AIAIO: Our Blog

Does this sound like you? Two or three generations into your ecommerce site, your business is decent but flatlining. You’re on top of your metrics; you know your RPV, conversion, AOV, and dropoff at each step in your funnel. But conversion and average order have stopped growing, and you’re ready to evolve.

Ecommerce is changing rapidly. Consumers are expecting more of your site, and embracing modern techniques can invigorate your business. We’ve outlined ten strategies you can use to supercharging your ecommerce efforts below. Be sure to come back in the coming weeks, when we’ll describing methods of implementing each of these concepts.

1. Dynamic Personalization / Collective Intelligence – Your site is collecting analytics data from thousands of visitors every day, and has been for years. How much of this data are you utilizing? Dynamic personalization puts it to use, immediately and with surgical precision. When a customer visits your site, even without logging in, within a few interactions a shopper’s persona is defined and business rules are applied to surface relevant content and functionality. Dynamic personalization providers include Baynote and RichRelevance.
2. Social Network Integration – Social networking isn’t exactly new, but social shopping imperatives are constantly evolving, as we described in our posts detailing luxury brands and iPad usage and possibilities for the new Facebook API. At the most basic level, integrating a “Share” button that allows users to share your content to their favorite social networking destinations is a good first step, as is integrating Facebook “Like” button functionality. At a slightly higher level of customization and effort, there are login integration and review/ratings integration tools such as Facebook Connect. Sites like Social Commerce Today stay on top of social shopping trends and provide more robust examples of retailers leveraging social shopping integrations.

   

3. Mobile Sites – Over the past year, Ai has seen massive increases in traffic and transactions completed at client mobile sites. The age of the mobile site is truly upon us. Mobile consumers have different needs than users browsing on the desktop, and mobile devices have their own set of capabilities and limitations. A dedicated, designed mobile site experience is a must for progressive ecommerce retailers.

4. Location-Based Tie-Ins -The GPS capabilities of mobile devices usher in a new era of exciting location-based cross-channel promotion capabilities. Examples include promoting products that were shopped-for online when the shopper is in proximity to a physical store, pushing promotions available at nearby physical locations, and providing interactive directions and pickup/availability notifications for shopped for items.

   Apps like FourSquare allow you to extend your reach by pushing promotions and specials and rewarding repeat shopping, all while extending your reach to a new customer base.

5. Experiential UI – Beyond simply being easy-to-use, modern ecommerce sites for innovative brands can be experiential and immersive, transforming shoppers into brand loyalists by evoking an emotional reaction.

   The Wrangler Blue Bell Spring/Summer 2010 site (warning: music/audio) is a great example of an immersive/experiential UI where the interactions are fun and reinforce the brand message. Lowe’s Sunnyville (warning: music/audio) provides a game-based metaphor for shopping for lawn and garden products and project planning.

   

6. Contextual Visualization – Shoppers increasingly expect to visualize how a product will fit into their life and style. Retailers who allow shoppers to visualize how products look on them and match with other products they are shopping for and already own will have a significant leg up in the ecommerce marketplace. The aforementioned Lowe’s Sunnyville site (warning: music/audio) allows you to “create your own yard” and see how various products will match your custom needs. The Laudi Vidni website allows to shopper to see their products on a virtual model, and takes the concept one step further by allowing robust product customization to suit a product exactly to your lifestyle and needs.

   

