AIAIO: Our Blog
The pulse and reviews of Alexander Interactive
We are gearing up with excitement for this year’s Internet Retailer Conference and Expo. Canopy CEO (and erstwhile Ai director of strategy, and, well, yours truly) David Wertheimer will be giving his live website critiques for the fourth time, and Ai and Canopy have a large and gorgeous expo floor booth in the works.
If you’ll be attending the conference, do stop by and say hi. See you in San Diego!
As the economy slowly pulls itself out of the recession, retailers are trying to connect with consumers in different ways. Reuters reports that Best Buy is scaling back its trademark “big box” stores, focusing instead on “mobile” retail locations and bolstering their online presence. However, The New York Times reported last week that many brick-and-mortar stores are back to embracing size and clutter. While piling up the goods may be great for B&Ms, this strategy usually fails to translate in the expanding ecommerce world.
Online there exist far better strategies for engaging consumers than drowning them in a sea of digital clutter. We advise our clients to embrace simplicity, proven behavioral strategies and technology like dynamic personalization. Few if any brick-and-mortar stores can make quick, store-wide changes like what can be done online. Digital optimization strategies allow our clients to take risks and experiment with their online offering, to adjust quickly based on real-time feedback, and then to experiment some more.
We have empowered many clients with this strategy, and it works. For example, our de-cluttering redesign of PexSupply resulted in a 33% jump in conversions, and 45% increase in total orders. Take a look at the difference after the break.
Scott Porad put up a terrific blog post last week about conversion rates and a lack of true averages.
While a global conversion rate of sorts exists–apparently, it’s 2.4% these days–benchmarking site conversion is a futile task due to the variables that impact sales.
Porad mentions Starbucks’ 99% conversion rate in his post. To expound, consider the stores in a shopping mall. Brookstone and Spencer Gifts, for example, probably have a lower conversion rate than, say, Old Navy or Radio Shack, due to the mindset of shoppers who enter (try vs. browse vs. buy vs. fix). But that doesn’t mean Brookstone has a problem. Differences in pricing, margin, and foot traffic expectations all play into the relative success of each store.
Instead of focusing on benchmarks for conversion rates, look at consistency of purchase patterns, and identify points in the browse and checkout processes where barriers can be minimized and revenues maximized. Not every site can convert like ProFlowers–and not every site has to.
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the following Thursday are just days away… Holidays are right around the corner. We’re not looking to change the world here at Ai, but we do want to play our part in making this upcoming year a safe, secure and profitable one. That being said, have a look at an article I recently wrote which was published in the B2C Marketing Insider.
12 Tips on Creating a Safe Online Customer Shopping Experience
“84% of polled Internet shoppers don’t think that online retailers are putting enough effort into protecting customers” (Forrester Research, Inc)
The E-commerce holiday shopping season is upon us and online retailers are busy implementing new shopping features, social campaigns, analyzing their test results, and redesigning their funnels from browsing to checkout.
The experts are out in force: Focus on usability! Optimize your product page! Come up with brilliant holiday promotions! Study the shopping trends! Yeah! Yeah?
No. Don’t waste your precious and ever-dwindling time focusing solely on usability and Ui improvements. Bottom line: If you don’t have your customers‘ trust and confidence, you won’t convert–regardless of all the improvements that your testing results indicated you should make.
This holiday season, make it a priority to ensure that your site is providing your customers with the sense of safety and security they are longing for in their shopping experience. Use our tips below to ensure your customers spend their precious time deciding which product to buy from your site, rather than then if they should even buy from you at all.
Prominent Contact Information
Contact information should be prominent and in a consistent place within your header and footer so that your customer knows where to go when they have questions or encounter issues. Display both phone number and email address so that your customers can contact you in the manner of their choosing.
Privacy Policy
Include links to your privacy policy on all transactional pages. The ubiquitous footer link is a good place to start, but too often overlooked. On transactional pages, make sure you have it prominently called out in the body of the page, above the fold. Spell out pieces of your policy as needed. For example, when asking for an email address, state your email usage policy right next to the field. Best Buy says this perfectly “Best Buy does not sell, rent, or trade your personal information to third parties”. Clear, blunt and to the point. As it should be.
Don’t Hide Costs
Transparency in shipping costs and delivery times is key – especially come holiday season. Be sure to provide all of the actual costs up front, including shipping, handling, and sales tax. These can have an enormous impact on the final price. According to OneUpWeb, 95% of customers want to know the exact cost of the order before proceeding into checkout. There is no better way to put the kibosh on a potential sale than to withhold additional costs until later in funnel.
