How to Lose Customers, Help Your Competition

It is a proven fact that the majority of new businesses, both online and off, fail within a year or so. There are many places to find how to improve business. Here we will describe some of the top ways you can drive your customers away and improve the success of your competition.

When you do make a sale, run quick to the bank and don't look back. Under no circumstances should you establish a way to contact your customer. Don't set up an email autoresponder or Store Performance card for them to fill out. You don't want to take the time to establish a rapport with a customer, it may enable you to sell him something else another day.

If you are shipping the purchase to your customer, take your time, he'll understand. You already have the money so don't rush to get what they bought shipped to them. That statement about shipping within 24 hours is just there for appearances. They have probably paid the shipping and handling charges as well. Send it the cheapest method, it will get there eventually.

Don't go offering guarantees on your products. If it does what the customer wanted it for, then all the better. If your website or advertisement description was not clear enough for them to figure out if it would work right or not then why bother giving even more details, they might not buy it then. You don't want to have to refund someone's money just because there was something unsatisfactory about the product for your customer.

You most assuredly don't want them calling you up with questions. Customer service and help desk tasks are a lot of work. It is not your fault if a customer doesn't know how to fix what they bought. Training somebody to learn the product well enough to talk a customer though fixing a problem is an expensive proposition. You need to cut overhead expenses as much as possible, right? If you must give contact details to a customer or interested shopper, use a seldom-checked email box or a phone attached to an answering machine.

You know there is nothing you can learn from your competition. So what if they have been offering free shipping on their products? Do you really need to know what kind of advertising they have been doing or what they are offering to customers? You have enough to do every day without adding research projects to your schedule. You have your website just like they do. What good is knowing how they have optimized it for the search engines? It's your business, right?

When you do have a customer, you don't want to seem pushy and offer to show him another product that could help out alongside what he already bought. Surely the customer has already picked out all he wanted to buy. If he finds out later that he needed some brushes to put that paint on with he will be back. The value of a spontaneous purchase while someone is in the mood to spend has nothing to do with all those snacks they put beside checkout isles.

It is a sure bet that if you diligently follow these tips it won't be long before you can forget all those headaches running your own business can cause. Then you can get back to finding a time-clock job and making money for somebody else, including your competition.