellers are pickier and savvier, there is also good news: speak to their individualized needs, and provide good customer service, and you can win them over.

There are plenty of bad customer service experiences out there: the Eisenbergs use "Lisa's" experience as an example. She's looking for a doorknocker that she saw on a web site. When she needed to get more information, in this case, the bolt measurements, she calls the company, only to be told, "I don't currently have that information available."

Sale lost.

Another thing they touch on that is directly relevant to web marketers is that a customer's "angle of approach," such as the search words they use to search for an item on Google, should impact how a marketer targets that customer. For example, if a customer searches on "wide-screen tv," she is most likely early in the buying process. If she types in a specific brand name and model number she's more likely later in the buying process. She may also type in different phrases, such as "projection tv." If the marketer doesn't account for all the possible terms, they may lose that customer. You can also customize your landing pages for those terms to address the different questions of those potential customers.

The Eisenbergs also delve into the different personality types of shoppers, and how sellers can best appeal to them. Some people are very methodical and want a lot of information; others may be more emotional and impatient, and want you to get right to the point.

But what about the eBay/online auction seller specifically? What kinds of things should they be doing? AuctionBytes caught up with Bryan Eisenberg to ask him more about his theories, what holds customers back from buying, and also to see what advice he would give to small online sellers and eBay sellers in particular:

AB: Can you give examples of clients you've worked with, and what are the most dramatic things you've done to increase people's sales?

Eisenberg: We've worked with companies like GE, DELL, Disney, Universal Orlando and Overstock. We work with clients who do online sales, lead generation, media sites, you name it...with always the goal of increasing the actions the visitor takes. Not necessarily the traffic, but once they get there, how do you get them to do what you want them to do?

Probably one of the most famous examples is from our last book, "Call to Action" - the endorsement from Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock. We helped them make one quick change to their Web site that I found within six hours of engaging us. We changed one image, and overnight it accounted for 5% to their top line.

AB: One image?

Eisenberg: One image. It was an image on one of their major category pages.

AB: Do you think one of people's fears about buying online is the security issue, and if so, do you think those are realistic based on actual fraud experienced by your clients' customers?

Eisenberg: In reality, there are fewer instances of identity theft online than there are offline. It's not really a major issue. And there are ways people can protect themselves: including getting a separate credit card that they use online, getting a different email address, all of that.

The biggest reason why people abandon shopping carts is because they don't have the confidence to buy.

The seller hasn't given them enough of the info they need to make a confident decision that what they purchase will solve their need or want or desire.

If you don't answer all the questions they have...we showed this example in a presentation, where one of my staff was recently looking to buy a Burberry coat. He moved from LA to New York last year. And you know the winters in New York are a little different than those in L.A.

He's a young guy in his early 20s, and he's a big gadget freak; he carries a Sidekick, the iPod, etc. One of his big concerns was obviously the pockets - how he's going to store everything; where is it all going to fit? He went online and started doing searches, and from one business to another trying to market him Burberry coats, nobody seemed to actually have them. And these are people paying for ads.

He ended up on bluefly.com, from a paid ad for Burberry coats, and they brought him to a site where all they have is sunglasses.

Finally he went to the Burberry site and found the product he's interested in, and he's left with tons of questions. He could enlarge the image, but it didn't really answer: What are the pockets like? How large are they? Will they fit this?

It left him saying, I have to go offline and see it in a store, so I can make that decision. And those are not impossible questions to imagine that a customer may have.

The challenge is, how do you go about presenting to the diverse set of customers? For example, if you're selling retail, do you sell (to) all the same customers the exact same way? No. Then why is it that online, all we do is create one page per product?

What happens is people say, well (then) I'll create one page for each different type of customer...but that doesn't work because people don't operate in a vacuum; they aren't a stereotype. People operate in modes of behavior. So you can go from one mode to another.

One of your other questions was, should (sellers) have auxiliary channels? The answer is yes. You may not be able to sell within the framework of eBay depending on how complex the product is you're trying to sell. The number of questions may be too vast, and the diverse group of customers you have may be so divergent, that there's no way to answer it on that page.

So you have to think of the page on eBay as a driving point so you can tell people, if you're really interested, come and learn more about it…and give them terms they can go searching for that naturally bring you up...or they visit your site, where you can go ahead and answer all the rest of their questions for them.

AB: I think the rule on eBay is you can mention your About Me page and on that you can mention your site, so they'd have to work within the framework of that rule, but of course there's more people can do with a standalone Web site.

Eisenberg: But you can target things...part of the way I structure my eBay page...is I have certain headlines with phrases, which describe the key benefits, knowing those phrases are terms that if they go back and search for, my pages will come up, my regular site will come up. They will do that often.

AB: Talking about targeting different customers, e.g. the soccer mom "Jills" and tech savvy "Barrys" that you talk about in your book, how would sellers go about targeting those different types of customers on eBay? Your suggestion is they can use certain keywords, even though they wouldn't necessarily run whole separate auctions?

Eisenberg: Right. And understand that different personas respond to different parts of the page. Some are much faster and make decisions more quickly, so you've got to address them toward the top of the page. There are others who are more methodical, that you can wait until later on in the page.

AB: So there is a lot you can do within the context of an eBay auction, if you really put thought into it?

Eisenberg: Absolutely. There's tons to do.

AB: About the "uncovery" process; finding out how and why people are looking for a product,...what kinds of things sellers can do to do uncovery - email people after the sale? Are there other things you can suggest?

Eisenberg: They can certainly email people after the sale, they can call them up, they can send post cards, even how they do their packaging. A big part of the uncovery process, as I said earlier, is really getting down to the nitty gritty of what questions people have buying these products...and the only way you know that is by actually talking to the people who are motivated to buy them.

AB: How would they do that; would they look at the bidders list, or use the contact an eBay member form?

Eisenberg: If they can't do that, you can use the traditional method...there's a lot of keyword research in terms of how people actually drive towards things. You've got to imagine, from those keywords, what are the potential intentions that people (have)…

AB: I know some sellers use Google Adwords, and there's also a great tool called Sellathon, where you can find all the keywords people used to find your auction. You can also see where the people who looked at your auction are located...I always find it fun when someone's coming from another country. I think the whole concept of just thinking about who are my customers, and what are they thinking when they look to buy my stuff, is good.

Eisenberg: Right...it's plan and then do, not do and then plan.

**Part 1 of "The State of Online Buying" can be found online at http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m10/i30/s02.**

---

*Julia Wilkinson is the author of "The eBay Price Guide," (No Starch Press, 2006 powered by Hammertap) and "eBay Top 100 Simplified Tips & Tricks" (Wiley, 2004-6); as well as "What $ells on eBay for What" (http://www.aolmemorabilia.com/whatsells.html). Her newsletter, Yard Salers and eBayers is at http://www.yardsalersebayers.com, and her blog "bidbits" is at http://blogs.gowholesale.com/julia_wilkinson.*