I’ll be joined in the Exhibit Hall by our VP of Marketing, Matt Dion, at the Elastic Path booth on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Wednesday the 15th at lunch hour, we’ll be joined by the lovely Julia Freeman of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store at our lunch hour vendor-retailer case study on Wednesday the 15th. I’m easy to spot, I’m in a red wheelchair.

It would be great to connect with you!

You may also like these similar posts:

• Elastic Path Mentioned in Forrester Wave
• Turn Customer Reviews Into Word-Of-Mouth Marketing
• Bloggers Digest 7/25/08
• Selecting the Right Ecommerce Software in 6 Weeks or Less
• Bloggers Digest - 8/15/08

Surely cross-sell usability is a factor in their effectiveness. But how can you show customers information about cross-sells without forcing them to abandon the page they’re viewing?

AJAX Hover

My favorite way to show cross-sells/upsells is to expose as much relevant product information pre-click. This can be achieved with an AJAX “hover” box. At the very least, you want to show the item’s title, price and stock availability. You could also show a brief description, delivery options, average customer rating or sales rank, or available colors. Barnes and Noble even allows a quick Add to Cart button:

But there’s potential to shove a lot more information into a hover box, like TheFind’s UpFront feature which even has tabs:

Quick View

Foot Locker gives customers the option of a “Quick View” preview:

You can select your product size, color etc and even add to cart without leaving the initial product page. The only tricky part is if you don’t click the right area of the thumbnail, you’ll get the full product page loading. This is a usability beef I have with Quick Look and Quick View features. However, if you do accidentally load the page, Foot Locker provides a recently viewed sidebar for quick return:

Comparison Matrix

When the suggested items are “upsells” (suggesting more expensive version of product from same product line) or “alternative products” (from the same category and similarly priced), it would be helpful to provide a checkbox comparison feature that whips up a product comparison matrix for the customer. I have yet to see this implemented in practice, but here’s a mockup of what it could look like:

This doesn’t make sense if you’re showing “cross-sells” of related products that you hope the customer will buy in addition to the product being viewed. You shouldn’t compare apples to watermelon to donuts.

Add Bundle to Cart

Amazon and Sears allow customers to add cross-sells to the cart as a bundle, with the option to remove suggested items they don’t want:

These are a few ways you can improve the usability of your cross-sells and upsells, and hopefully push their conversion North too.

Victoria’s Secret has a nice layout for cross-sells with the ability to add them to cart from the product page.

The problem is, unless you make all your selections before you hit any of the 3 “Add to Bag” buttons, you will be taken to the cart page without a link back to where you were. There are no clear instructions on how to make it work if you’re not sure.

Martin and Osa’s shop by outfit bundle configurator allows you to make your selections one by one without leaving the page, when you’re ready you click “Add to Bag.”

Carry Suggestions to Cart

Some customers will be conditioned to not click on related items for fear of losing their place on the page they’re viewing. Arden B shows the same cross-sells in the cart summary page:

Walmart shows the following recommendations at the bottom of the product details when viewing a baby stroller:

After you add the product to cart, your cart updates with an AJAX box (top right), and you stay on the product page, but “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” moves to the top, and the product details move below. Smart.

Sears also does something similar, taking the customer to a landing page showing “bought this, bought that” items and category top sellers after an item is added to the cart:

You may also like these similar posts:

• Cross-Sells and Upsells: What is the Diff?
• Will Interactive Ad Storefronts Take Off?
• Amazon Ditches Better Together for Bundles
• Measuring and Improving Cross-Sell and Upsell
• Martin + Osa Launches Shop-By-Outfit + Video

• An upsell is to get the customer to spend more money - buy a more expensive model of the same type of product, or add features / warranties that relate to the product in question.

• A cross-sell is to get the customer to spend more money buy adding more products from other categories than the product being viewed or purchased.

The terms cross-sell and upsell are often used interchangeably because, let’s face it, this gets confusing. Say the customer is viewing a 4GB iPod Nano for $169.

8 GB iPod Nano, $229 -> Upsell, same product family, more expensive
8 GB iPod Touch, $299 -> Upsell, same product family, more expensive
16 GP iPod Touch, $399 -> Upsell, same product family, more expensive
Apple In-Ear Headphones with Remote and Mic , $79 -> Cross-sell
Skull Candy headphones, $69, -> Cross-sell
$25 iTunes card -> Cross-sell
8 GB Microsoft Zune, $249 -> Upsell, more expensive, same category
4 GB Creative Zen mp3 player, $159 -> Neither cross-sell or upsell, rather an “alternative product suggestion”
Portable DVD player, $299 -> Cross-sell. Cool gadget, customer “may also like” but not related to mp3 player.
Griffin FM transmitter for car, $79 -> Cross-sell

Really, there should be a third category - “alternative products” which are really a navigation aid rather than something that truly boosts the cart value or items per sale. Consider the following example from Harry and David:

The label “Go Deluxe” suggests an upsell. One suggestion is to double up on the chocolate truffles and get 2 for $44.85, a true upsell. The other takes a product from another category (that is of higher $ value) which would be considered a cross-sell if suggested in addition to, rather than instead of the product being viewed. In this case, the popcorn is an alternative product suggestion rather than a true upsell of the truffles.

Clear as mud?

You May Also Like?

There’s no stock way to present product recommendations. Common labels for recommendations are:

“Recommended products”
“You may also like”
“Customers who bought X also bought”
“Customers who viewed X also viewed”
“Frequently bought together”
“Stuff you need” (Radio Shack, for accessories)
“Stuff you may want” (Radio Shack, for items in other categories)
“More from this (category, brand, author, artist)”
“Looks hot with”
“Complete the look”

For usability, the best labels clearly communicate why products are being recommended (”this is a more fully featured item than the one you’re looking at,” “people like you liked this,” “these are top sellers in this category,” “these items will look good with what you’re looking at…”) rather than “Recommended” or “You might also like.”

Often retailers mix of upsells, cross-sells and alternatives in their merchandising zones. CompUSA separates upsell from cross-sell with “Want to Upgrade?” suggestions and “More Recommendations”:

Aside from label clarity, another benefit of separating your suggestions into separate merchandising zones is more accurate tracking of what types of suggestions are more effective. Are you more successful persuading customers to add to their order or upgrade to a more expensive model?

So while we don’t need to get too hung up on what cross-sell is vs upsell (there’s room for a bit of crossover in definition), and we should add the third category of “alternative products,” understanding the general differences can help us make better decisions in selecting product associations, labeling merchandising zones and measuring the conversion of different suggestions.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Merchandising Usability: Better Ways to Display Product Recommendations
• Measuring and Improving Cross-Sell and Upsell
• Improving Click-Through Rates on Featured Products
• Amazon Ditches Better Together for Bundles
• Cross-Selling Tips for Online Retailers

Can’t see video?

What will the next 40 years bring?

You may also like these similar posts:

• Youtube Experimenting With Video Ecommerce
• Hot Ecommerce Trend: Embedded Video in Email
• Distilled Clothing Has Innovative Use of Video
• Click to Buy Video Providers
• Elastic Path Mentioned in Forrester Wave

FitForCommerce has also recently launched FitBase, the first ecommerce market knowledge base and community. Bernardine is offering friends of Elastic Path (that’s you) a 10% discount off your FitBase subscription using the promo code EPWEB10.

Why Requirements Diligence?

If you were choosing a stock or career, you’d do your homework, right? Ditto for ecommerce.

No one will argue the better you plan, the better your build, test, launch and support phases will go. And planning is really an equation of Requirements + Use Cases + Workflow + Creative Design + Timeline:

Ten Steps to Requirements Success

1. Align with Business Objectives
2. Know Relevant Best Practices
3. Perform Competitive Analysis
4. Define Functional Requirements in Detail
5. Prioritize and Time Phase Requirements
6. Document Use Cases
7. Diagram Workflow Design
8. Apply Creative Design
9. Test and Adjust Requirements Again and Again
10. Keep Requirements Updated Always

1. Align with Business Objectives

• Define success. Spell out your desired, measurable objectives.
• Reinforce brand? Improve customer experience?
• Reduce costs? Increase profit margins? Increase conversion rates? Increase sales?
• Gain market share? Gain back market share?

• Know and agree (amongst stakeholders) why are you changing/re-designing/re-platforming
• Current site is out-dated? Inflexible? Needs better features or customer experience?
• New branding / imaging / product line strategy?
• Adding new businesses or product lines? Going global?

Specifying why you’re actually making these changes is important in knowing what’s going to drive these requirements.

• Define who are you designing it for
• Who are your customers and what do they want?
• Why do they come back?
• Are there different messages for different audiences? Primary and secondary?

• Align your organization to support the objectives
• Who are the stake-holders vs. decision-makers?
• Who is going to do the work? Who is going to review the work?
• Do you have enough of the right expertise or resources in-house?
• Right expertise: Technical, e-marketing, e-merchandising, creative design, IA/content design, customer support, fulfillment, etc.
• Are external or on-demand resources available?
• Have you allocated enough time? Are there conflicting projects or objectives?

• Assign and allocate the project team
• Is everyone clear on roles and responsibilities, time commitments?
• Who is the project lead and do they have the right authority and accountability?
• Do you need to look outside your organization to fill resource gaps? (We don’t always have all the talent/resources in-house).

Don’t forget to “document it and socialize it.” Write things down and document what you agree upon, so that everyone clearly understands expectations and deliverables.

Socializing needs to happen to get buy in from folks that have to live with it, implement it or use it. Have more discussions about it, circulate a memo/diagram, do an in-house training/webinar on it, etc.

Document and socialize each step!

2. Know Relevant Best Practices

• Research “Best Practices” at the feature/function level
• Research the industry
• Network with peers to find out what worked and didn’t work for them
• Reach out to experts in the field including consultants and providers
• Read whitepapers, research reports, forums, blogs
• Be careful of analysis paralysis

• “Play” with other great sites
• Shop competitor (same products OR same demographic target) and non-competitor sites
• Experiment with leading edge and non-leading edge features

Don’t just do things because they’re cool or other people are using them.

• Use quantifiable market data and benchmark as much as you can
• FitBase
• E-tailing Group

3. Perform Competitive Analysis

• Conduct competitive analysis
• See what you like and don’t like
• Decide what you want to include and want to avoid
• Check competition in your category, but also mindshare or budget competition
• Think about what’s needed to give you a competitive edge – short-term and long-term

Budget competition: in this economy, you’re not just competing against industry competitors, but against other goods and services the customer is considering. For example, apparel is competing with electronics, in a way.

• Compare specific features to non-competitors, too, to understand what your customers expect
• What sites and features are setting a new bar?
• What capabilities or interactions are your customers being trained to expect?

• Compare use of key features

4. Define Functional Requirements in Detail

Make sure you’re covering all your bases…

• Review each and every potential feature/function
• There are 100s of features, functions, topics that an eCommerce manager must plan and execute around

• Consider requirements’ impact on all elements of running an eCommerce business including content management, promotions, back-end processing, analytics, reporting etc.

• Use surveys, feedback forms (from customers and other retailers, if possible)

• Treat everything like an investment decision

• Document your current capabilities
• Pinpoint what features or areas of the site or content drive sales (or, conversely, trigger abandonment or service calls)
• Don’t assume they are obvious
• Review every page, data set, content
• Never assume your new site will have all the features and functionality you currently have, unless you plan or confirm that it will

• Limitations or Impact Factors
• Technical processes or limitations, such as integrations with legacy systems
• Budget considerations
• Organizational considerations, such as strong/weak skills

Metrics documents are good to have, it’s something you can hand to your vendor or in-house team that logs your average site traffic, peak times, etc. because you have to plan business processes around these factors.

5. Prioritize and Time Phase Requirements

• Prioritization
• Know that you can’t always get what you want when you want it
• Rate them
• Must Have = Cannot re-launch without it / Is a critical capability
• Should Have = Should not launch without it / Is important
• Nice to Have = Can launch without it / Try to include / Can be phased in
• Stack rank requirements – top 40 in order

Ranking things always forces people to put things in order, whereas rating them is less clear. If you can’t stack-rank, at least put them into blocks (most important 10, next important 10 etc).

• Phasing
• And when do you need it by?
• What are your timelines? What drives your timelines?
• Is project phasing an option? Is some throw-away work acceptable?

Case Study: Spencer’s Gifts

Must Have:

• Content management system: promotion flexibility, template changes, manage graphics, shipping options
• Merchandising tools - categories
• Auto merchandising
• Navigation/taxonomy
• Site search integration
• SEO – unique meta/title tags
• Analytics integration and page tagging
• Cart / checkout functionality - persistent cart
• Loyalty Program
• Integrate with order management
• Parent/child sku relationships
• Security and PCI compliance

Should Have:

• Personalized product recommendations
• Product ratings and reviews
• Dynamic imaging (zoom, alternate views)
• AJAX capable
• Site optimization, A/B and Multivariate Testing

Nice to Have:

• Alternate payments
• Improved content
• Wish list, gift registry, gift guides
• Product comparison
• Micro sites
• Mobile
• International
• Blog

6. Document Use Cases

• Uses Cases are written to clarify a specific customer experience/journey (written from user perspective - both customer and staff)
• Multiple features can be included in a single Use Case
• For each Use Case, include:
• Objective
• Scope
• Requirements
• Process & Feature Dependencies
• Data Dependencies
• Demonstration Scenario
• Alternatives
• Integrations
• Technical Assessment & Options
• Special Requirements
• Risks, Issues, Constraints

7. Diagram Workflows

• Functional Component Diagram
• Diagram that shows functional view of the eCommerce business to show inter-relation and implications to process, organization, technology, but not workflow

• Technical Component Diagram
• Diagram that shows technical integrations and data flow between systems detailing inputs and outputs

• Site Workflows as more than a site map
• Pages are to be used (how to get from home page to product page to cart to confirmation, for example)
• Features/content by page
• Storyboarding, IA, labeling, navigation
• Key workflows like: Browse, search, guided navigation, registration, checkout

8. Apply Creative Design

• “Lo-Fi” vs “Hi-Fi” Wireframes
• Lo-Fi covers layout – what is on a page (think inventory), relative size and position
• Hi-Fi is where everything is to scale

Lo-Fi Wireframe:

Hi-Fi Wireframe:

• Creative Design
• The look and feel of the site including colors, design devices
• Create multiple options to demonstrate a “design system”

• Use Corporate Identity and Style Guide
• If none exists, create one first, then adjust, then update it

• Usability
• Ensuring a visitor/customer’s experience is as effortless as possible

9. Test and Adjust Requirements…again and again

• Test requirements against all use cases including “edge cases”
• Test for wrong-course path. What should happen when errors are made?