When the user can expect to receive their package is enormously important as well, especially to shoppers cutting it tight during the holiday season. Show this information as early as possible as well. This is actually a deciding factor when it comes down to those final few days. Shoppers are willing to pay a premium as long as you can provide them with the security that it will arrive on time, as promised.
Return Policy and Shopping Guarantee
Shoppers want to know what their recourse is if their item arrives and is damaged, the wrong item, or just simply not what they wanted. Be sure to clearly spell out your return policy so there won’t be any surprises later. Do you have a shopper satisfaction guarantee? Nice! Again, place this prominently above the fold, and inspire your shoppers with confidence that they can’t make a wrong or irreversible decision.
Anticipate Their Concerns
Be mindful of the various sensitive touch points throughout the purchasing process. Address concerns before they even arise. If you expect your customers to share private and personal information with you, you need to address the reasons why you need the information at the appropriate times.
Apply the Human Touch
Ten other sites may sell the same product, at the same discounted price, and have the same safety features in place. Differentiate yourself by emphasizing a personal touch and telling your shoppers that you completely understand their concerns. Give them that warm and fuzzy feeling that they are in good hands by hitting the emotional aspects of shopping.
Using the right tone and personality makes a difference. It is comforting for a customer to see “Please don’t hesitate to call us with any concerns or questions. Your security is our sole priority.” compared to a simple link to the Help Section. Instill confidence in your customers by speaking to them like human beings, rather than unique visitors, throughout the shopping process.
Your “About Page” and Value Proposition
Part of converting the customer is making them feel confident that they are in good hands. The ‘about page” is an often overlooked part of creating a secure shopping experience.
Are you family owned? Are you quirky? Are you a huge company that started off with two people in a garage? Do you donate a certain portion of profits to charity? Don’t let “About Us” be one paragraph of fluff about commitment to selling great products. Shoppers will see right through this. Be yourself. Shoppers have a greater sense of confidence knowing that they are at a real store run by real people.
Make a Good First Impression
Visual design has a huge impact on new customers feeling safe. Shoppers will form an opinion of your company within five seconds of seeing your home page. Want them to feel safe, and not think you are a fly-by-night outfit? Invest in design. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be award-winning, gorgeous visual experience. The site’s design need to give an instant sense of credibility and trust to visitors. Even though customers may not be entirely conscious of it, good design inspires confidence.
Performance & Stability
A slowly loading page, a site that’s down, or obscure programming error messages can raise instant doubts in the shopper’s mind. It is likely they are in comparison shopping mode, so if they were to leave one site and arrive at a site that loads slowly, or not at all, then the experience comes to a quick end. If they see errors and messages they don’t recognize, they will doubt your professionalism and whether their information is safe on your site. A solid technical implementation is as important as a great design.
Badges, Tigers and Seals Oh My
Seals of approval from TRUSTe or Better Business Bureau Online are widely recognized, but remember that a seal is only a graphic; it can be counterfeited. To be sure, make sure you link to the certifying agency’s site that profiles the merchant information. Also, avoid the Times Square approach putting eight different seals on your site. It diminishes the effectiveness. If you really feel the need to bombard 8 seals on there, all I ask is that you use the animated graphics. At least your savvy visitors can get a laugh.
Sweat the Small Stuff
Be sure your site has been thoroughly reviewed and that there are no misspellings or grammatical mistakes. They may seem tiny, but they will immediately cast your professionalism in doubt.
Security Through Social Validation
Social validation is a proven factor in influencing how people purchase products, and it’s no different when it comes to influencing why they should shop at your site for these products. Customer dialogue, reviews and interactions (regardless of what is being discussed) brings instant credibility to your site. People want to know that other people shop at your store. They want to see activity and not just take your word for it.
Now more than ever, privacy is a huge customer concern. Between Facebook privacy issues, Google ego-searching, and countless ads aggressively targeting hackers and screaming identity theft shoppers are only getting increasingly more sensitive and aware of the how, why, and when their sensitive personal information is used.
As online retailers, it is our responsibility to provide a safe and comfortable shopping environment for the customer, both online or off. The most successful businesses are able to instill confidence in their customers, and adding a relatable human touch. They develop a trusting, ongoing relationship with their customers to ensure repeat purchases and loyalty.Look folks, lets not forget – it’s the holidays! Do your customer and your bottom line a favor by letting them focus on giving rather than worrying. So you better be good for goodness sake.
Last week Walmart announced free shipping on walmart.com for the holiday season. The scope is staggering: the offer covers more than 60,000 products and comes with no purchase minimum.
