Give customers the information they are begging for

Yesterday I called in a wholesale grocery order and chatted with the salesperson a bit.

Instead of just taking the order, he asked me some questions about what I was going to use things for.

Turned out, because I've never learned the specific food service jargon I was ordering the wrong things.

Well, not wrong. Just that there were better options that I never knew about.

For example, we were cutting up a 50 pound box of B potatoes to make french fries. But for a few dollars less, we could have gotten 4x 15 pound bags of A potatoes (60 pounds). He taught me that the A potatoes are larger and better suited to french fries (and less cleaning time for me) while the B potatoes are smaller and meant to be cooked whole.

Once he explained it, the codes made sense. Adult size vs Baby size.

For someone in the industry, this sort of thing isn't a problem. Insiders already know what those are and the jargon can actually help speed up a conversation with other insiders. Many developers will know that using SQL to put JSON into a RDMS is probably not a good idea and a NOSQL or key/value store would be better, but non-developers will get lost by all the jargon.

If you're serving customers and attracting outsiders who don't know the jargon of your industry, it's up to you to explain it to them. The more informed and educated your customers feel about your products, the more trust you build, and the better chance they'll buy from you over a competitor (both now and in the future).

If you don't explain it or confuse them with it, they're going to get uncomfortable and that feeling will carry over to your store. Confused and uncomfortable people don't buy.

Explain your jargon, create resources to help industry outsiders, and you'll start to see benefits accrue. That's what true content marketing is all about, not cranking out N blog posts per week that no one reads.

That's how you can build a Shopify store that keeps its repeat customers year-after-year.

Repeat Customer Insights can also help you understand your customer's behavior and see if you're improving or declining. With its collection of behavior reports, you can see what they're actually doing instead of throwing darts at the wall.

Eric Davis