How to sell online to old people
The world is full of ecommerce sites, and the younger generations have quickly embraced online shopping. Basically, everyone who’s younger than 35 years has more or less grown up with computers, and is therefore most familiar with how to use them. However, when looking at the older part of the population, we see the exact opposite picture.
Let’s take a person of 65 years as an example. There is a great chance that he or she did not try a computer before at the age of 40. As adults, we do not have the same curiosity as children, and we are not as open-minded to new technologies as children. As a result, many of those who tried a computer long into their life quickly abandoned it again.
If you work within e-commerce, there shouldn’t be anything new to this. So how to do go around if you want to launch an e-commerce company where every single product is designed for people above 65? It’s not easy, I can tell you that.
Back in 2014, I launched such company in Denmark, called LivetSomSenior (in English, it can be translated to “Life as senior”). In LivetSomSenior, we sell items such as walkers, wheelchairs, Tena hygiene products and similar items. We are a pure online business, and all our products are targeted for the elderly part of the population.
Doing this exercise with success has taken a great effort of work. There are multiple things to take into consideration, right from how to design the website to customer service etc.:
- Selling to a senior through the internet requires trust. One would argue that e-commerce is all about trust, but even more so when it comes to retiree’s. They are more suspicious towards companies they do not know, and are very reluctant to use their credit card for online shopping
- The product descriptions need to be easy to understand. Furthermore, the font size has to be large enough for them to read it easily.
- The design of the website must be kept on a very minimalistic level. Avoid pop-ups, flashing banners and other disturbing things.
- The order flow must be extremely simple to avoid questions.
- Consider if you should offer phone support. Many e-commerce sites try to avoid this, but the elderly part of the generation really likes to ensure themselves that there are reliable persons behind the company, and to know what their options are of returning items after the purchase
The above are just some of my observations after 2 years with 100% focus on selling to customers with an average age of 70 years.
Another thing that we have tried with good success is to create information websites focused one topic only. As an example, we saw that there were many questions regarding walkers, and that the market was very immature. Therefore, we constructed a whole website with the sole purpose of teaching the customer what to look after when buying a new walker. This website is called “Rollator-guiden.dk” — which in English would be “The walker guide”.