• Field Testing
• User/usability testing of wireframes (start with mockups)
• Ask ‘friendlies’ (customers) to give feedback
• Get structured feedback of creative design, but go beyond “I like/don’t like” to “This works for me because…”

• Adjust Requirements
• When testing or other factors prove a need to adjust
• Be careful not to react too quickly to feedback (often one user comes in and hates something or gets stuck somewhere, look for patterns, consistency)

10. Keep Requirements Updated…always

• Keep a library of requirements documents
• Print a binder to maintain most recent version
• Maintain version control (label documents with versions and authors)

• Create a process to update requirements when anything changes
• Hard to do when focus is testing and going live
• Testing Team and Requirements Team must be in sync
• Make last step of testing (e.g. closing a ticket) include checking that requirements were updated

Requirements are never set in stone, they’re always living and breathing.

Questions

From my experience in ecommerce implementations, your requirements approach is right on. However, the problems is some clients (usually smaller ones) are not sophisticated, patient or detail oriented enough to take this type of rigorous approach. They are not able to articulate requirements without seeing it first. How do you suggest one adapt the methodology to meet this type of client?

Hold the line on rigorous methodology. Start with mockups but they have to tie to requirements, even if people are visual. Use both (wireframe and workflow document and list of requirements). Doesn’t have to be a creative design, but a placeholder for where the feature will live.

Can you share your experiences with delivering ecommerce sites using an agile approach as opposed to getting all requirements up front?

Agile approaches are tricky, if done properly it will work very well. If not done well, it can be worse than a waterfall approach. Defining functional requirements in great detail is still very important. The difference with Agile is that you’re doing things in chunks. Define your iterations (chunks), so that you can define those requirements.
Once you create those requirements for that iteration, they’re fixed. To fix them, they do need to be detailed enough. In a way, it’s taking this approach and breaking them into iterations.

What role does SKU descriptive copy play in the equation? It seems that retailers treat it as an afterthought.

Yes, very often that becomes an afterthought. As you’re going through your requirements, make sure you’re collecting samples of whatever that feature is about. Is it about copy, other product content, ratings and reviews etc. What does the retailer do now and what does it want to do in the future. That way it becomes something you’re planning for, rather than an afterthought.

What do I do if I’m already in the implementation phase, but I realize that my requirements weren’t detailed enough?

That’s a common question - and painful. There’s no right answer other than going back and re-cast your requirements. It will save you time to do this, even if it does mean a delay in implementation. You don’t have to start all over again, but it might take you longer to finish.

You may even find interdependencies pop up that you didn’t think about before, and you can take advantage of adjustments that need to be made to these requirements at the same time. Better to find out before you’re even deeper into the project.

Next Webinar

Creating relevant shopping experiences through targeted selling
Tuesday, July 28, 2009 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT

Do you show the same offer to all your shoppers? If so, you’re falling behind your competition and failing to recognize that not all customers are created alike. Today’s top online retailers understand that they can micro market to specific segments of their customer base with targeted content. These retailers are maximizing their marketing and merchandising efforts, delivering a more relevant experience to the customer, and improving their bottom line.

In this one-hour webinar, Ecommerce Analyst Linda Bustos and Product Manager Peter Sheldon of Elastic Path Software will discuss how targeted selling presents an opportunity for you to improve conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty.

Webinar takeaways:

• How can you leverage what you know about your customer to improve their shopping experience and increase store revenues?
• How are the top online retailers using targeted selling?
• How can you avoid the common mistakes?
• Understanding how to apply targeted selling for your customers?
• What does personalization really mean?

Presenters: Linda Bustos, ecommerce analyst, Elastic Path Software and Peter Sheldon, product manager, Elastic Path Software

Sign up today!

You may also like these similar posts:

• The Importance of Requirements Diligence
• Show and Telus: Solutions for the Complex Sale
• Optimizing Site Search for Non-Product Information
• How to Choose Ecommerce Technology & Software
• Webinar Recap: Delivering Successful Enterprise Ecommerce Projects

Persistent Shopping Carts

Persistent shopping carts save a customer’s cart contents across sessions through “persistent cookies.” A cookie is a small text file stored on a user’s computer. The cookie can be set to expire after a few minutes, a number of days or even years unless they are wiped out by the user’s browser or anti-spyware programs, or the user does not accept cookies.

For example, if the customer bookmarks a product on Monday by saving it to cart, and returns on Sunday to purchase, she doesn’t have to locate the product again. This is a nice customer service feature that can save sales. Some users, based on experiences with other sites, might assume your site uses persistent shopping carts, and upon returning to an empty cart, be too frustrated to even bother re-locating the products.

Amazon even reminds you when you added an item:

Amazon has caught me off guard before when I didn’t realize I had old stuff in my cart. I added a bunch of items in one session, didn’t review my order carefully and ended up receiving (and paying for) an extra wireless mouse! Lesson learned.

The decision to set a cookie that will contain information about what a customer has added to cart is made by the retailer - not all retailers use persistent shopping carts.

Perpetual Shopping Carts

Perpetual shopping carts display the number of items in the cart and sub-total as a shopper navigates the site. Marketing Sherpa recently reported that 64% of retailers believe perpetual shopping carts are “very effective” at improving conversion.

Some sites like Altrec use both persistent and shopping carts, which I recommend.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Have You Mystery Shopped Your Site Lately?
• Reducing Anxiety on Cart Review Page: Show SKU Thumbnails
• Amazon Alerts Shoppers of Price Changes in Cart
• Why Victorias Secret Lost A $350 Sale
• Wishlists May Reduce Cart Abandonment

I came across a really eye-opening article in the February 2009 edition of Internet Retailer, (accessible online or as a reprint at Essential Accessibility) titled “Seeing the Light.”

The article describes the available technologies to bring online retail sites up to par for disabled users of all kinds. Visually impaired users can use screen readers like JAWS, Window-Eyes, BrowseAloud and IBM’s Easy Web Browsing. People with limited hand function can use “radar mouse” * that looks like a Doppler radar. When the sweeping line touches something a paralyzed person wants to view, he or she uses a finger or head-activated device to “click.” It can also help customers check out by activating an on-screen keyboard.

* I don’t have permission to use the screen shot of radar mouse on Canadian Tire, but you can view it here.

Accessibility consultants like the SSB Bart Group, TecAccess, Virtual Vision Technologies and Thinkzo can assist with audits, training and JAWS (screen reader software for visually impaired) scripting to bring companies up to code with legal requirements including the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disability Act (ADA).

Retailers can also do their own audits, following WC3 Accessibility guidelines or subscribing to SSB Bart’s software-as-a-service Accessibility Management Platform ($1,000 per month).

For further reading on website accessibility (especially for web developers), check out the SSB Bart blog. Interesting topics include link text and image link accessibility tips, tips for the Adobe product Captivate and lightbox accessibility. (An example of a lightbox is a “Quick View” that pops up over a category page:

Making a retail site accessible can cost between $100,000 and $2 Million dollars (preventing a class action lawsuit such as the one filed against Target - priceless). But it can really make a difference to disabled consumers.

If you’re curious how friendly your website is for disabled users, check out Deque’s accessibility compliance tool.

You may also like these similar posts:

• The Importance of Web Accessibility for Ecommerce
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Product Pages and Cart Summary
• Have You Mystery Shopped Your Site Lately?
• Optimizing for Hunters Part 2: Beyond Search and Navigation
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Home Pages and Navigation

• Seller reputation - 28%
• Price - 26%
• Website look and feel - 16%
• Website ease of use - 15%
• Special offers - 4%
• Delivery factors - 3%
• Appearance in search listings - 2%

Retailers must realize persuasion and conversion is not all about pricing and landing page testing, but communicating trust.

How do you demonstrate your e-store is reputable?

If your retail brand is a household name, you’ve got a strategic advantage here. But if you’re not famous, you can still be seen as trust-worthy. We have discussed the importance of clear value propositions, still they alone are not enough to persuade today’s Google savvy Internet shopper. Whatever you claim about yourself is only marketing until it can be verified by customer testimonials or other independent raves and reviews.

Show off store ratings and media mentions

Not just for eBay sellers, retailers like GamePointsNow display customer feedback on their home pages to show off their reputation. Using a feedback service provided German company eKomi, GamePointsNow saw conversion lift by 5%.

Clicking on the Ekomi badge takes you to the retailer’s detail page, where you can read the positive, neutral and negative feedback details:

Below the Ekomi badge, GamePointsNow also links to a positive media mention from a gaming magazine.

EyeBuyDirect features customer testimonials, media mentions (linking to its pressroom) and its recognition as an Internet Retailer Top 100 site on its home page:

EyeBuyDirect uses scrolling testimonials in a box on the home page as they recognize that visitors often have a short attention span and it’s unnecessary to read more than a few testimonials. If visitors want to read them all, they can click through to over 4 pages of praise.

Even more impressive are the media mentions, which EyeBuyDirect dedicates primo real estate to on the home page (top right of content area). Understanding that, even at a sub-conscious level, when customers can connect your brand with logos he/she is familiar with and trusts (like ABC network, InStyle magazine and Forbes magazine), it’s powerful. Roy Hessel from EyeBuyDirect shared that after adding the media logos, customers were 45% more likely to stay longer on the site and complete a purchase.

What’s missing from the survey list is shipping costs, seller’s policies (including privacy policies), site security and payment options the seller accepts. (And don’t forget the conversion killer of required registration). These are all important factors in the retailer selection process — with reputation, website appearance, usability, security and policies making up the trust quotient; and the others (including price) the service quotient.

Show off your reputation in search engines

Shopping comparison engine TheFind launched a new feature last week that exposes this information about a retailer in search results, so customers can get a quick look at security seals, payment options, policies, shipping options and even links to social media like Twitter and blogs.

Would be nice if this kind of feature was also available in traditional search engines like Google. Maybe TheFind can license its tool to the big G or even the big 3 (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Bing).

Another way to build your trust as a retailer is to practice reputation management in search engines and across the Web, as customers might do some digging about your company. A great resource for reputation management is Andy Beal’s book Radically Transparent (you can read my review and tips for finding a reputation manager for your company here).

You may also like these similar posts:

• Reputation Management and SEO [Video + Summary]
• Killer SEO Trick only 1% of Online Retailers Use
• Negative Word Of Mouth: Crisis or Opportunity?
• Media Coverage: When You Got It Flaunt It
• Bloggers Digest - 3/21/08

If you choose your delivery method before you have a clear understanding of what your site or system needs to do at launch and 3, 5, 10 years down the road (as best you can predict) you may find yourself boxed in to a solution that can’t do what you need it to, or facing a development timeline and cost that you didn’t bargain for.

Last August, Bernardine Wu from FitForCommerce presented a webinar The Art and Science of Choosing Ecommerce Technology and shared her tips for requirements gathering and prioritization:

• Define them at a detailed, feature-by-feature level
• Create use cases and user personas
• Include systems, data and processes your eCommerce system will integrate with
• Create workflow designs, screen mockups to show how your site will operate
• Include requirements for managing the site
• How products are loaded and manipulated
• How pages are changed
• How promotions are managed
• How orders are managed, fulfilled
• How customers are handled
• Prioritize your requirements
• Rank them in numerical order
• Rate them as nice-to-have and must-have
• Use ‘use cases’ to describe ‘how’ it should work

Be sure to include how the feature will work. For example, if the feature is a wishlist - can the list be emailed? Must you have an account to create a wishlist? Will there be product recommendations and low inventory alert emails sent to the wishlist creator?

And don’t forget you may dream up features that your customers don’t even want or need. Survey your customers and discover what they want from your site.

Because this is such an important topic, we’re bringing Bernardine back to elaborate on requirements diligence. In Requirements Diligence: The Cornerstone to Ecommerce Project Success you’ll learn:

• How to build a comprehensive requirements set
• How to incorporate workflow design and best practices into your requirements
• How to use benchmarking and market data to justify your requirements
• How to distinguish between a must-have vs. should-have vs. nice-to-have

We hope you’ll join us on Wednesday, June 30 at 9am PST / 12pm EST for Requirements Diligence: The Cornerstone to Ecommerce Project Success.

In the meantime you can catch up on The Art and Science of Choosing Ecommerce Technology (last summer’s webinar with Bernardine) and its companion blog post. If you’re still jonesing for requirements advice, check out my Coles Notes version of the 2008 Shop.org Annual Summit session Selecting the Right Solution Provider for Your Retail Operations: eCommerce Platform Selection Case-Study on the Shop.org Blog.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Webinar Recap: Selecting the Right Ecommerce Software in Six Weeks or Less
• Requirements Diligence: The Cornerstone to eCommerce Project Succes
• Show and Telus: Solutions for the Complex Sale
• How to Choose eCommerce Technology
• How to Choose Ecommerce Technology & Software

But cross-selling and upselling is one of the most difficult activities to do well and effectively measure, as evidenced in the e-tailing group’s findings:

Cross-sell/Upsell in Shopping Cart, Conversion Rates:

• Less than 1% conversion - 8% of retailers
• 1%-4% conversion - 16% of retailers
• 5%-10% conversion - 9% of retailers
• More than 10% conversion - 3% of retailers
• Don’t know conversion rates - 44% of retailers
• Don’t merchandise in shopping cart - 20% of retailers

Cross-sell/Upsell on Product Pages, Conversion Rates:

• Less than 1% conversion - 5% of retailers
• 1%-2% conversion - 15% of retailers
• 3%-4% conversion - 5% of retailers
• 5%-7% conversion - 6% of retailers
• 8%-10% conversion - 2% of retailers
• 11%-15% conversion - 1% of retailers
• More than 15% conversion - 2% of retailers
• Don’t know conversion rates - 50% of retailers
• Don’t merchandise on product pages - 14% of retailers

The only overwhelming statistic here is that most retailers have no clue how product associations convert. With 92% of retailers citing web analytics as the number one data source for merchandising decisions, it’s disturbing that many retailers are not measuring the outcome of these decisions.

Of course, measuring conversion rates for cross-sell/upsell can be ridiculously complicated, and depends on what kind of cross-sell/upsell solution you’re using. If you’ve built your solution in-house or your commerce platform came with cross-sell/upsell out of the box, you’ll need to figure out how the data will feed into your analytics tool. If you’re using a third party Software-as-a-Service like RichRelevance or Baynote, analytics might be provided for you, but it might not provide the depth and detail that you want.

Measuring the Right Thing?

For example, your merchandising tool might not break out conversion rate by shopping cart vs. product page. It may not be able to show you detail like product category cross-sell/upsell conversion, or tell you “conversion rate for cross-sells in price range $X-Y in relation to product price $A-B is xyz.”

Then there’s the question of “what does conversion rate mean?” Does it mean the product is viewed, added to cart, or a sale is made by a customer who is shown cross-sells on his/her visit? The merchandising tool we use on the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store tells us that their tool lifts conversion by 140% and average order value by $14.94 (with A/B split testing). That doesn’t tell me if customers are buying more items per sale. I don’t know which suggested products are most successful to refine our merchandising strategy. I don’t know which products and categories have the highest conversion rate.

These problems and questions are common among online retailers, and while tracking these detailed events is possible (with complicated analytics mashups, for example) there’s often not enough IT resources or budget to make it happen.