7. Dynamic Grid Expansion / Liquid Layouts -Ecommerce sites are typically designed to work in 1024 x 768 resolution in order to support users with older technology. Trapping your product display in this “fixed width” doesn’t cater well to the increasingly larger percentage of users browser your site at resolutions of 1280, 1440, 1600, yet most current e-commerce sites employ fixed width layouts. Utilize liquid layouts to dynamically size your product display based on the shoppers’ resolution. Alternatives include showing more images/product at once, and dynamically scaling to larger images on both category listing and product detail pages.As a corollary, Ai has found that the “view all” link is the most clicked link on the most ecommerce category listing pages. Shoppers don’t want to page through screens of products – they want to see all of it at once. Consider an infinite scroll metaphor in order to display large sets of products in a scrollable list, rather than asking shoppers to jump page-to-page. Ai implemented an infinite scroll on the PexSupply.com category listing pages. As you scroll down, you’ll notice the number of products on the page automatically increases, with no performance penalty.
8. Minimize UI Cruft – Shoppers come to your site to see your products, not your fancy navigation systems. Yet most ecommerce sites spend a majority of screen real estate dedicated to navigation and ancillary functionality, and a minority of real estate dedicated to product. Modern ecommerce websites will reverse the trend and dedicate 75% of screen real estate to show product, with 25% for supporting navigation, not the other way around.
9. Rich DHTML and AJAX - Dynamic HTML and AJAX technologies have been a boon to shoppers the world over. Instead of having to reload a page every time the shopper clicks, these technologies enable a world of rich interactions that are nearly instantaneous. While not new, most sites are still just scratching the surface of how to use these technologies in a robust manner. Here are some examples of how to take your DHTML into the modern era:
   • Mega Drop Downs – Mega dropdowns offer large panels that are easy to access, break navigation choices into logical groupings, and can feature dynamic or interactive content. Check out the Jakob Nielsen mega drop down article, featuring Ai-designed mega-drop pioneer Action Envelope. Also check out Ai-designed PexSupply.com and BizFilings websites.
   • Robust Wizards & Comparison Tools – Guiding shoppers to products that are relevant to them based on their needs and providing detailed, interactive comparisons between products can be taken to the next level using DHTML and AJAX. Check out Ai-designed Bizfilings Incorporation Wizard and Comparison Guide.
   • One Page Checkout – Why make your shopper click through multiple page reloads, when you can let them complete their purchase all on one page? Ai-designed Steiner Sports and Cache.com websites feature one page checkout.
   • Product Option Selection – Showing product availability in different option combinations (for example colors and sizes) is a common UI problem. Check out how Ai used DHTML and imagery on the Chelsea Clock website to display options availability by clicking change product options from the page linked above.
   • DHTML Kung Fu – Individually, DHTML techniques like promo carousels, tabs, scrollers, and other DHTML widgets can be powerful merchandising tools individually. Combined, they can allow you to take your site to new heights. Check out the Action Envelope home page
10. Get Textual - Designers have been limited to a handful of “web-safe” fonts since the dawn of the web, and have had to hardcode anything else into images, slowing downloads and making custom messaging and personalization difficult and time-consuming. Not any more. With the advent of HTML 5 and font serving technologies such as TypeKit, the web designers’ typographic palette has been opened up as never before. This isn’t just a design nicety, but rather a critical innovation that will allow savvy companies to deliver targeted, personalized message in brand-consistent ways for the first time. The impact doesn’t stop there – not having to use images for any custom fonts leads to faster page downloads and great accessibility of type to search engines and disabled users. Ai has used these technologies on sites such as General Atlantic and Internet Retailer (not yet launched). Alternatives include sifr, cufon, and TypeKit

Our focus thus far has been on strategies that are modern, or next generation. These assume you are building on a solid foundation of ecommerce best practices and test-based user interfaces. Consider the two “bonus” strategies below as necessary pre-cursors to the items listed above.

“Boring” Best Practices - Ecommerce best practices are a hot topic for a reason – they work. Ai has evolved a custom set of best practices for ecommerce over our past 8 years of experience, and applies these as the baseline of every site we work on. Yet some clients we’ve spoken to consider them “boring” and would rather skip right over to the sexier stuff. Our message is this: best practices work. We’ve seen far too many sites where the focus was too heavily on brand innovation or winning awards, and where conversion tanked. Make sure your design efforts are based off well-articulated and understood best practices for the site as a whole, and for each discrete stage in your funnel, from home page down to the checkout receipt.

A quick Google search will reveal an abundance of ecommerce best practices. Some good places to start looking are Jakob Nielsen’s Ecommerce User Experience book, and the Marketing Sherpa and Marketing Experiments web sites.

Test, test, test – Designing a best practices-based web site based on a deep knowledge of your customers and products is a great start. Integrating A/B and multivariate (MVT) testing into your process can take your site to the next level. At Ai, we have integrated testing into all of our design projects for the past few years, and have always seen measurable lifts in conversion and AOV. The kicker is that testing actually saves time and money by short-circuiting lengthy debate and review cycles.

If you are just starting out with testing, try Google Website Optimizer, which is a free tool with limited functionality. For the more ambitious, Omniture Test & Target provides a robust suite of MVT testing and reporting capabilities.

Integrating the ideas above into your ecommerce strategy will take your site to the next level. But how? Let Ai do it for you, or come back in the coming weeks as we delve into each topic above in more detail.

Media-based agencies in New York City often take part in extramural activities aside from the normal company outings and adventures. Often these activities involve kickball, dodgeball, bowling, ultimate frisbee, or other such “kid” sports that us “adults” play to keep a semblance of youth. Ai had no such team for any sort of activity like this, so I did some research into the possibilities of forming one. My search directed me to the New York City Social Sports Club (NYCSSC), where I noticed that most of the sports’ registration dates had closed. One of the only open sports for this season was, frankly, exactly what I was looking for – Team Trivia.

Ai is a collaborative company. We take pride in working with each to create the most vibrant and brilliant websites the world has ever seen. We are a family and we are a team. We are creative and we love solving problems together. These attributes seemed to make Team Trivia a perfect fit for us. And so, Ai Team Trivia was born.