The move is a maneuver in Walmart’s price war with Amazon and Target, coming just days after Walmart lowered prices to compete more fiercely with its competitors. In the level-playing-field world of ecommerce, Walmart is making a compelling case for many consumers not to shop anywhere else.
So what does this action mean for the rest of the industry, not just the billion-dollar behemoths at war? Several things.
1. Expect heavy price wars this season. Indeed, they’re already underway, what with campaigns and discounts starting in October this year, in part to offset the sluggish economy. (Then again, this happened in booming 2007, too.) Every store will be watching its competitors’ prices, and consumers will, too.
2. Look for the spread of no-limit free shipping. Already, some larger retailers (like LL Bean, whose promo is shown here) have chosen to match Walmart’s offer. Amazon hasn’t budged yet, in part because its $25 hurdle is fairly accessible. If Walmart chooses to extend its offer past the holidays, though, watch for shipping costs to rapidly become an albatross on mass-market sites.
3. The small-business end of the online CPG market may be in trouble. Walmart’s promotion allows consumers buying $9.88 toys to shop walmart.com for value–good for consumers, bad for small competitors, who may spend $7 on average on shipping. Expect startup retailers to shift focus away from small-ticket items unless they have access to favorable postal arrangements.
4. Don’t expect this to hurt the specialty stores. Bloomingdale’s has free shipping on $300-and-up purchases, Nordstrom $100: this isn’t about them. Nor is it about niche brands whose distribution relies on the digital channel. Those retailers can still charge fair shipping costs, because people are seeking out specific products. Walmart may encourage an expectations shift, but those expectations may or may not extend to every corner of the online retailing industry. (Yet.)
Check walmart.com in January to see if free shipping sticks around or if it’s just a market-share maneuver for the holiday season. That pending decision by Walmart may permanently alter the industry.
This morning I enjoyed re-reading Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Newsweek piece, Why Web Won’t Be Nirvana. While 15 years later most of his observations on information overload and the lack of content curation abound, how delightfully wrong he was in predicting the failure of “cyberbusiness.”
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
It appears our industry has done a fine job addressing all of Stoll’s concerns, save for thankfully not making stores obsolete (and arguably positioning great multi-channel retailers even stronger because of their web businesses). We certainly can point and click for great deals. I don’t remember ordering an airline ticket in the last 10 years and not doing it online. OpenTable can almost always snag a last minute reservation for me at the latest NYC hotspot. While their usability leaves a great deal to be desired, web-based contract negotiation tools drive billions in global procurement.
And speaking of a “trustworthy way to send money over the Internet,” while we haven’t yet found nirvana, in 2009, $209.6 billion was spent by consumers typing credit card numbers into a white box on a website. People trust sending their money over the Internet.
Sure, we lack nuanced salespeople in our digital world. That saleswoman who tells me I look fabulous in that suit will never lose her job to ecommerce. But we sure do come close to the same results. On more than one occasion we’ve all experienced that bizarrely efficient and shockingly accurate “others who purchased” recommendation, and went for it. Dynamic personalization is the salesperson of the future, and she’s being implemented today in almost all of our modern ecommerce work.
It sure is easy to criticize Stoll with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, and most unfair not to offer ecommerce predictions for 2011 and beyond of my own. Stay tuned to this page in the coming weeks.
So you’re probably thinking to yourself right now, “Why Redesign?”
Gosh. Funny you should think that, because it just so happens I recently wrote a little piece on that exact subject, as a featured blogger on Building43.com.
Redesigning a website is a daunting task. Budget, deadlines, resources, features, content, platform changes, brand perception, SEO implications – the list of challenges is a long one. The potential impact website redesign has on your organization is as enormous and critical as the process. Will conversion go up or down? Will your new site attract more visitors or will traffic drop off?
If you want more detail on the topic, take a look at a deck from one of my presentations at Internet Retailer’s Web Design 2009 conference, “Charting the Successful Redesign — A True Story About an Agency and Client Partnership”. It gives a detailed account on the site redesign, specifically what led to the decision and the steps we took to execute it. It does NOT go into pancakes and the secrets behind achieving a remarkable fluffiness. Lets just make that clear from the outset.
Ah, internet shopping. Nothing like browsing products and comparing pricing without ever having to leave your chair.
For many years I almost completely abandoned visiting good old fashioned brick and mortar stores. I hopped on the internet shopping bandwagon really early. I used to buy CDs from cdnow (RIP) over their telnet service before the much maligned Internet Explorer even existed. When I discovered eCommerce, I never looked back.
Well, I didn’t look back until this past December, when I had a falling out with one of my favorite vendors, Newegg. Much to my surprise, I now go to Best Buy for many of my computer needs.