Though you may not have access to all the data that would be helpful, at minimum, a global conversion rate is a start. I wonder how many retailers who “don’t know” their conversion rate just don’t know where to access the reports from the vendor.

Improving Cross-Sell/Upsell Conversion

If you do know at least your conversion rate for pages with cross-sells vs. pages without, you have a benchmark you can work on improving.

“You’ve read this far in this article. We think you’ll also love…” last year’s Get Elastic post Cross-Selling Tips for Online Retailers for a list of Dos and Don’ts, along with retailer examples.

Elastic Path also did a webinar on effective merchandising with Mike Svatek, formerly of Baynote. Mike offered this advice:

When do cross-sells work?

Cross-sells work well for considered purchases (high involvement rather than impulse - typically higher cost) provided they are lower cost accessories related to the product. They also work for smaller purchases with small accessories like Barbie and an outfit. You want to keep the cross-sells at half the price or less. When they are more than 1/2 the price of the item considered, the attach rate is low.

Products with natural bundling are also good, like cameras with lens, cleaner, memory cards and warranty.

When do cross-sells fail?

Don’t try to push higher priced items together with lower priced. People who buy a camera may buy a camera lens at the same time, but it’s unlikely someone adds a lens to cart and then all of a sudden wants to buy a camera. Same with sports tires - you wouldn’t try to upsell a Porsche.

Be careful that you don’t just look at correlation in your analytics data - but consider the primary and secondary intent. You may want to manually add constraints to your rules engine so you don’t goof your directional selling.

When do up-sells work?

Upselling (suggesting a similar item instead of the item being viewed) must have a small difference in dollar value or a small nominal percentage difference - 10-20% max. You need to show some incremental value for the increase in price.

When do up-sells fail?

When important attributes are different (red vs. blue dress) or when you show items that don’t have the features the customer is looking for. You can also fail by showing different brands. If a customer owns a Nikon he needs Nikon accessories, not Pentax or Canon.

You also need to consider any contractual agreements you have with suppliers and brands. For instance, you may not be allowed to show certain brands next to each other.

Effective merchandising often requires tweaking your tool with custom rules, rather than a “set it and forget it approach.” Make sure you fully understand your tool’s ability to set constraints, blacklist products and create custom associations. Also understand how to review any available analytics data your solution provider collects.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Merchandising Usability: Better Ways to Display Product Recommendations
• Cross-Sells and Upsells: What is the Diff?
• Reducing Anxiety on Cart Review Page: Show SKU Thumbnails
• Amazon Alerts Shoppers of Price Changes in Cart
• Webinar Recap: Effective Merchandising: What Sells?

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The annual Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition is happening in Boston this week, and while Elastic Path is not there this year, we have a ton of video evidence of our visit last year as Jason Billingsley made his rounds of the trade show floor interviewing a wide range of ecommerce vendors.

One must-see video if you’re a manufacturer is Jason’s interview with Shopatron’s CEO Ed Stevens:

Can’t see video?

One of the biggest roadblocks for manufacturers when selling online is channel conflict. Many manufacturers have their hands tied when selling direct to consumers because their retail partners may retaliate (or retailiate?) To handle channel conflict issues, manufacturers’ website either sell no product, a limited product line or just accessories to keep retail partners happy. With 50-60% of customers looking for branded product beginning their search at the manufacturer’s website - that’s a lot of missed opportunity for both the manufacturer and retail partner. It also hurts the customer who has to find the product elsewhere.

What Stevens’ company Shopatron does is allow manufacturers to offer a full product line for sale on their websites, with retailers as fulfillment partners. Customers can even choose to pick up the product at the local retailer, which is an opportunity for the retail partner to sell even more product to that consumer — 1 in 4 customers will end up buying more stuff when they come by to pick up their order. Stevens reports 55% of Shopatron customers choose the in-store pickup option.

In the future, it will be interesting to see if services like Shopatron can provide in-store pickup options through interactive TV advertising widgets (as discussed in our Multichannel 2.0 webinar). It’s common for manufacturers to advertise on TV, but so far there hasn’t been an instant gratification service for the customer or a way for the manufacturer to solicit a direct response. Perhaps Shopatron and Alvenda should chat.

See More IRCE 2008 Interviews…

We conducted 16 interviews with various ecommerce vendors at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.

1. How to choose ecommerce software and technology - Bernardine Wu, CEO, FitForCommerce
2. How retailers can sell more online with social commerce - Jay Shaffer, VP Worldwide Sales & Marketing, Powerreviews
3. Hackersafe is now McAfee Secure - Rich Murphy, McAfee
4. The benefits of RIA’s for ecommerce stores - Graeme Grant, COO, Allurent
5. Why online retailers should be blogging - Darren Tomey, VP Sales, Compendium
6. How do ratings and reviews help online retailers? - Sam Decker, Chief Marketing Officer, Bazaarvoice
7. When bad people ruin good online marketing - Ryan Douglas, PlumberSurplus.com
8. Direct international shoppers to local sites automatically - Justin Skogen, Director, Enterprise Sales, DigitalElement
9. The state of affiliate marketing in online retail - Larry Joseloff, VP Content, Shop.org
10. Multi-store retailing - Roy Rubin, CEO, Varien
11. How online stores use images to improve customer experience - Stephen Kristy, CEO, LiquidPixels
12. Comparison Shopping Engine Tips for Online Retailers - Michael Lambert, CEO, MerchantAdvantage
13. Link building strategies for Internet retail SEO - Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
14. Direct to consumer manufacturers can reduce channel conflict - Ed Stevens, CEO, Shopatron
15. New eCommerce service lets you shop online with a friend - John Jackson, CEO, DecisionStep
16. Product recommendation engines improve customer experience - Scott Doan, VP Sales, Strands

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You may also like these similar posts:

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• Interactive TV Shopping: Not As New As You Think!
• Webinar Replay Up + Get Elastic Update
• 8 Ecommerce Loyalty Program Ideas

Online retailers Amazon, eBay and Best Buy have opened up their own APIs. Like Facebook, they can leverage a force of free developer talent to create innovative, fun and useful applications and bring their product catalogs to more places around the web — not just their own .com sites or shopping engines. This could be the next ecommerce trend. Gartner predicts that by 2012, 25% or more of top retailers will allow software developer partners to access their APIs (application development interfaces) to connect to product catalogs and payment systems for affiliates.

eBay and Amazon have offered their APIs for a while, and I’ve spotted some interesting creations like the eBay Auction Misspeller. The idea is to help bargain hunter find poorly optimized listings (that get little or no bids) and find eBay deals. Others have built their own Amazon Wishlist applications for Facebook by mashing up Amazon and Facebook APIs:

More recently, Best Buy launched its Remix API asking “Can you build a better best buy?” It incentivizes its developer community with contests at RemixChallenge.com with prizes like flat panel TV screens and cash.

The challenges are product and customer experience focused, like the Flat Panel TV Challenge:

Here is your opportunity to help customers find the right TV for them. Create a complete customer solution around large, flat panel television systems. The purchase of a large TV is particularly difficult on-line, Best Buy wants to help their customers navigate all of the different choices they are presented with, in order to make the correct decision for their circumstances.

There are also idea generation contests: “How do we make Best Buy the best ink destination? What would attract more people to our experience? Ease of use? Better assistance tools or applications? You tell us.” Developers can interact with Keith Burtis, the Best Buy Remix community manager through Twitter.

Check out some of the featured creations at the Remix Sample Gallery. One of my favorites is the GPS Discovery Tool, an interactive product finder a bit like what Telus Mobility does with its handsets.

Another developer is using the API to feed Twitter accounts for video game preorders, with a separate account for Wii, XBox, PS3 etc.

Even if developers don’t win Best Buy’s coveted prizes, they can still use the API to enhance their own affiliate sites and make money through referrals. The more Web sites out there displaying Best Buy products, the more sales Best Buy makes. This is a win-win situation.

It will be interesting to see what kind of applications the community comes up with to solve Best Buy’s challenges, and to see which retailers follow suit.

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• Interactive TV Shopping: Not As New As You Think!

One of the events that happened while I was away was SMX Advanced in Seattle (Search Marketing Expo). Fortunately there’s always a ton of liveblogging coverage, as often breaking news from search engines get announced at these events, like support for the canonical URL tag. Because search engines are constantly working on improving their own tools and minimizing search engine spam, the “rules” and best practices for SEO (search engine optimization) also change. It’s important for SEO professionals, marketers and webmasters must stay on top of these changes as not to give outdated advice, and for bloggers to update old posts that may contain outdated advice.

While catching up I learned 2 important things about how Google follows links on a website:

1. How Google Handles the Nofollow Attribute

In 2007, the SEO world was a-buzz with a new trick - PageRank sculpting. The idea was you could control the flow of PageRank between pages of your site by plugging up “leaks” to pages like Contact and Privacy, so more PageRank would be applied to your product and category pages. (If you’re not familiar with the PageRank concept, please refer to this video explanation).

I recommended Stephan Spencer’s concept of PageRank sculpting for retailers in late 2007 as a “Killer SEO Trick Only 1% of Online Retailers Use” and referenced the practice in 9 Privacy Policy Usability Tips, Tips for SEO Friendly Affiliate Programs and Dodging Duplicate Content Filters While Assisting Affiliates.

What we understand now is that Google no longer treats the nofollow attribute the same, and the “trick” doesn’t have the same benefit as it had before. The nofollow attribute will still prevent PageRank from passing to nofollowed links, but there is no boost to links without the attribute - the juice just “evaporates.” If you’ve used the technique before, there’s no harm, there’s just no benefit anymore. The disappointing thing is that if you have a large number of links on one page (including links in comments on blog posts), they still dilute the link value of more important links on the page.

This is a perfect example why any internal SEO expert or SEO consultant you may be working with reads blogs, attends conferences (or at least keeps up with the event coverage) and stays on top of the industry, otherwise you may get advice that is either a waste of time or at worst, get you banned from search engines. It’s also important for bloggers like me to update old posts to reflect new information.

2. How Google Handles Javascript and Flash

Equally if not more important, your web developers should understand how Google and other search engines handle Flash, Flex, AJAX and Javascript. Google annnounced advances in searchability of Javascript and Flash at its own Google I/O event, and Vanessa Fox’s explanation is a must read for all of your Web developers. Whether you’re working with internal or outsourced devs, send them this article today.

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• Canonical URL Tag Is Worth A Shot
• Killer SEO Trick only 1% of Online Retailers Use
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• Ecommerce SEO Hack: Free Tool to Hone Your SEO Strategy
• Zappos Secret SEO Sauce For Branded Pages

If you point your mobile phone’s camera at it you’ll be directed to GetElastic.com on the mobile web, provided you have a reader on your phone capable of decoding the QR (quick response) code.

QR codes are 2D images that contain information, most often links and text. If you keep your eyes open, you’ll see QR codes on product packaging, print advertising, bus shelters — I even saw one on a picnic napkin last weekend.

Ralph Lauren is one example of a multichannel retailer taking advantage of QR codes in offline advertising:

Of course, QR codes are more common in Asia than North America — you can even find magazines containing nothing but QR codes.

They’re also becoming fashionable:

You can even share your Twitter status with anyone following you around in the offline world:

Can’t see video?

QR codes are also leaking into pop culture. The Pet Shop Boys’ video for the song “Integral” has a series of codes that appear in a flash throughout the video. On the band’s site, you can find the actual codes which each link to a web page about civil liberty violations (the song is a rant against the Big Brotherishness of ID cards). Unfortunately embedding on Youtube has been disabled by request, but you can view the video here. It’s actually an amazing artistic work.

Creating a QR Code

Creating a QR code is easy. You can generate QR codes with an online generator (just Google “qr code generator”) or even bathroom tiles:

Can’t see video?

QR Code Roadblocks

Though “big in Japan,” the roadblocks to QR code popularity in North America are that many phones don’t have QR code readers, and many can’t properly download the proper software. Some manufacturers are pre-loading the reader software, but even so, it can be hard to capture the code properly considering you have to have a steady hand, get the right angle and so on.

QR Codes 2.0

If you’re thinkin’ QR codes are tough to look at, and bland and boring in plain black and white, never fear. Designer barcodes like Louis Vuitton’s and the colorful Microsoft Tag:

With the ability to store more information than their B&W QR cousins, MMCC (mobile multi-color composite) codes can contain text, video clips, ringtones and even games encoded entirely in the image — no need to access the Internet to decode the content right on your mobile phone.

In a multichannel 2.0 context, these small pictures can open up a world of product information and even transactional ability right on the customer’s phone, like a kiosk in your pocket.

So if you’ve ever wondered what that funny looking square is on billboards, in public washrooms, on paper napkins or t-shirts — now you know. I bet you’ll see them everywhere now.

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As Mark Brownlow explains in his state-of-play update on video in retail email, early use of video in email was really linking an image of a video to a video hosted on the Web.

Some retailers like Overstock, REI and Sears got clever and converted video to animated gifs. (Hat tip to Chad White of the RetailEmailBlog for these examples). REI uses Liveclicker, but Anna Yeaman has a DIY tutorial on how to convert video to animated gif.

What’s so tough about embedding actual video in email?

Deliverability is the issue. Large video attachments are often a red flag for spam filters, and ISPs (Internet service providers) block “complex data” including Javascript for security reasons.

ISPs have banned Javascript Sending video in an e-mail has been a challenge for deliverability, since large video attachments often alert spam filters. The way that Goodmail gets around this issue is that their e-mail class, called CertifiedEmail, is a paid service that does not go through typical e-mail filters.

How to beat the filters

Last month, email certification company Goodmail launched its video certification project, CertifiedEmail. CertifiedEmail includes a trust stamp which is like a VIP pass through spam filters. Goodmail customers pay a fee to send email with CertifiedEmail, and embedded video will play at Goodmail’s partner ISPs which for now includes AOL, with more ISPs to follow.

The CertifiedEmail service locks down the bit of code that calls the video server, allowing actual video code to live in the email rather than just a placeholder. Target is one of the first companies to sign on with the service.

Google recently announced it would support Youtube links in email for Gmail accounts. It’s not an embed, rather Gmail recognizes Youtube code and displays the video in the email — provided that the Gmail user has enabled the feature through Google Labs. It’s unlikely the average Gmail user is going to turn this on — so don’t get too excited. But it’s possible this will become default in the future.

For now, the animated gif trick seems the most reliable method. CertifiedEmail is promising but needs a few more ISPs on board.

Stay on top of retail email trends

3 great retail email blogs are RetailEmailBlog, StyleCampaign and Email-Marketing-Reports. 2 hot retail video blogs are VCC and Videoretail. I follow these folks to stay in the loop. And do read the entirety of Mark Brownlow’s post Video Email: Current Practices.

