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Selling Through Non-Sticky Web Sites

© Bert Markgraf

The latest, must-have characteristic of a web site is that it has to be sticky. Sticky means that your visitors stay on your site, presumably looking at ads and buying more and more stuff. While I'm not convinced that this is actually happens, all the big portals and commerce sites are trying to be all things to all people so that their people stay and don't need to go anywhere else.

There seems to be a market for this kind of service but it is not the market small businesses are or should be targeting. Stickiness on a small business web site doesn't make a lot of sense unless it is caused by real content - i.e. the customer is so interested in your products that he sticks around for a long time looking at everything and buying a lot of stuff.

More generally however, the typical visitor to a small business web site is after a particular item or particular information and your job is to give or sell him what he wants as efficiently as possible.

This is really the target market for a small business web site: the customer who knows what he wants, knows he can find it on your site and knows he can get it quickly, reliably and with a minimum of wasted time and effort. It's a non-sticky approach for customers who don't want to get stuck.

There is considerable disagreement over what works and what doesn't for web sites but it seems to me that people who have money to spend are often also people who don't have time to stick around on "sticky" sites. Offer them something of value in a way that saves time and energy and you've got a customer. It may be another niche approach but that what small business is all about.

For more on this subject, try this article. The author says more and more people are bypassing the sticky portals and gives references. Come to think of it, perhaps people prefer slippery to sticky.