People don’t buy products from elephants — trust me, elephants are pushy and not big on negotiations.

The biggest problem faced by most eCommerce sites that follow the traditional model (see: 1998 chic) is that they believe that they are still allowed to be elephants. The results are unwieldy, lumbering sites with dozens of static pages, stock shopping carts and if they’re feeling really nostalgic, an animated gif or two. The inventory rarely changes, the “flavor text” is constant and the only thing that shifts a byte is the homepage and that only on a blue moon.

Communities

Compare that to Amazon, arguably the most successful online retailer.

Amazon has proven that just because you sell a product, doesn’t mean that you need to give up user interaction. They allow users to create reviews, to share public wish-lists, to provide feedback and to build pages around common interests.

Why? To give their users a reason to come back that isn’t strictly to shop.

The reason that we don’t like buying product’s from elephants is that they don’t talk much and one moody elephant can really ruin your day. No matter how much you like our trunked friends, you just can’t have a conversation with them. We want to believe that the people we do business with care about us, if only a little. Even something as simple as letting people send in feedback about a product tells visitors that the person they are entrusting with their credit card at least cares enough to read their email.

Not only do these hooks help you build community, but they also serve as acceptable sacrifices to the search engine gods. By consistently generating relevant content, you give the engines more to crawl, indirectly bringing more people to your site through the engines. By allowing your users to help you generate the content, you reduce the overall costs associated with building this traffic.

Building content isn’t strictly about giving your users places to add their comments. Depending on what you are trying to sell, it can expand into allowing your users to have a hand in creating your inventory. Tee-shirt companies like CafePress and Zazzle have been successful by relying on the idea that customers often know what they want better than you possibly could. Both of these companies let their users submit designs, build their own mini-stores and profit off of their products. Not only have they built up strong communities of creators this way but they have reduced their costs by outsourcing the process of creating new inventory to a basically free work force.

Why should you build in user interaction? If nothing else because it sets you apart from your competitors. There are thousands upon thousands of sites out there looking to sell the same products that you offer. Hundreds of them have budgets many times as large as yours, and the top tier control 90% or more of the market you are trying to move into.

Since you can’t fight against their wallets, by building up your community and giving your customers a reason to come back, you can do the one thing that most of these large retailers cannot — make your elephant talk.

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