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• Keeping Up With the Google

Once again, there are a ton of cool prizes up for grabs, and I recommend any search marketing blogger to take the time to enter. You really don’t even need a blog to enter, just write a relevant article. I’ll be judging this year. You can send me flowers, chocolate covered grasshoppers and iPhone accessories as long as you don’t expect that to influence my vote!

Just a few tips for your article, this is what the judges liked about my article last year:

* Enticing title.
* Engaging questions at the beginning of the post.
* Short, easily digestible, paragraphs with easy-to-read bullet points.
* Lots of graphics to break-up the text and actually demonstrate the tips.
* Lots of useful links.

Go on and enter the contest here.

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• Bloggers Digest - 7/11/08

One way to run a tighter ship is to work with several carriers, and select the lowest priced carrier based on real-time, per parcel lookup to take advantage of fluctuating rates and competition. Rate shopping software like Anyrate or Logicor coupled with warehouse management systems can determine prices based on parcel dimension, weight, destination and delivery date.

Another approach is to nurture a relationship with one carrier which may cost more on paper but has its advantages. Good carrier relations help you negotiate better rates and even receive better service, which helps you satisfy your customers better. Price isn’t the bottom line when it comes to shipping if speed, reliability and customer service are compromised. You could end up paying far more in returned items that were damaged in transit, and lose long time customers to one bad experience.

What’s your experience? Has rate shopping saved you thousands? Has fidelity paid off?

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• 61% online shoppers prefer to shop with a retailer that offers free shipping than one that doesn’t. — Forrester Research (2007)
• 43% of shoppers abandon their shopping carts because of unexpectedly high shipping charges. — PayPal, comScore (2008)
• 60% claim free shipping is a reason they are more likely to shop online. — Harris Interactive (2008)
• 90% believe free shipping offers would entice them to spend more online. — The Conference Board (2008)

David Bell, marketing professor at the Wharton School even observed that “For whatever reason, a free shipping offer that saves a customer $6.99 is more appealing to many than a discount that cuts the purchase price by $10.”

That’s not rational, is it?

I have a couple theories why free shipping is so important to customers.

“I Win” Theory

It could be the desire to win is what draws shoppers like those Professor Bell observed to the online channel. The ability to compare prices, find the lowest prices, skip parking lots and lineups — there’s a payoff vs. shopping in a store. The shipping charge negates that advantage - it effectively raises the total price paid and is like a “convenience tax.” A dollar discount is easy enough to find in-store, so finding one online doesn’t justify the shipping cost.

The customer thinks “The product is already marked up, it’s easy for the retailer to give a little on price. But footing the shipping bill costs the retailer something, so I win.”

Perceived Value Theory

Last year I wrote a post Are Dollar Discounts the Worst Incentives? which covered something we discussed at the Marketing Experiments Landing Page Optimization Workshop in Santa Monica. Dr. Flint McGlaughlin suggests dollar discounts devalue product, and the perceived value of the incentive can never exceed $X (where X is the amount of the discount). Whereas the value of free shipping could be much higher depending on what the customer imagines shipping costs would be.

If the preference for free shipping is stronger than other incentives for your customers, you may consider switching your email and affiliate promotions accordingly (hint, run a split test to find out).

If you’re not able to offer free shipping, one tactic to be careful with is showing a bundled price that includes shipping. A 1998 study by Morwitz, Greenleaf and Johnson tested “$82.90 including shipping and handling” against “$69.95 plus $12.95 shipping and handling”. They found consumers were less likely to recall the full total cost and were more likely to remember the product’s cost. Unbundled pricing had more demand.

On the flip-side, a 2005 study by Schindler, Morrin and Bechwati discovered customers who comparison shop had a higher degree of “shipping charge skepticism” and actually preferred the bundled price.

Moral of the story? Test.

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Part 1: Home Pages and Navigation
Part 2: Search and Category Pages
Part 3: Product Pages and Cart Summary
Part 4: Forms and Checkout

This series is based on a review of 10 mobile ecommerce sites: Best Buy, Target, Sephora, Moosejaw (old and new design), Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Sears2Go, Ralph Lauren and Tickets.com. (Links point to mobile versions of each site)

Forms and Checkout Process

As I mentioned in Part 3: Product Pages and Cart Summary, Best Buy, Sephora, Target and Moosejaw’s new site don’t support mobile checkout. Sites mentioned in this post are Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Sears2Go, Moosejaw’s old site and Ralph Lauren.

I typically recommend ecommerce sites to include the following in their checkout processes to maximize conversion:

• Allow guest checkout option
• Provide security assurances and trust seals
• Link to privacy policy
• Ask for an email address in the first step of checkout
• Don’t ask for more information than necessary in form fields
• Mark required fields with an asterisk (*)
• Allow customer to copy billing and shipping addresses (use tickbox for shipping address “same as billing address”)
• Provide a telephone number for assistance at each step of checkout
• Store contents of shopping carts in cookies whenever possible, if customer abandons cart the items will still be there in a new session
• Use as few steps as possible and show a progress indicator
• Use personalization/tagging to identify customers with a promo code, and hide the coupon code field from others

When “checking out” mobile checkout processes, I noticed that none of them showed the progress indicator, linked to a privacy policy or had a “click to call customer service” link (perhaps because you can’t talk on your handset and input information at the same time like you can on a computer). I was unable to tests personalization/tagging capabilities.

At least one mobile site followed each of the rest of the best practices:

Guest Checkout Option

Nobody wants to be forced to register before checkout on the Web, how much more on a mobile device!

Barnes and Noble states explicitly that registration is not required, and hints that registration has a benefit — faster checkout next time:

Sears2Go also explains the benefit of registration and allows guest checkout, but puts the guest checkout option first and includes a bold button with the label Guest Checkout. Sears understands customers don’t necessarily read text, and Guest Checkout is self-explanatory.

Showing guest checkout first can improve conversion, as the customer is less likely to assume he/she needs an account or will be forced to create one to proceed. This approach assumes the customer wants the fastest checkout possible, which customers appreciate.

Ralph Lauren combines the sign in page with the first step of checkout (billing and shipping information). This approach can reduce the total number of steps.

Amazon’s simple log in is consistent with its Web checkout. It’s actually a required registration — but it appears so easy it doesn’t feel like a forced reg, your account creates itself as you go through the checkout process.

The downside to customer log in is it relies on email and password combinations which returning shoppers often forget (you have to remember at least your email address to request a password hint). Many simply create a new account - making it harder to reconcile customer information (one loyal customers looks like 5 flaky ones). This is an issue for both online and mobile channels.

Security Assurances

Despite the public’s fear of mobile payment security (as discussed in our Multichannel 2.0 webinar), none of these mobile sites had security assurances except for Amazon’s link “Why using a credit card is safe”

Ask For Email in First Step

The earlier in the checkout process you ask for an email address, the easier it is to follow up with a customer if the cart is abandoned with a triggered recovery email. Though the idea of chasing after a customer for changing his or her mind is controversial, many retailers have managed to save sales this way.

Of course, Amazon’s first step is the email address. The rest ask for an email address after 8-10 required fields on the Billing/Shipping page. Because some folks are paranoid about giving away any contact information, B&N includes “Your email address is required so that we can contact you about your order” and Sears2Go uses “Tell us where to send your confirmation email.” It might help to include a one-liner about your email privacy policy (i.e. you won’t share the address or send promotional emails.) Unfortunately Ralph Lauren has no assurances, and even pre-checks the email list permission box.

Perceived Difficulty of Forms

The longer the form, the more tedious it appears and the less the customer wants to bother with it. But most customers recognize asterisks (*) separate the required fields from the optional, so it’s key to include them.

It’s not a good idea to provide unconventional instructions like *Bold fields are required (which fields are bold below?). Never assume your customer is going to notice.

Allow Quick Copy of Billing Address to Shipping

This is standard for new customers, while returning customers and account holders should be able to select from existing shipping addresses and billing methods, like Amazon:

The only thing that’s confusing on a mobile screen is which button corresponds to which address when you have more than 1 or 2 to choose from. A little triangle marker pointing to the address on each button would help. An incorrect shipping address is a major problem.

A side note: Moosejaw’s old site (the new site has no checkout) had a time-saving feature where you enter your phone number in the first step, and based on your area code your city, state and country are pre-filled in the Billing Address step.

Estimated Arrival Times

I’ve mentioned before it’s a good idea to show actual dates of estimated arrival rather than “X business days.” It requires less thinking for the customer. Of the 4 sites, only Sears2Go provided dates rather than days:

Edit Cart in Process

Many retailers like Amazon remove navigation when a customer enters the checkout process in hopes to keep the customer in the funnel, but this can be a problem if the customer wants to make a last minute edit or add more products to the cart. Barnes and Noble allows cart editing, and Sears2Go allows an escape back Home or to the Shopping Cart summary. Even Amazon has a “Shopping Cart” link in it’s mobile checkout.

Alternative Payments / Pay by Phone

I didn’t notice any alternative payment options like PayPal mobile, but Barnes and Noble interestingly provided a Pay By Phone option. This isn’t a bill-to-phone-bill option (as discussed in the Multichannel 2.0 webinar), rather you can “Call 1-800-843-2665 (1-800-THE-BOOK)” to complete your order. You will be given a confirmation number to cite when you call after you have completed your order (on your phone and by email).

Perhaps some customers perceive this as more secure than entering a credit card over an unsecured mobile network, although placing an order by telephone carries its own security risks. It might also be a headache for Barnes and Noble if customers complete orders and don’t follow through with the phone call authorization.

Final Thoughts

With only a handful of reference sites, this series is not intended to be a best practices guide, rather a collection of recommendations based on observations. Please keep in mind I was viewing these sites with the iPhone and experiences on other devices may vary.

Most usability guidelines for the WWW carry over to Mobile Web, while common usability problems are exacerbated by mobile devices’ smaller screens and keyboards (or lack thereof), flakiness of mobile Internet connections and lack of standards between mobile designs, browsers and operating systems.

My recommendation is to have a mobile friendly site if the mobile channel is part of your retail strategy (whether for transactions or just customer service). When designing for the mobile Web, make sure you check out competitors’ sites in your industry, test your site on many different devices and involve real users in your testing.

I would love to hear your thoughts on your experience on mobile commerce sites, on this blog series or about your own efforts with mobile commerce in the comments.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Mobile Commerce Usability: Search and Category Pages
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Product Pages and Cart Summary
• Checkout Inspiration From Top Converting Sites
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Home Pages and Navigation
• Webinar Recap: Holiday Wish List for Mobile Commerce

Part 1: Home Pages and Navigation
Part 2: Search and Category Pages
Part 3: Product Pages and Cart Summary
Part 4: Forms and Checkout

This series is based on a review of 10 mobile ecommerce sites: Best Buy, Target, Sephora, Moosejaw (old and new design), Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Sears2Go, Ralph Lauren and Tickets.com. (Links point to mobile versions of each site)

Product Pages

Though you can access e-stores on any smartphone, product pages on mobile optimized sites are much more usable, as you can see below:

Product Descriptions

While stripping down images and unnecessary navigation on home pages is a good idea on mobile sites, keep in mind the importance of content in the online buying experience:

• 77% are “very to somewhat” influenced by the quality of content (descriptions, copy, images and tools) when deciding to purchase from an online retailer
• 79% “rarely or never” purchase a product without complete product information
• 76% believe content is insufficient to complete research or purchase online “always,” “most often” or “some of the time”
• When faced with incomplete information, 72% go to a competitor or research further

Source: e-tailing group, 2007

The best online stores provide rich product descriptions, multiple image views, image zoom, review content and even product comparison tools. While it may not be optimal or even possible to include everything from the online store into the mobile site, care should be taken that product information presents the key benefits of the product/brand/make/model.

Above is a product page for an HDTV on Best Buy’s ecommerce store. The same product page on its mobile site:

The Best Buy example is concise, but if the mobile site is to be used for product research, is this enough information to “sell” the product? Will customers understand the jargon of HDMI inputs, aspect ratio and piano key black cabinet?

Customers also want as seamless an experience as possible. If you won their loyalty through a usable and content-rich website, it’s important to meet expectations on mobile devices also.

Be careful that product descriptions don’t display as run-on paragraphs. Moosejaw ditched its squished descriptions (left) in its redesign (right):

The old site suffered from several problems, HYPN OLV probably describes the color - but it’s not obvious what it means. The click-to-call and add to cart buttons were way too close together, too easy to tap the wrong one on a touch-screen. And the Zoom Prod. Image call-to-action at the end of the paragraph doesn’t look like a link. The new site looks and feels more like the regular Moosejaw site, and its descriptions include the quirky Moosejaw personality. The click-to-call link and and multiple images are easier to tap for touch-screen users.

Target takes advantage of bullet points to present an easy to scan snapshot of product specs:

You can even send product details to yourself via text message.

Sears2Go allows you to read an intro to the description and expand for more detail if you wish. This removes the burden for folks that hate to scroll while presenting enough information to satisfy researchers:

Sephora and Sears link to ratings and reviews right at the top of the product page:

Be careful with tables, they often force the user to scroll horizontally and sometimes both horizontally and vertically to view them, like Ralph Lauren on the iPhone:

Moosejaw allows customers to expand and contract reviews, which minimizes scrolling and page load time:

Images

Considering 77% are “very to somewhat” influenced by the quality of content including images and tools, quality imagery should not be skimped on. Target, Ralph Lauren and Sears show large images by default, and Moosejaw offers alternate image views. Obviously, you can expect better conversion with better images.

Calls to Action

Avoid stacking calls to action like “Add to Cart,” “Add to Wishlist” and “Continue Shopping” for touch-screen users. Leave some space between buttons, or place them side by side instead:

Cart Summary

Best Buy, Sephora, Target and Moosejaw don’t support mobile checkout. Of the sites that did, here are some highlights:

Ralph Lauren and Sears both allow cart editing, and Barnes and Noble allows you to move items to a wishlist. Surprisingly, Amazon doesn’t have a cart summary page - it jumps right to a sign-in screen.

Ralph Lauren confirms the item is in stock and highlights that free shipping is honored for mobile purchases. Sears offers shipping or in-store pickup options, but disables store pickup when it’s not available for a product. The best feature is Sears’ security icon on its cart button - as I mentioned in last week’s Multichannel 2.0 webinar, fear of security is a major roadblock to actually completing mobile purchases.

Tickets.com is interesting, its business is unique and one aspect of ticket purchasing is a time limit before the tickets are returned to stock if you don’t complete the purchase. You also rarely see a captcha in an ecommerce checkout, but the ticketing industry is more vulnerable to shady activity than other retailers. Unfortunately this captcha is difficult to decipher.