I used to think of Best Buy as a place that I would go when I needed something badly enough to pay a 10-20% premium. Much to my surprise, many of their products are now competitive with online stores like Newegg. Frequently, I can get products a little bit cheaper since there is no shipping charge. Add to that the instant gratification of getting the product exactly when I want it, and I’ve actually started to prefer brick and mortar shopping again.
Oh, there will always be plenty of stuff I’ll be able to find online cheaper. But for right now, I’m finding a return to brick and mortar shopping to be not only enjoyable, but also a fiscally sound decision.
Just to be clear, I am not abandoning eCommerce. After all, I do help make eCommerce sites for a living :) I’m just reintegrating brick and mortar shopping into my purchase/shopping habits. In fact, over the past 2 months, I’ve spent close to $2500 at amazon.com. I’ve built 2 new computers for my home, and preordered that snazzy new graphite Kindle.
It’s also worth mentioning that I actually spend a lot of time at bestbuy.com. Even though it’s very close, I still don’t want to make the trip unless I know that they have the product in stock. There’s no quicker way to do that than to go to their website.
Not only does their site save me time in the store, but they also frequently have sales online that don’t have in the store. So you could end up spending more money than you have to if you don’t know their online price. They will price match their own online store right at the cash register.
G’day mate! I am pleased (and a wee bit freaked out) to be flying to Sydney tonight to participate in Online Retailer, Australia’s leading ecommerce conference. With more than 4000 confirmed attendees, Online Retailer looks to be compelling and exciting.
I hope to be part of that excitement, as I am presenting at the conference on the ROI of user experience. It’s a frequent topic at Ai and one I’m looking forward to sharing. I am also doing live site critiques, my stock in trade at the Internet Retailer conferences, and joining in several other discussions and events.
If you’re in Australia, drop me a line, or swing by the conference and see for yourself.
Many sites have been doing some form of personalization for years. This often includes relatively “wide” customer segments like new vs repeat visitors, and relatively static discount or product promotions. Now imagine doing promotions that are customized with every page view, to the specifics of each individual visitor. That’s dynamic personalization. It’s the next killer app in ecommerce.
Dynamic Personalization
In a blog post a few weeks back, I wrote about dynamic personalization as one of the top strategies for next-generation ecommerce. Dynamic personalization is a hot topic at Ai, and our clients are leveraging it with great results.
Many sites have been doing some form of personalization for years. This often includes relatively “wide” customer segments like new vs repeat visitors, and relatively static discount or product promotions. Now imagine doing promotions that are customized with every page view, to the specifics of each individual visitor. That’s dynamic personalization.
What It Is
Have you ever been on Amazon and seen “customers who bought X also bought Y” after you added an item to your shopping cart?
That’s dynamic personalization. Specific product (or content) recommendations based on your unique behaviors. These behaviors include what you have browsed and searched for, the products you’ve viewed, your ratings and reviews (if any), and your purchase history.
How it Works
All these behaviors are compared in real-time with the behaviors of other shoppers. The result is a match between things you’ve implicitly expressed an interest in, and the interests others have expressed. This type of dynamic personalization uses collaborative filtering, a fancy way of saying that it uses the wisdom of the crowd, and represents the most common method by which dynamic personalization works.
The D in Dynamic
As customers continue to visit a web site, browse and search, view products, and purchase, this data is fed into the personalization database. As the site owner adds products, content, and promotion, this information is fed in as well. In this way, the dynamic personalization system continues to evolve as it learns more about what is popular and relevant right now.
If a hot new toy is released, this product will come to the fore in recommendations as a result of customer interest. As it fades in popularity, it will be replaced by something more popular.
This adaptive learning and re-adjustment happens thousands of times per day without any explicit setup or maintenance. Additionally, the type of recommendation presented can be dynamically customized to the type of product displayed. Quantity discounts might be appropriate for cleaning supplies, but not for dvd players. Feature-based upsells and accessory cross-sells might work for a TV, but not for a book.
Why It Matters
A very small percentage of what you have available on your site is relevant to any one customer at any one time. Getting users to view what is relevant to them–making them aware that you have what they need, that they are in the right place and (by the way) there are other options they may not have thought of that are also relevant to them–is a sure way to greater sales and customer retention. Traditional methods of updating and optimizing your site through analytics and testing are great, but rely to a certain extent on guesswork and can be too slow to react to a trend.
Dynamic personalization relies on what your customers are actually telling you about what they prefer. If you don’t have the time to update your site thousands of times per day and provide live customer service chat to every customer, you should probably look into it.