We have a team consisting of six people (the maximum number of players on each team): Isaiah Belle (Technical Lead), Richard Davy (Senior Designer), Benaz Hossain (Associate Project Manager), Josh Rusch (Systems Administrator), Robert Gurdian (Analyst), and myself skottey forden (Front-End Engineer, Team Captain). We have a diverse team from all departments within Ai, all with one thing in common – a love for random facts and “useless” knowledge.

Last night we attended the first quiz, all six of us basically going in blind and not knowing exactly what to expect. Each quiz night consists of fifty questions – five categories with ten questions in each. There are normal categories, a visual category, an audio category, and a social round where two teams work together to answer the questions of that round. Some of the categories last night included: current events, and name the book title and author based on book cover photos with the title and author Photoshopped out. The most notable category, or rather the most ridiculous, was: Top ten methods of murder in the United States, per the FBI’s statistical list. Double points were given for getting each correct answer in the correct order from 1-10. Trust me, it’s harder than it sounds.

Did I mention there is no multiple choice for any of the questions?

The quiz was fun and the team is looking forward to the following eight or so weeks left in the season. There will be more to come on Ai Team Trivia in the coming weeks as the season progresses. Be sure to stay tuned.

PSFK has published a report (disconcerting, damning or riotous, depending on your station) showing that many top luxury brand websites don’t function on the iPad. (That image above is the Prada home page.) Given that Apple buyers are often luxury product consumers, this is a glaring omission for some of the world’s strongest brands.

The iPad is a reminder that the web is now rapidly moving away from the “build a website, let it run” strategy. A growing diversity of web-enabled devices is going to force companies to build websites that make usability the prime directive. The direct problem is the use of Flash, but the real issue is the lack of universal accessibility.

The growth in broadband mobile networks has led to rapid adoption of web access by consumers. Smartphones are nearing 20% of the American cellular marketplace and are expected to reach 30% soon. Ai clients saw growth in mobile traffic as high as 600% over 2009 alone.

The iPad is the latest and most profound bellwether in this usage shift. Contemplating how to service users with 1.5″ BlackBerry screens was one thing; dealing with iPad users, with their 1024×768 screens and just-like-a-laptop-only-better expectations, is entirely another. And while the iPad may be just a first step in an evolution, a million unit sales in a month suggests someone found the keys to the steamroller.

Computers are not going away; manufacturers shipped 68 million of them in 2008 alone. More important is the fragmentation of the marketplace, which, years after homogenizing almost entirely in Internet Explorer for Windows, is now an open landscape. Four different browsers have substantial (greater than 3%) market share. And dozens of devices are now displaying web pages in displays ranging from 320 to 1920 pixels in width, both with and without Flash.

The requirement for 2010, then, is to adapt to the fragments. Good websites need to actively identify visitors’ platforms and deliver user-centric results–not just the Amazons and Facebooks of the web, but the many small- and medium-size sites that encourage exploration and engagement. As platforms continue to diversify, creating flexible, accessible sites is a must.

I was struck this weekend by the positioning of a question in the New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist column. A person was referred by her doctor to a lab partially owned by said doctor. The doctor didn’t disclose his stake, and much hand-wringing about the omission ensued.

Based on the phrasing of the question, Randy Cohen’s ethical guidance was firm: “That’s why a physician should not send patients to facilities in which he has a financial interest. It is neither prudent health policy nor good medical ethics to put a doctor or a patient in such a position.”

But the inverse is also true. Patients should want to go to facilities in which the physicians have a financial interest. The doctors have a vested interest in providing their customers with the same professionalism and quality of care that they give in their own offices.

This is true in any industry. Think about hair salon that opens a spa, the deli with a catering business, the ad agency with a media buying arm. Businesses create corollary interests for financial purposes, yes, but the implied message is one of consistent performance. Indeed, that’s often the hook behind the sale.
The error in the Ethicist column is therefore about the omission, not the referral. How might the answer have been different if the question were phrased this way (my edit in bold):

“A specialist recommended that my wife get a CT scan and suggested that she use a lab in which, the physician clarified, he had an interest. She wasn’t required to use that lab, and there was no reason to question its quality or his calling for a scan. I’m O.K. with this lab — I say you either trust the specialist or you don’t — but my wife is not so sure. What do you say?”

Suddenly the question shifts from cagey profiteering back to trust. As the questioner remarks, if the patient (client, party-thrower, CPG marketing manager) trusts the adviser, the recommendation of a related business can be more trustworthy, not less.

All businesses can benefit from this transparency, ecommerce sites among them. A strong parent company or sub-site can give added validity and confidence to customers. Don’t hide facts when they’re not worth hiding; empower people to make well informed decisions. Providing knowledge can build trust and boost the bottom line.