Next post we’ll cover highlights from the checkout process and forms on mobile commerce sites.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Mobile Commerce Usability: Search and Category Pages
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Forms and Checkout
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Home Pages and Navigation
• QRious About QR Codes?
• How Top Retailers Show Product Images

Part 1: Home Pages and Navigation
Part 2: Search and Category Pages
Part 3: Product Pages and Cart Summary
Part 4: Forms and Checkout

This series is based on a review of 10 mobile ecommerce sites: Best Buy, Target, Sephora, Moosejaw (old and new design), Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Sears2Go, Ralph Lauren and Tickets.com. (Links point to mobile versions of each site)

Search

Error Handling

As I mentioned in Part 1: Home Pages and Navigation, some sites like Best Buy and Barnes and Noble offer keyword search without a category browse option. If you take this approach, make sure your site search handles typos and synonyms well - it’s even easier to misspell words with tiny keyboards and touch screens than regular computers. Search autocomplete, like the iTunes Store is helpful.

Placement

Many sites show search boxes on every page, like a regular ecommerce Web site.

Search Result and Category Pages

Sort Options

Best Buy numbers its results for easy selection with a keypad, and chooses not to show thumbnail images (faster loading screen). A potential problem is its default results - if there are 200 results and they’re sorted by price, the lower priced accessories may be shown for the first few pages because they’re a keyword match and sorted by price - for example, HDTV cables mixed with HDTVs.

Sears offers more options. You can filter search results further by category, or use sort-by price, ratings, keyword relevance and popularity. This is really helpful:

Because some devices don’t have “Back” buttons, providing a link back to search results is recommended. Unfortunately Sears does not support this.

Minimizing Clicks

Include stock availability (both in-store and online) and price in your category listings, this saves the user clicks and page loads and improve the shopping experience. If you offer in-store pickup, indicate which products are eligible. Sears even includes when products are available from sister-stores:

Amazon has a nice-to-have feature where you can add an item to cart or wishlist right from the category or search result page (on the iPhone, touch the arrow to expand the listing and display the buttons). This saves page loads for “hunters” who know exactly what they want and don’t need to see a description.

What’s Clickable?

Make sure image thumbnails are “clickable.” Moosejaw’s old design was confusing, the only thing clickable was the item title:

Whether or not to show thumbnail images and star ratings in search results is up to you — they decrease page load speed but help customer make a selection from search or category. Best Buy chooses not to show thumbnails, which makes sense for many of its large products which are hard to see in thumbnails anyway. If you don’t show thumbnails, make sure there is enough space between results for touch screen users’ fingers.

Liked this post? Stay tuned for the next installment — Product Pages and Cart Summary. If you haven’t already, consider subscribing to Get Elastic.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Mobile Commerce Usability: Product Pages and Cart Summary
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Home Pages and Navigation
• Merchandising Usability: Better Ways to Display Product Recommendations
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Forms and Checkout
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Consider the WWW’s usability hiccups of the late 90’s — some which are still problematic today:

1. Scrolling, horizontal scrolling
2. Small fonts, unfriendly Web fonts
3. Broken images, incompatible plugins
4. Links that don’t appear clickable
5. Slow loading pages (remember “World Wide Wait?”)
6. Complicated navigation, poor labeling
7. Search tools that can’t handle synonyms and misspellings
8. “Banner blindness” - if something looks too much like an ad, it’s ignored
9. Complicated form fields
10. Required registration before checkout
11. Unclear information, site instructions

The list goes on.

Add to these plagues the problems of tiny screens, slow and flaky network connections, lack of support for rich media, cost for data and short battery lives of mobile devices — and the headaches of the Web become migraines on mobile.

Yet the industry’s bracing for an explosion of mobile commerce - up to $2 Billion by 2010? Are you kidding me?

True, a large chunk of this activity could be for digital downloads like ringtones and wallpapers, but there’s a lot of potential for mobile shopping of retail sites if only the experience was tailored to the tiny screen.

There are a handful of retailers who’ve taken the lead and developed mobile sites. Some are good, some are great, all are better than a non-optimized version. Here are my notes and mobile usability recommendations based on a review of Best Buy, Target, Sephora, Moosejaw, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Sears2Go, Ralph Lauren and Tickets.com. (Links point to mobile versions of each site)

This is the first of a 4 part series on mobile commerce design and usability:

Part 1: Home Pages and Navigation
Part 2: Search and Category Pages
Part 3: Product Pages and Cart Summary
Part 4: Forms and Checkout

Note: After my research, Moosejaw re-launched it’s mobile site on a new platform with a new smokin’ design. I’ve included shots from both the old site and new in this series.

Consider Search Engines

Choosing a URL

Because input is harder on mobile devices than on the web (especially with the deadly combination of long fingernails and iPhone - I speak from experience), long URLs are a nightmare to type. Though there’s no rule for what URL your mobile site will live on, m.site.com is easiest for users to access (easy to remember, least number of characters to key in). Sears is the only site I’ve seen so far that has it’s own branded .com site - Sears2Go.com - which is fine as long as you evangelize the domain name well.

If possible, try to register m.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.mobi and mobile.yourdomain.com and redirect them all to one version. This will help customers find you when they guess your mobile URL.

Meta Descriptions

Here’s a mashup of a few meta descriptions and how they appear in search results. It’s a good idea to include an explanation of the mobile site’s features and functionality in the snippet:

For more information on search engines and mobile websites, check out Should You Have a Mobile Version of Your Ecommerce Website?

Home Page Design

Layout

Regular sites are often graphic heavy with multiple merchandising zones, Flash banners, AJAX features, multiple styled navigation menus and many calls to action. Regular sites require zooming in on a smartphone, which makes viewing them like looking at a map through a peephole. They may also take a long time to load.

Check out Sephora and Target’s regular home pages viewed on the iPhone:

Now see the difference between Tickets.com and Barnes and Noble’s Web home pages and their optimized mobile home pages:

To improve usability on a small screen, you’ll notice most mobile home pages are stripped of graphics and may or may not include regular navigation menus. Best Buy avoids navigation completely, offering just a search box, store locator and customer service number:

Barnes and Noble’s mobile home page also features search and store locators without category navigation, but offers links to customer service items and Top 10 lists. The rationale is mobile surfers are “hunters” rather than “browsers”, and hunters prefer a search box. But is this a fair assumption - especially on a device where input is more difficult, and for products that may have very long titles and author names?

Another approach is to use “stacked” navigation menus (rather than horizontal) like Moosejaw’s old site and Sephora:

Rarely you’ll find merchandising on a mobile home page. Amazon and Moosejaw’s new site do so, but the images are small and layout still simple:

Moosejaw’s original home page was pretty bland and utilitarian — not a match to Moosejaw’s wild and crazy website. The new mobile design incorporates more personality, featuring more entertaining content than just a product catalog, like “In Case You’re Bored” - which Moosejaw’s high school and college age customer probably is.

There’s no hard-and-fast rule on what direction to take with your home page (just search and essential customer service links, just menus or merchandising with images etc. But make sure your home page has clear links to essential information and tools that support research, product location and customer service features you deem important to you mobile strategy.

Font / Style Considerations

Many mobile devices have poor color contrast and can be hard to see in the glare of daylight or in dark venues, cars and other areas with poor lighting. Be very careful when designing with low contrast colors, and avoid light text on dark backgrounds. Especially white underlined text.

LINKS AND OTHER TEXT WITH ALL CAPS IS HARD TO READ. EVEN WORSE WHEN IT’S IN SERIF FONT.

Mobile browsers handle style sheets in different ways. They may or may not cache external style sheets or support the style element and some don’t support style sheets at all. If you have mobile specific style sheets, there’s no guarantee a given device will pull the right one. It’s best to give every non-text element a text equivalent like you would when designing emails for image-off clients.

Navigation

Menus

The best way to show menus on mobile phones is with a vertical stack, rather than horizontal menu bars. Only use the top-level categories on the home page. You’ll have to decide whether to show expanded categories and sub-categories in the second level of navigation (after the user has selected a top-level category) or use a linear drill-down, examples:

Sears2Go shows top level categories on the home page (bonus points for promoting its mobile application in the menu):

And chooses to use expanded categories after the first category selection:

Others like Sephora and Moosejaw’s old version opt to drill-down level by level:

Both methods have their advantage and disadvantage. An expanded menu takes longer to load and requires more scrolling, while drill downs require more page loads with every selection. If you’re designing for phones that use numeric keypad input to select, drill-downs are easier to manage - you’ll need less corresponding numbers.

No matter what you choose, make sure links are large (unlike Moosejaw’s old site or Target, below) for touch screen users. When links or buttons are too small or too close together it’s easy to touch the wrong one. Numbered menus are helpful for phones that navigate through a numeric keypad.

It’s helpful to have “Up” or “Top” links at the end of menus to quickly return to the top of the page, especially for expanded menus with many items.

Image Navigation

I don’t recommend image navigation for categories. It can be confusing because images don’t necessarily look like links unless they’re product thumbnails or buttons. Graphics add to page load time, and their labels can be hard to read - as with Ralph Lauren’s “Shop” label (can you find it?). And tiny hero shots add no value, only eye strain.

Labeling

Clarity is so important when naming calls to action, categories and links. Because each page may load slow or cost money, you want to minimize ambiguity about where a link leads. Ralph Lauren’s “Entertainment” (above) is an example of an unclear label.

Breadcrumbs

Remember the old advice “make links look like links?” Breadcrumbs are links, and they should look like breadcrumbs. Common mistakes I found were hiding the breadcrumbs in the header, too close to the logo, and using ALL CAPS with no underline. Sephora’s breadcrumbs are easy to overlook, and it’s confusing whether “Mobile Reviews” is a tagline or a link (it’s not a link).

Moosejaw’s old breadcrumbs were camouflaged in the brown bar, in all caps, not underlined. Easy to overlook. Especially when they are centered (see Moosejaw screenshot above).

Tickets.com does a nice job with breadcrumbs at the top, and large, clear links at the bottom, “Back to Reggae,” “Back to Concerts” and “Home.”

Because not all devices have a back button, mobile sites don’t have room for sidebar navigation on product pages. Breadcrumbs are more important on mobile sites than regular ecommerce sites, especially when your categories and sub-categories/filters drill-down 2 or 3 levels. Remember to make breadcrumbs look like breadcrumbs (underline and use > to separate) and consider placing them at the top and bottom of each page.

Access Keys

For handsets without a pointing device, providing a keyboard short cut (access key) for links that are repeated across pages makes it easier to navigate quickly.

Liked this post? Stay tuned for the next installment — Search and Category Pages. If you haven’t already, consider subscribing to Get Elastic.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Mobile Commerce Usability: Search and Category Pages
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Product Pages and Cart Summary
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Forms and Checkout
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What is Multichannel 2.0?

Traditional, Multichannel 1.0 includes retail, mail order, call center and online store. Emerging technologies like mobile phones, Internet protocol TV and set-boxes, store kiosks and digital signage and consumer electronics like iPod touch, gaming consoles and portable book readers like Amazon kindle — the next generation of shopping channels is what we at Elastic Path refer to as Multichannel 2.0 — anything that has the potential potential to access your information assets and facilitate transactions through them.

Mobile

Mobile Commerce Beginnings

• First appeared in 1997 in Finland with 2 mobile phone enabled Coca Cola machines that accepted payment by SMS (text messages)
• The same year, Finland’s Merita Bank also began accepting SMS transactions
• In 1998, the first downloadable ringtones appeared in, again in Finland
• In 2000 we saw mobile parking payments in Norway, mobile train tickets in Austria and mobile airline tickets in Japan

Mobile Commerce Today

• North American mobile commerce totaled about $346 million in 2008
• Expected to hit $577 million in 2009
• Predicted to quadruple to over $2 Billion by 2010

Compared to all ecommerce which was a $204 billion industry last year, this doesn’t seem much. But it’s an area of growth and can greatly enhance the cross-channel experience. You can also use the mobile channel for marketing and loyalty programs which also add value.

Mobile Payment Methods

PSMS Transactions

Sending a premium text message (or SMS — Short Message Service) to a short code allows customers to pay and a premium charge is added to the customer’s phone bill and the goods released when the merchant receives payment.

Because the SMS doesn’t include billing and shipping address detail, this is most common for digital downloads or proof of payment for tickets or physical product in which case a MMS (Multimedia Message Service) might send a barcode confirmation to the customer to present when redeeming goods/services.

SMS payments are not perfect as they can suffer from latency (time lag between “purchase” and merchant’s receipt of payment. Consumers may not get their downloads instantly, and some messages can get lost completely. There’s no guarantee.

Operators may also bill the customer for the text message and typically keep a percentage of the sale from the merchant for supporting the payment service. Other third party service vendors may also take a cut.

Amazon’s Text-Buy-It

Amazon’s Text-Buy-It service allows you to send Amazon a text message with a product name, search keyword, UPC code or ISBN number to “AMAZON” (262966). Amazon sends back a list of matching products. To purchase, select the number beside the product. TextBuyIt uses your mobile phone number to find your account settings for your default shipping address and billing information. It’s free to use aside from any SMS charges from your carrier.

Bill to Phone (No SMS)

Another bill to phone option involves a PIN and OTP (one time password) that bypasses banks and credit card companies. The problem for retail is the retailer needs to offer different payment options for different carriers with carrier co-operation - which makes it just too complicated. Right now it’s mostly used for digital downloads or services partnered with a Telco.

3rd Party Payments

PayPal, Amazon Payments & Google Checkout all have mobile options. You sign up on the Web, register your mobile and create a PIN to use when you want to pay with your mobile. This requires remembering your PIN which may lower conversion.

Similarly, iPhone and iPod Touch users can purchase digital content, games and applications through the iTunes Store with an iTunes account, using a password as authentication.

NFC

NFC (Near Field Communication) uses a short range to transmit information. Because it’s a short range, it can only be used close to a terminal like an in-store kiosk/self checkout, a ticket machine, a bank machine etc. Many credit cards already have the chip for “contactless payment.” You might have one and not even know it.

Currently this is big in Japan for mobile train tickets, you just wave your phone at the machine. NFC payments may or may not require a PIN.

M-commerce Roadblocks

Customer roadblocks:

Smartphone Penetration

Smartphones are still only 6% of the US mobile market - thought that equates to 50 million Blackberries and 37 million iPhones. A high percentage of smartphone owners use them to surf the web, but not necessarily for shopping. Most mobile purchases are for ringtones, wallpapers, games, applications and other digital content.

Findability

Some retailers have mobile specific sites optimized for mobile browsers. There’s no conventional way to name your mobile URL – some use m.domainname.com or domainname.mobi or even subfolders. The best practice is to use device detection and redirect any visitors to your regular site to your mobile version – but that’s not 100% foolproof, and it can be hard to guess the mobile URL or find in a search engine.

Usability

Smaller screens, slower page loads, smaller images, disabled Flash, AJAX and video hinders mobile usability. Stay tuned for a Get Elastic post on mobile website usability tips.

Cost

SMS and mobile web usage charges can deter people from mobile shopping. Think of e-stores with home, browse categories, product page, add to cart, whole checkout process – lots of time and data and battery juice.

Security Fears

Security fear is enough to deter 30 to 70% from mobile shopping. In reality, payment options available do improve security. The real threat is storage of personal information on the retailer’s end which just as much if not more of a threat in other channels. But new technology usually brings fear and misunderstanding. The industry has a lot of public education to do.

