What are they buying ?

E-Commerce is still a very difficult business to crack. Many digital companies are still struggling to find one product that turns out to be a silver bullet for their business.

I had a small stint working on digital music e-commerce website. It was a subscription based model, where user pays one time fee for a monthly subscription for unlimited download.

Some of my learning’s:

1. Give what they want:

It is worrisome to see users not finding value in your website, when you have the best and the latest bollywood content. It looked obvious to us that latest bollywood content could woo users to pay for the service. But numbers had something different to say.
Highest content download for more than a month was a bhajan – “Hanuman Chalisa” followed by “Chiggi Wiggi” from Blue (year back when I wrote this blog). Also many users were downloading regional songs such as Haryanvi, Tamil and Punjabi.

Rs.50 is all it takes to buy a pirated CD of latest songs from bollywood and if you have enough time on hand with a decent broadband speed, just need to visit websites like cooltoad.com and likes to download all the latest songs. So why pay for these songs?

Learning:
Obvious can be catastrophic: We thought that the driver for our website will be latest Hindi songs, but it’s not the case. Users ask for regional content and download substantial amount of non-bollywood genres as well.
So, observe what your users are doing. Sell them what they want and not what you think is best for them.

Create a niche:
E-commerce does not necessarily require huge volumes to survive, unlike ad driven websites. Hence, it’s easy to survive and thrive by targeting a niche segment.
For instance, a website that sells only bhajans might make decent money and have niche audience that come with a pre-set mindset.

2. Make it instant:

Design your homepage to display as much content from your collection as possible. Do not make users search for content. They will not!

On a music e-commerce website users make an instant decision to download content. They generally won’t search and browse before downloading. Hence, don’t be surprised to find lesser page-views per user. It’s not a metric to consider when tracking the performance of your website.

3. Platform independent:

Another user feedback was that a lot of users wanted to listen to their songs on the mobile .Our DRM rights prevented them to do so, which users’ complaint about.

Learning:
So make your content platform agnostic.

4. Its not how much, its how good:

Don’t get carried away with the size of your content library. It’s good to have a huge content library, but only if your users ask for it and users download it.
We had more than 60k content pieces but each month had only 8k audio pieces downloaded. Also majority of the songs downloaded belonged to three / four genres and languages.

Learning:
Ask users what they want and get that content for them. This will save cost and efforts of getting content for your website.
Especially if your website is targeting a niche it’s much easier to identify the content that you should upload. However, in case of a generic music e-commerce site this can be quite a challenge.

5. Track regularly

E-Commerce website for music needs to be updated with content as often as possible. Hence it becomes imperative to track the performance of the website , in terms of number of downloads , downloads per genre , downloads per language on a continuous basis, preferably weekly.

6. Inform regularly:

Weekly mailer is best way to inform users on latest content uploaded. Unlike social networking sites, users have less reason to visit your website on a daily basis. Hence, keep them informed to generate repeat traffic to your website.