Retailer roadblocks:

Cost

Building mobile sites requires separate design, content strategy, possibly mobile platform subscription.

Lack of Standards Across Devices

You can create different style sheets for mobile, but there’s no guarantee a given device is going to pull the right stylesheet. You have to test across multiple devices - smartphone and non-smartphone. Application development is device-specific to the operating system. Building an iPhone and Blackberry app may only serve maximum 6% of customers – maybe 1% are interested in your app.

Mobile Websites

Home Pages

Notice the difference between Tickets.com web and mobile home pages. The mobile site uses only high level navigation – no product merchandising.

Barnes and Noble’s Flash and AJAX wouldn’t work on the mobile web. It’s home page cuts right to the chase: search, find a store, browse the menu.

Product Pages

Target and Sephora both strip out side navigation in favor of breadcrumbs. Text is larger (no need to resize, zoom). Target uses bullet points for the description and shows large default images.

Should you have a mobile version of your site?

Despite extra cost for design and mobile platforms, there’s a night and day difference in usability. If your goal is to do anything over $1 a year with m-commerce, get a mobile site and use device detection to redirect mobile visitors. Anyone who reads their email on their phone might click through to your site.

You don’t have to have a fully functioning store. If you have retail locations, store locators and inventory lookup alone might suffice – an example is Best Buy. All it has is search and a store locator. Some products have a click to call link so you can order by phone.

Think about your industry, would shopping by phone enhance the customer experience? Do your customers want it? Look at web analytics and survey customers. Then look at your store on a few devices and ask yourself if you could stand shopping through it as-is.

Mobile Applications

Not an alternative to, rather a companion to the mobile site. Works well for rentals/subscription/repeat purchase industries, like gifting. 1800flowers has apps for Blackberry and iPhone that access customer accounts and their phone’s Address Books.

Amazon’s app has some innovative features including “Remembers.” Snap a picture of anything and it will try to locate a product you can buy through image recognition. If that fails, it will get humans involved. This shot is from a blogger who snapped a photo of his Zicam medication and 10 minutes later he had a response with links to buy more online.

Should you have a mobile application?

Again, you need to develop for different operating systems like Blackberry, iPhone and Android so you might do all this work for only a few customers. But the customers who do add your app are likely the loyal customers so giving them that extra experience can have its payoff.

The app should do something or meet a customer need that your online store doesn’t do effectively. 1800flowers works for busy people on the go, Amazon also adds value with the camera/image search. Other ideas are mobile shopping lists that you can create on the web and push to your phone or reminder to refill a prescription.

Apps don’t have to be commercial as long as they’re on-brand. Example: a meal planner or fitness tools if you’re an enterprise diet chain like Nutrisystem or Jenny Craig. People buy a lot of food on a regular basis but also need other tools and support — mobile can be that “pocket coach.”

Oakley has a GPS Surf Report application, North Face has a Snow Report and Harndmark has a GPS enabled golf course locator for travelers. Get creative.

Whatever you do, make it useful for customers or it will get lost in the application haystack. If you have a Purple Cow of an idea for an app, do it if you are willing to throw all the money for development away if it doesn’t take off or have immediate ROI. Building the app is not rocket science but you should have resources set aside to evangelize it and user test it just like a regular website.

Otherwise, you can still sell to mobile phone users without an app through the mobile web.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is gaining traction and there’s much you can do:

• Opt-in SMS marketing (Moosejaw)
• Text order tracking # post-sale (Moosejaw)
• Locative coupon push (use GPS and send coupon when they’re near the store)
• QR codes (Ralph Lauren)
• In-store iPhones for product info lookup (Moosejaw)

In-store iPhones are a good way to market your app if you have one.

Kiosks

Kiosks can bring all the advantages of the web right into the store: cross-sells, customer reviews, detailed product information, video content, search, inventory, checkout etc.

A perfect example of an industry that kiosks work well for is book selling. For example, Borders’ inventory is 10x the size of its biggest store. Kiosks give customers access to the “long tail” of products for home delivery or in-store pickup. Borders reports 35% of customers who pick up in store purchase additional items in store.

Canada’s biggest bookstore chain Chapters/Indigo surveyed over 5000 of its customers who use its store kiosks and found that 50% have used the the kiosks to make online purchases (plus kiosks support in-store sales). 37% visit Chapters/Indigo specifically to use the kiosks and 80% said they would visit the store again to use the kiosk. Their latest feature allows registered customers to swipe their loyalty card at the kiosk and instantly receive a set of personalized recommendations.

Kiosk popularity will drive the need for IT investment and commerce platforms for businesses that have managed to survive without online stores until now. Think gas stations, restaurants, grocery stores, service providers, etc. Eventually POS systems as we know it will be extinct. Kiosks also have their own design and usability guidelines, so we could see a new industry born — Kiosk Optimization Experts. or Gurus.

Kiosks also make it possible to set up mini stores in airports, shopping malls, grocery stores, schools, stadiums, movie theaters – pretty much anywhere. In this economy, cutting out floor space, rental overhead, employees, theft problems etc makes this attractive.

Digital Signage

Digital signage can display much of the same information ask kiosks but may have a larger screen, the ability to wave a product in front to display infomation or just replace traditional signage (can be updated globally with one click). When proximal to the product it makes more sense than going to a kiosk in the middle of a store.

Right now JC Penney is testing a “smart fixture” in the Home departments of 3 pilot stores. Hold up an item and scan it to learn about its features, colors, sizes and even washing instructions, and that information can be e-mailed. Again in the future you could use the signage to checkout.

IPTV (t-commerce)

Nearly 2.5 million North American broadband households want to purchase a connected TV, willing to pay $100 more than for non-connected TVs. 33% of broadband households want on-screen widgets and 27% want to access content stored on home computers. One study found more than 66 million consumers watch television while surfing the internet (computer, phone or other device) — so making TV interactive makes sense.

Cable companies are already shipping set-top boxes that can access the ‘Net and last October, Panasonic introduced the first true2way HDTV to the market.

true2way is another name for the Open Cable Application Platform (OCAP), a Java based software/middleware standard for developing apps and widgets for interactive TV. Advertising will become truly direct response - with a link to a local store finder, product locator and online checkout. 1800flowers actually has a fully transactional advertising widget for the internet right now, which would be easy to access through TV.

The nice thing about OCAP being an open source standard is you don’t have to worry about buying licenses or developing for different platforms/formats. Really innovative retailers can find creative ways to offer shopping widgets or perhaps explore partnerships with television programs.

Leveraging existing ecommerce services for a consistent mulitchannel experience

Your existing ecommerce platform contains a wealth of data that should ideally be leveraged across all channels. The ecommerce platform is the hub for:

• Order history and shipment tracking data
• Product catalog, including full Web-ready product descriptions, rich high-resolution images, media (videos), technical meta data (e.g. feature specs for consumer electronics) and warrantee information
• Shopping carts, saved shopping lists, wishlist and gift registries
• Customer profiles including profile data, saved shipping and billing addresses and even payment methods such as stored credit cards
• Product reviews, user submitted images, video, comments
• Web analytics including product views and best sellers
• Product relationship data for accessories, cross sells, up sells, related products and dependant products
• Purchase history and profile data for personalized recommendations and promotions

Regardless of the shopping channel, all of these data assets in your ecommerce platform need to be leveraged to ensure that:

a. Customers have a holistic / consistent shopping experience, regardless of the channel
b. You can access reports and analytics at aggregate and channel level in one place for a “single view”

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) allows any existing or future channel to consume these services, and services are exposed via simple APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) using lightweight RESTful* web services

*REST or Representational State Transfer is an approach to software architecture that leverages existing protocols of the Web including XML (Extensible Markup Language) and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) to pull information from a Web site

Retailers like Amazon, eBay and Best Buy are examples, they provide APIs for internal IT and 3rd party developers to build shopping widgets, mobile applications etc.

Holistic experience between website and mobile application

Example: Amazon.com retains shopping carts, saved lists and wishlists across shopping channels. The mobile application syncs with the Web account.

This is great for shoppers who research online and purchase offline. In the future, customers may be able to locate products in store via RFID chip to the exact aisle and shelf. Big box stores could introduce in-store maps to help customers find product.

Holistic view of order history

Great for both the customer and the retailer, customers can track orders regardless of channel origin. For retailers, the single view of all orders in a single system makes financial reporting, inventory control, sales reporting considerably simpler.

Holistic customer reviews

The ability to access and contribute customer reviews in any channel is valuable for customers and retailers. Reviews can be used in mobile applications and in offline print flyers, digital signage, kiosks and shelf pricing labels.

How can you prepare for the next generation of shopping channels?

Because every business is different, there’s no blanket checklist for how to prepare. We hope this webinar has got you thinking about how emerging technologies will affect your industry, company and consumers and got you excited about the possibilities. We encourage you to assess your own situation in light of the following:

Competitive analysis

Understand what your industry is doing and consider the cost of delaying investment in new channels, even in this economy. Playing catch up can be costly, as Borders demonstrated, entering ecommerce on its own (detethered from Amazon) in 2008, while its competition steadily invested in the online channel even through the dot-bomb days.

Understand your customer

What does your customer want and expect today (especially in light of what your competitors offer)? How can you support the customer experience through new channels?

For some retailers, the mobile channel is non-transactional - it’s there for inventory lookup, order tracking, customer review and product information rather than selling. That’s perfectly fine. And remember there are also non-commercial ways you can leerage applications through mobile and IPTV that can support loyalty, branding and awareness.

Organizational culture

Now more than ever IT deserves a seat at the big kid’s table and for many organizations this is going to mean a big shift in priorities, human resources and budgets. If your CIO is not your best friend, consider taking him golfing. IT is integral to making multichannel 2.0 happen.

Platform issues

Examine your existing ecommerce platform and evaluate its readiness to support new channels. We always recommend looking 5 to 10 years down the road when considering platforms, so you need to figure out if your existing architecture can handle Multichannel 2.0. You may need to invest in SOA and ditch your legacy spaghetti architecture, or begin to leverage commerce platforms that allow you to easily expose services to all channels without the need for bolt on third party products for integrated reporting and consistency across channels. Find out if your existing vendors’ roadmaps support what you are trying to do long-term.

Q&A

Is it just the user interface layer of the application that needs focus when thinking of multichannel or is there more consideration at the middle tier?

The UI is very important, creating a mobile experience that fits within the size of the mobile screen is valuable. But you definitely need to think of middle tier and back end tier as well. It’s important to make sure your existing are readily accessible through an API to be consumed by other channels. But remember these all add workload to your servers, and all of that adds traffic and demand to your infrastructure. Make sure your systems and platform have the capacity to support this, and any spikes that may occur as a result of, for example, a Superbowl ad with an interactive commerce widget through Internet TV.

Do you think Mobile commerce is a real area of growth or will it just cannibalize other channels?

No, I don’t believe the new channel create new demand unless it’s digital content specifically for the mobile device (ringtones etc.) Real advantage in growing your own business and own revenue is being where your customers prefer to shop, and if your competitors aren’t there, it’s an opportunity to capture those sales. There’s also opportunity to support higher sales in the retail channel by giving customers access to customer reviews, price comparison and rich product information in-store.

For companies using m-commerce, what percent of their revenue comes from this channel?

There’s not a lot of companies using mobile companies using the channel with the expectation of return, it’s early and very experimental right now. I don’t have access to figures but if anyone wants to share their own results in the blog comments that would be fantastic. I don’t expect it to be very high right now because of the roadblocks, but it’s something to think about and watch.

Mobile shopping - how secure is it?

We discussed the various mobile payment options and they are all fairly secure, using PIN and one time passwords or SMS. There’s always a risk someone could hack through WAP (wireless access protocol) with an unsecured network, but the bigger risk is actually on the retailer’s end where customer information is stored in a database, that it could be compromised. And that is vulnerable regardless of the channel. Really the retailer should be using SSL (secure sockets layer), there’s a small risk but it’s nowhere near where the public thinks it is.

Can we get a copy of the Forrester Report mentioned in the Webinar?

You must be a subscriber to Forrester to read the full document but you can access an excerpt here.

Next Webinar

Requirements Diligence: The Cornerstone to Ecommerce Project Success

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT

Whether you are building your requirements for an in-house developed project or just trying to deciding what to do, requirements are the cornerstone of success. But it’s not just motherhood and apple pie. Requirements need to go beyond a wish list of needed features and capabilities.

In this one-hour webinar, ecommerce industry expert Bernardine Wu, CEO of FitForCommerce, will share key strategies and tactics to help you build the most effective, bullet-proof requirements to ensure project success.

Webinar takeaways:

• How to build a comprehensive requirements set
• How to incorporate workflow design and best practices into your requirements
• How to use benchmarking and market data to justify your requirements
• How to distinguish between a must-have vs. should-have vs. nice-to-have

Sign up today

You may also like these similar posts:

• Retailers Embrace API-lliate Marketing
• Will Interactive Ad Storefronts Take Off?
• Interactive TV Shopping: Not As New As You Think!
• QRious About QR Codes?
• Amazon M-Commerce: Introducing Text-Buy-It

For telcos with mobile service offerings, an ecommerce platform must have the ability to support a complex sale where the customer selects a phone, a rate plan, a term length, additional services such as text messaging and caller ID, product accessories like a case or Bluetooth headset and even options like “I want to keep my own phone number” or “I don’t want my number to appear on caller ID.” It’s possible that no two product configurations are exactly the same.

The ecommerce platform must also support special promotions and customer service like upgrading a plan, renewing a contract, adding services or purchasing an additional handset.

And because there are so many steps the customer has to take, a usable site is crucial to converting new customers and keeping existing ones. Because competition is fierce, having unique features is highly important to telcos to be competitive.

If you recall our webinar The New Ecommerce Dilemma: Buy, Build, or Leverage?, organizations where the ecommerce solution required is complex, unique, requires heavy integration with other systems and is of high strategic importance — chances are slim an out-of-the-box commerce platform is going to have features exactly as you want them nor the ability to extend them to set you apart from your competition. Such a project requires a completely in house build, or an ecommerce framework that gives you a jumpstart with the basic features you need (faster time to market than build from scratch) and the ability to customize the daylights out of them.

This was the case of Telus, a leading telco here in Canada. Telusmobility.com went live a couple weeks ago on the Elastic Path platform. Telus chose Elastic Path’s ecommerce framework to build its custom solution.

Here’s a little “Show and Telus” of what they built with our framework. A lot of these features I have never seen before on any other sites.

Email/RSS subscribers, can’t see video? View this post on Get Elastic.

Highlights

There’s many paths a customer might take to build a bundle, here I demonstrate starting with a plan. After you choose your plan, you’re notified that your cart is updated, and there’s a prompt to take the next step: add a phone.

If you don’t know where to start finding a phone, there’s a phone-finder tool that filters the available phones based on the features you want (about 1 minute into the video). You can view a gallery of product images by scrolling horizontally, which means less clicks to see multiple product views. You can also see 360 degree views.

Because handset prices depend on the length of your contract term, each handset requires a choice of terms and prices. Once you select your handset, the cart notification appears again with a summary of everything in your cart and links to next steps: add services or accessories.

If you select accessories, the system remembers which handset you selected and filters compatible accessories automatically.

You can edit your contract term right in the cart summary, and line items are separated into categories: Phone, Rate Plan, Services, Activation Fee and Accessories. Each category has its own return to shopping link.

How About Your Ecommerce Project Requirements?

Whether you’re enterprise, mid-market or a mom and pop shop, your ecommerce project is going to have certain requirements. It’s crucial to know your requirements before you go shopping for an ecommerce vendor. The framework isn’t a fit for everybody, and just as Software as a Service doesn’t serve all needs.

Need guidance sorting out your project requirements? Don’t miss our next webinar with Fit For Commerce’s Bernardine Wu: Requirements Diligence: The Cornerstone to an eCommerce Project’s Success. This webinar will discuss:

• How to build a comprehensive requirements set
• How to incorporate workflow design and best practices into your requirements
• How to use benchmarking and market data to justify your requirements
• How to distinguish between a must-have vs. should-have vs. nice-to-have

It’s happening Tuesday, June 30 at 9am PST, 12pm EST. We hope you’ll join us.

If you missed today’s webinar Multichannel 2.0: Are you ready for the next generation of commerce channels?, stay tuned for the blog recap and webinar replay coming Friday.

You may also like these similar posts:

• The Importance of Requirements Diligence
• Webinar Recap: The New Ecommerce Dilemma: Buy, Build, or Leverage?
• Delivering Successful Ecommerce Projects
• Webinar Recap: Selecting the Right Ecommerce Software in Six Weeks or Less
• How to Choose eCommerce Technology

At first blush, I didn’t think browsing within the smaller window would be usable. Wouldn’t a larger screen make the shopping experience more pleasant? Why does everyone think customers would rather jump off a cliff than click an extra button?

But as I played around with the widget, its AJAX-y goodness actually felt more usable than a traditional site. I didn’t have to scroll up and down the page to view products or click to load another page. I could scroll within the widget, hover over thumbnails to see more information, and see a quick view without a new page load (saves time). I started to dig it.

The size also had the feel of a mobile application - something designed specifically for a smaller viewing area.

Shopping widgets have a lot of potential for mobile applications, Internet enabled television, gaming consoles and other electronic devices that access the ‘Net. Pushing your storefront anywhere there’s a screen is the next step in multichannel retailing.

Stay tuned for the recap of today’s Webinar Multichannel 2.0: Are you ready for the next generation of commerce channels? hitting your Inbox or RSS reader Friday.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Interactive TV Shopping: Not As New As You Think!
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Product Pages and Cart Summary
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Search and Category Pages
• Bare It All Online for Male Shoppers
• QRious About QR Codes?

This subject line from a recent Sephora email caught my attention. Not so much because I want to learn about makeup, but being a marketing fanatic I thought it was a compelling headline and wanted to see if the email creative was equally compelling.

I did a happy dance when I opened this email from Sephora - it epitomizes what I’ve been talking about here on Get Elastic about sharing product knowledge in email and attaching value propositions to featured products:

It even uses a clever play-on-words - a “primer” can be a tool to teach basic concepts, or something that is worn under makeup to “make makeup last longer and prevent smudging all day.” Sephora presents a primer-primer that makes the customer aware that primers for face, lips and eyes exist (I didn’t know that), explains their value proposition concisely and recommends products to satisfy the demand it just created.

The email also mentions its Beauty Insider loyalty program a few times - each mention offers a value proposition for becoming a member: exclusive products, personalized email recommendations in the future and rewards points.

Should retail email sell or inform? I think Sephora does a little of both.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Post-Purchase Trigger Email Examples
• Making Emails Enticing to Everyone
• Saving High Dollar Sales: A Great Example of Triggered Email
• Should Retail Email Sell or Inform? An A/B Split Test Case Study
• CEO Explains Why Crutchfield Will Weather the Economic Storm

Customers would use their touch-tone phones to navigate the screens, add products to cart, select payment and billing offers and confirm purchase.

Though Telaction showed promise with 13% making purchases of a $60 average value (actually outperforming its mail order catalog), Penney pulled the plug on the 6 year, $106 Million project after failing to find a partner after just one year in action.

The service was delivered through cable systems which received a flat fee for each subscriber rather than a % of sales. Screens were provided by video disc players, and complicated ‘frame grabber’ technology had to be installed at each neighborhood cable node to allow for a city of 75,000 people to to use the service. (Hat tip to Youtube user davismv for converting this VHS video and providing that last tidbit of information).

Twenty years later, Interactive TV shopping is re-emerging (however with much more sophisticated technology) and JC Penney is leading the way again with a new way to shop in-store through a TV screen. These are some of the things I’ll be talking about in next week’s webinar Multichannel 2.0: Are you ready for the next generation of shopping channels?

Join me and play futurist as we explore the exciting technologies of mobile, interactive digital TV, digital signage and other Internet-enabled devices. I’ll be joined by our product manager Peter Sheldon and we’ll cover the possibilities and challenges for both IT and marketing professionals:

• How are retailers and shoppers already using Multichannel 2.0?
• What are technology vendors building to enable Multichannel 2.0?
• What are the technological barriers and how can you bypass them?
• How will you prepare for the next wave of shopping channels?

I promise this will be an enlightening hour, and it goes down on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 from 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PST.

Sign up today!

You may also like these similar posts:

• Will Interactive Ad Storefronts Take Off?
• Changing Channel Conflict for Manufacturers
• Multichannel 2.0: Are You Ready for the Next Generation of Commerce Channels?
• QRious About QR Codes?
• A Quasi-Interview on Multichannel Experiences

One of the worst culprits for friction in the checkout process is required registration. Forrester Research reports that 23% of customers abandoned the last online store that asked them to register.

In a usability test for a major online retailer, Jared Spool found new customers resisted registering, and some weren’t sure if they had registered before or not, entering various email address and password combinations in hopes they wouldn’t have to register. Others were suspicious the retailer would spam them with sales emails if they registered.

“Very few” repeat customers remembered their login information, and worse, many had multiple email addresses that had changed over the years. Guessing email/password combos gets frustrating, and of those who eventually clicked “Forgot password?” only 25% ever tried to finish the checkout! Further analysis of the customer database revealed 45% of registered customers registered multiple times, some as many as 10. If this happens on your site, it’s a big problem - you have frustrated users and dirty data - you overstate your unique customers and understate your repeat purchase and lifetime customer value data.

Jared’s recommendation was to replace the Register button with Continue, and adding “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.” Conversions increased 45%, bumping annual online revenue by $300 Million.

Back to the top converting sites, I’ve checked them all out to see how they handle registration. Interestingly, some like QVC and Schwans (yeah, the one with the 50% conversion rate) still require registration. Exclusivity of product/service may afford them to get away with this, but makes you wonder how many millions are left on the table.

Of the top converting sites, I have a few favorites. I hope these designs inspire you as you consider your own checkout optimization:

Proflowers

• Prominent 1-800-Number
• Security is reinforced at the top with “Secure Checkout”, in the “Sign in Using Our Secure Server” and at the bottom with security seal.
• Order details are shown with thumbnail image
• Shows the number of steps in checkout
• Very clear that guest checkout is an option, even uses “Proceed as Guest” on call-to-action button
• Links to privacy policy

1-800-Flowers

Like Proflowers, 1-800-Flowers allows for easy guest checkout, shows number of steps in checkout process and provides a toll free number but does not use any security assurances (although I may be seeing a test version with them removed). Because people read English left to right, I prefer the guest checkout on the left. Why subject a customer to friction if you don’t have to?

LL Bean

LL Bean provides 3 options but my suspicion is 2 is more effective. Whenever you offer more choice, you have higher risk of abandonment. Allowing the customer to create an account after checkout would satisfy both types of new customers - those who want to create an account and those who don’t. Unless…

J.Jill

…I like J.Jill’s approach to account creation. It lists the benefits of membership, shows all the fields required to sign up (so customer can decide whether they’re comfortable with providing personal information and believe sign-up time is reasonable).

I would also like to see the guest checkout option on the left and a more prominent privacy / security assurance on both LL Bean and J.Jill.

Amazon

I’ve seen the exact Amazon sign-in design also used by other major retailers and Amazon does many things well:

• “Ordering from Amazon is quick and easy” <-- addresses the fears and uncertainties about the difficulty to check out
• Captures an email address as the first step so Amazon can send a triggered email should something go wrong (You have items in your cart and didn’t complete checkout, did something go wrong? How can we help?)
• Asking for minimal information in the first step vs. asking for a lot of information may convert higher, customers perceiving it as simpler/easier (reinforces the promise “this will be a breeze”)
• You have to create an account, there is no guest checkout option but “you’ll create a password later” makes it sound like that doesn’t matter
• “Sign in using our secure server” is a good call to action to proceed.

How do you motivate customers to register? Forrester’s survey found 51% of respondents were somewhat or very willing to part with personal information in exchange for discounts, 40% to save time and 27% for a more personalized experience. Make sure you mention at least one key benefit for registration when asking for it.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Mobile Commerce Usability: Forms and Checkout
• Required Registration: Top Etailers’ Favorite Usability Mistake
• Amazon Checkout: Do You Really Wanna Get In Bed With Amazon?
• Cross-Website Personalization: Will It Happen?
• Amazons Novel Way To Build Customer Loyalty

There’s a lot of PPC experts out there who will tell you to look at your PPC keyword reports and get rid of keywords that don’t convert. Sounds logical, right? Why spend money on losers when you can spend more on winners? Especially when you’re under pressure to show strong ROI (or ROAS - return on ad spend) or are working with a tighter budget in these tough economic times.

But nixing “non-performing” keywords is not always a good idea.

Attribution

Most analytics reports (including your Adwords report) credit the last keyword clicked before conversion. For example, your customer searched for “kids bedroom furniture” on Monday and found a Cars movie race car bed on your site. The customer searched Google for “Cars movie racecar bed” on Tuesday, clicked your paid or organic search listing and completed the purchase on your site. “Cars movie racecar bed” is credited for the $400 while “kids bedroom furniture” registers as a non-converting click. Because the credited keyword is “long tail” - perhaps that click only cost $0.50 while the more competitive “kids bedroom furniture” costs $2.50 - certainly one appears more “profitable” than the other.

Multiple keyword searches and site visits are not uncommon. According to a 2005 comScore study, people perform an average of 13 searches before converting — leaving 12 keywords out in the cold in conversion reports. (Though these keyword searches may lead a customer to other sites, not just your own). Craig from ClickEquations shares some actual data on visitor behavior on his blog.

There is much debate whether philosophically the first or last click should be credited - or credit be divided across keywords. And there are tools like Omniture SiteCatalyst that allow you to use “linear” allocation (again, Craig shares an example).

But this post does not attempt to solve the attribution/allocation dilemma. Because allocation/attribution is not the only thing messing up your keyword reports! Other reasons keywords may not receive the credit they are due:

• Orders placed by telephone. There are ways to track telephone orders, but it is not default in any analytics package.

• Cookie deletion. The customer clears cookies, uses another machine or browser or returns to your site after the original cookie expired. Any of these would fail to correctly credit a keyword. (Some estimates suggest 30% of web users regularly clear cookies)

• The broad match type. For example, the “kids bedroom furniture” keyword may be matched to a search for “kids bunk beds” which you don’t sell. A high volume of searches for “kids bunk beds” and other searches that cause your ad to appear will boost a keyword’s impressions and will either dilute your click through rate (if your ad is not specific to the search term) or your conversion rate (your landing page doesn’t match the search term). If you use broad match - always use the broad match keyword exposure filter.

Before you hit delete…

1. Add this Google Analytics filter so you can see what exact searches trigger ads from your broad match and phrase match keywords. Anything irrelevant gets added as a negative keyword at the Campaign level (to prevent ads from other Ad Groups from appearing).

The benefit will be a better click-through rate (less clicks but far less ad impressions). You’ll have a lower absolute spend because you’re not paying for irrelevant keyword matches anymore, and your higher click-through rate means a lower cost-per-click. Hurrah!

2. Play customer on your own landing pages. Think about search intent - certain keywords are more “informational” than “commercial.” Would someone using the keyword in a search engine hope to find information or a product page? How can you improve your landing page to connect with that visitor? Does this keyword need its own Ad Group with its own landing page?

3. Chop at the Ad Group level. If you need to save money on PPC, figure out which product/categories are low margin, under-performing or are too expensive per click to keep bidding on and pause or delete the entire Ad Group, rather than killing individual keywords.

Again, deleting individual keywords within Ad Groups may not improve your results, because these keywords may not be getting credit for all the “assists” they’ve made to conversion. And your ads may still appear thanks to the broadness of broad match if the same search just gets matched to a similar keyword. If you do remove a keyword, be sure to add it as a negative keyword at the Campaign level.

You may also like these similar posts:

• PPC Tip: When to Use Negative Exact and Negative Phrase Match
• PPC Myth Week Pt 2: Bid Higher to Appear Higher
• Should You Remove Keywords With Low Click Through Rates?
• PPC Myth Week Pt 1: Organic Search Traffic is More Qualified Than Paid
• Dont Miss These Holiday Keywords Next Christmas

*Quality Score is Google’s way of scoring the quality (clever name, hey?) of your ad and landing page relevance and attractiveness to searchers. If you’re interested in learning more about Quality Score, Craig Danuloff of Click Equations is writing a book about it and is dripping out chapters on his blog.

Click through rate (CTR%) is the most important part of Quality Score, according to Google’s own explanation of how it ranks ads (Youtube video). CTR% is followed by ad/landing page relevance and landing page quality. The video goes into detail on how ads with high Quality Scores are rewarded by higher positions and lower average CPCs.

It used to be common practice to crank up your bids when you first launched keywords so they would rank higher and get better click through, and turn them down once you established a good click through history. Today, Google calculates your click through rate at each position it tests your ad in, comparing it against other data it has for advertisers in those positions rather than an average across every position. So there’s no need to bid high - your focus should be improving that click through rate!

Tips for Improving PPC Click Through Rates

1. Find negative keywords. Add as many negative keywords as possible to reduce impressions for irrelevant or near-relevant keyword searches. Some negative keywords will be applied at the Campaign level, others at the Ad Group level. You can also find negative keywords by adding a broad match exposure filter.

2. Group keywords more tightly. Studies have shown click through is highest when the ad headline includes the exact keyword the searcher typed in (limited to 35 characters) — especially for brand / color / model number searches. So rather than having one big Digital Camera Ad Group with all your brands and models, you would have a Digital Camera group with only unbranded keywords, and Ad Groups for each brand, and model-specific Ad Groups for each brand.

Some keywords might be so popular / high converting they may justify their own Ad Group so you can write an even more specific ad, like “Ashton Kutcher Coolpix.”

3. Write better ad copy. Some tips include:

• Use keywords in your ad’s headline that match your keyword list (you might use Dynamic Keyword Insertion to accomplish this
• Write persuasive ad text including value propositions about your business or enticing calls to action
• Use numbers like prices and percentages
• Capitalize The First Letter Of Each Word. Don’t Laugh, It’s Proven.
• A/B test your ads

In this economy, you can’t afford sloppy PPC campaign management. Make sure you do everything you can to improve Quality Score before you ramp up bids on keywords. After optimizing for CTR%, look at improving landing page relevance, not just to please Google, but to convert more clicks to sales.

You may also like these similar posts:

• PPC Tip: When to Use Negative Exact and Negative Phrase Match
• Should You Remove Keywords With Low Click Through Rates?
• PPC Myth Week Pt 3: Kill Keywords That Dont Convert
• Negative Keyword Research Tools & Tips
• Laptop Bags, PayPerClick and Landing Page Relevance

Myth #1: Organic search more qualified traffic than paid

I was surprised to see in print one of the most respected search marketing gurus state “Organic searchers who click on your pages are highly qualified visitors to your site. They are much more likely to make a purchase than some other kinds of visitors you receive.”

In fairness, the guru went on to explain that banner ad clickers are less qualified than searchers actively looking for a product in a search engine. Nevertheless — to claim that organic searchers are highly qualified is false. It also implies that organic search converts better than paid search, comparison engines, email traffic, affiliate leads and so on. This just ain’t so.

1. SOME organic traffic is better “qualified” than others.

Remember, in this context “qualified” means more likely to purchase. If you look through your organic search referring keywords, you’ll find a number of non-transactional terms, and transactional terms that are not necessarily close to purchase or even relevant to what you offer.

Examples from the 2010 Olympic Store:

• Non-transactional: “vancouver 2010 schedules”
• Transactional, not relevant to our offer: “how do i get tickets for the 2010 winter olympics”
• Transactional, too general: “business card holders” (may like our offering but is likely in research/comparison mode)
• Qualified: “vancouver 2010 sterling silver heart charm bracelet”

Also, organic conversion can vary by search engine. It’s possible for your market, traffic from Yahoo, AOL or MSN sends you more shoppers and Google sends you more information hunters.

2. SEO vs. PPC - it depends on the keywords.

PPC traffic “quality” also depends on which keywords get clicked - especially if you’re using the broad match type. In fact, broad match can trigger some really un-qualified traffic. If you were only bidding on a certain number of close-to-purchase keywords with the exact match type - you *could* argue PPC is more qualified than SEO if your conversion rates also confirm so.

3. Other channels - it depends…

Comparison engine traffic is *typically* closer to purchase since visitors have already evaluated your offer against competitors and the product against other alternatives, comparison engine traffic should convert better in theory. Your results may vary.

Similarly, email and affiliate referrals have been exposed to your brand and offer before clicking through - you’d expect better results for these channels than search. Again, your results may vary.

Type in traffic (no search engine or other site referred the visit) indicates brand awareness, and perhaps preference. Repeat customers, brick-and-mortar customers or people responding to offline advertising may convert higher than SEO/PPC traffic that’s also clicking on several other results to compare. But direct traffic can also indicate you should filter out your own staff’s IP address or you have missed Javascript tags on some pages (causing a null reference).

So what’s the point of this rant? I don’t want anyone making decisions to invest more into SEO than other channels because they heard that organic search is the most qualified traffic. I don’t want you to set the wrong expectations on organic search, and set goals like “increase organic visits” or “increase conversion for organic visitors.”

You may also like these similar posts:

• PPC Myth Week Pt 3: Kill Keywords That Dont Convert
• Top Online Retailers Not Showing Up in Google!
• PPC Tip: When to Use Negative Exact and Negative Phrase Match
• Reputation Management and SEO [Video + Summary]
• PPC Myth Week Pt 2: Bid Higher to Appear Higher

Why did we choose this topic?

Economist Magazine rated the outlook of 15 industries from 1-5 based on their outlook for 2009, considering economic conditions. Only ecommerce had a sunny outlook, and it’s estimated that 1/4 of all retail transactions will occur online by 2012. This drive translates into a lot of ecommerce projects, with an estimated 20-33% of companies replatforming or upgrading their ecommerce solutions each year.

IT related projects 30-50% don’t make time spec and budget targets, ecommerce projects are particularly challenging. If we can take that risk down even 5 points for you, this hour-long webinar is time well spent.

Agenda

• How are eCommerce projects different from other I/T and Marketing projects?
• What business and project management elements are especially important in eCommerce projects?
• What technical elements predispose an ecommerce project for success?
• What are the Top 10 things to do before project kickoff?

Approach

Our approach was to collect experiential data from “hands on” project experiences (10 sample projects from 10 to 200 person-months). We wanted to keep this very close to the metal - so we started by looking at projects Elastic Path and HCL had done, and some that our staff had done prior. We also looked at industry stats, analyst and pundit opinions. Watching for common business and technical characteristics of projects at the high and low ends of success, we put together a Top 10 Checklist and practical tools to help you with your next ecommerce project.

How eCommerce Projects are different from other IT projects

• Relatively low cost with high business impact and ROI compared to other IT or marketing projects
• Visibility due to revenue and brand impact, if things don’t look right, it’s not just obvious to your IT staff - visible to competitors, executives, customers etc.
• Face direct competition from similar applications with peer companies
• Potentially very complex architecture
• Need to ensure scalability, security of transactions and data, fault tolerance aspects
• Need to integrate with specialized products and 3rd party sites/services
• Need to integrate with existing legacy systems
• Requires cross channel Support ( Web, Online, In Store etc)
• High rate of continuous evolution — “ecommerce is like constructing a ship while it’s at sea” due to continual innovation in the industry
• High production support requirements

Business and project management elements important in ecommerce projects

1. Commitment from organization leadership
2. Teamwork and effective, regular communication between business and IT teams
3. Requirements management during the complete project lifecycle - it’s not realistic to lock down requirements with an iron fist to ensure on-time delivery of the project
4. Effective change request management
5. Customer experience focus - when the user’s perspective is considered, success is much higher
6. Planning and management of integration dependencies between different sub-groups

Commitment From Leadership

Who are the executives responsible for the outcomes of the project? Often these are executives from IT, marketing, line of business executive and/or an executive with “Ecommerce” in their title. These executives need to be on the same page, not only behind closed doors but visibly to everyone on the project. They need to send the message of why this project matters to the business, and should do so explicitly and quantitatively. Ideally, project objectives should be translated into CR, AOV, Traffic and other ecommerce-specific goals. This will greatly help prioritize work if/when crunch time hits.

A helpful tool is a Project Charter — a brief document in bullet form that includes a message from the top regarding the project’s ecommerce goals. Anyone on the project should be looking at the Project Charter for an introduction to the most critical aspects of the project. It’s important to include a “message from the top,” signed by all the executives involved, laying out the objectives you want to meet.

Teamwork

Choose a team that ideally has worked together before, that won’t be at each other’s throats a week into the project. If you’ve got 10 soldiers in a trench, they’re not necessarily fighting for the general, they’re fighting for each other. Chemistry is important. You’re better off with a team with 100% chemistry and 80% skills than a team with 80% chemistry and 100% skills.

Invest the time and money to bring people together for fun, social activities. Fly in your outsourcing team. Bring in your end users. People have a lot harder time getting testy with someone they’ve gone bowling with than someone they’ve never met face to face.

Requirements Management / Customer Experience Focus

An IT organization would never think of deploying a new email system without involving end users, yet many neglect to involve customers or customer proxies in ecommerce project.

It’s helpful to have your BAs (Business Analysts) sit and watch marketing and CSR business users work with their current tools, or even train to do the job so they get a real gut-level feel for what user frustrations may be.

Consider an Agile methodology. Ecommerce involves a lot of non-IT savvy constituents and a very rapidly changing environment – it is very tough to get the requirements right the first time. Agile is a business and development methodology where the key is not to fix the scope and lock it down, rather start with list of requirements, then on an iteration basis (e.g. every 3 weeks) revisit priorities and establish the work plan for the next iteration.

What technical elements predispose an ecommerce project for success?

• Solution Architecture
• Store Front Design and Architecture
• Integration
• Security Considerations
• Third Party Solutions
• Search Engine Optimization

Solution Architecture

It’s required that the ecommerce solution addresses current and future business needs as cost-effectively as possible. Some tips:

• Use architecture and design patterns that separate back end activities from storefront for increased performance, flexibility, reusability and scalability.
• The architecture should not impose tradeoff between performance, scalability and the business controlled flexibility that the system provides
• Most of the business rules in the system should be business controlled rather than having IT dependency
• Design to ensure performance, availability and scalability of the solution based upon expected peak load and throughput requirements

Ecommerce also involves a lot of sensitive data transfers. Ensure the system runs with minimal security checks, with managed security across various levels.

Store Front Design & Information Architecture

Usability is key to the successful ecommerce site, many web users never return to a site after a bad experience. Design recommendations include:

• Content and data targeting to end-users should be business controlled rather than having IT dependency
• UI Should be intuitive, standard and easy to navigate
• Checkout process should be straightforward and not ask for too much information
• Site search should function properly, handle misspellings, synonyms etc.
• Privacy and security features should be emphasized to build trust
• Analytics tools should be used to measure the effectiveness of your store’s layout and features
• Personalization tools may be used for better user experience and higher average order values

When making design decisions, consider industry specific factors like your business brand identity, what is your industry, your target audience etc.

Integration

A typical ecommerce solution requires integration between several disparate applications and systems like ERP, CRM, search, analytics etc. Systems must be interconnected and seamlessly integrated to realize their full potential. When faced with legacy systems and existing code with a variety of languages, It’s important to establish interoperability, both syntactically and semantically. Any existing, loosely coupled services should be made available in the enterprise to address application requirements.

Integration techniques include data warehousing, web services (SOAP and REST), SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) Middleware which supports SOA implementation.

Top 10 Things to Do Before Project Kickoff

1. Form a cross functional core team

2. Define and communicate business-level goals

• Browser to buyer conversion rate
• Average order value
• Targeted traffic to the website
• Brand penetration generated by marketing
• Improved time to market
• Cost savings through more efficient order management
• Enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and trust

3. Decide whether to build, buy or leverage based on requirements and resources

Requirements

• Complexity (Catalog, B2B, B2C, support for multiple channels etc)
• Time to Market (Urgency)
• Uniqueness (In Business Model or Solution)
• Strategic Importance
• Data security
• Integration ( with internal and external systems)

Resources

• Technical capabilities
• ecommerce capabilities
• Budget

4. Technology decisions

• Implementation platform (Java/JEE or .NET)
• Application server, database server etc.
• Third party solutions and services
• Tie up with selected external third party vendors

Decisions should be based on your business requirements. How closely does the technology or product address the requirement? How difficult is it to integrate with existing systems?

Most large organizations have existing code written in a variety of languages, and have a number of legacy systems. It is vital that corporations be given an efficient, rapid path to preserve and reuse these investments. Legacy integration often is one of the most challenging tasks to overcome.

5. Solution architecture blueprinting

• Develop proof of concept / pilot to bring focus to key areas of concern and take decisions
• Perform capacity planning
• Hardware and software license procurement

6. Plan for data security and fraud prevention

• Involve data security team to comply with standards such as PCI

7. In-house implementation vs. outsourcing decision

In-House pros

• Gives full control over the project
• Knowledge Retention - Keep the talent and knowledge in-house, allowing for future enhancements, modifications and redesigns

In-House cons

• Limited Expertise - Internal team should have required level of expertise in the required technologies and products

8. Effective transition of business requirements from business to IT teams

• Continuous involvement of business during the complete project life cycle

9. Project planning and management

• Create detailed project plan
• Establish processes for communication, change control, and issue management
• Gather required engineering and project management tools
• Involve your cross functional teams
• Set up development and test environments
• Ensure availability of trained resources as per the project plan

10. Define roles and responsibilities of all the stake-holders and get their commitment

Tools Mentioned in Webinar*

Project charter
Agile software development life cycle
Wiki project index
Requirements traceability tool
Change request tracking tool

*Available with the webinar replay

Questions and Answers

What are the main reasons for ecommerce project failure?

• Missing alignment of organization functions toward the objective, concrete business, marketing and operational plans, should be available
• Missing strong leadership and clear decision making
• Improper handover of requirements from business to IT team, requirements not well understood by IT
• Having the right skill set and a commitment towards the goal essential
• Having integration points very well defined between internal and external systems is key so you don’t discover unknown problems during integration

What are some critical success factors when integrating your ecommerce site with social media sites such as Youtube, Facebook etc?

We see this in almost 100% of Elastic Path projects, people want to know how to leverage social media. The first thing you need to do before you start looking at the social media technologies is be clear about the customer experience — what are you and your customers trying to accomplish? Let the tools fill in capabilities that relates to your business goals.

That being said, there’s also room for experimentation, especially if your brand / strategy revolves around innovation.

Understand the tools in context to your goals. If it’s a complex purchase decision, maybe Twitter is not the right tool. Facebook could be the right choice if you have a strong community. Don’t think only about how to get people to buy stuff, you can also leverage them for customer research and awareness.

How difficult or easy is it to freeze requirements for an ecommerce project and why?

It depends on the relationship between the people doing the implementing and the end users. Does it translate to positive or negative energy? Because flux is the norm in ecommerce, everybody needs to agree it’s difficult and agree you will try to accommodate as much change as you can while committing to untouchable, must-do requirements. There’s a balance between iron fisted requirements management and anarchy.

In addition to capturing requirements correctly and communicating them between IT and business departments, using requirements stability tools can help you track requirements through the project without missing anything.

When evaluating vendors for ecommerce solutions, what are the top 3 things we should be looking for?

We do have a full webinar on that topic, check out The New Ecommerce Dilemma: Build, Buy or Leverage?

Certainly features and functionality should meet your requirements, but assuming your solution will be in place for 5 or 10 years, it’s very important you don’t paint yourself into a box by looking solely at today’s features and functionality. Look for flexibility - can you get skills quickly or are they all proprietary? Is the tool well architected so I can make extensions down the road?

Linda’s comment: Features, Functionality and Flexibility - the 3 Fs?

How important is it to understand target customer behavior before we think of designing an ecommerce solution, and how to proceed with that?

It’s very important to understand customer behavior and focus on success factors IT when designing the site, branding, site should represent the business plan. You should also understand your industry type and competitive environment.

In terms of how you proceed, one approach is to look at your web analytics tools and look for pages where people are dropping off. If you can organize a focus group and have them use your site and get into their heads, that’s also good. There are also other technologies using Javascript-tagging that can collect on-site user data including A/B split testing.

How Important is to involve testing team from delivering a “defect free ecommerce project” perspective?

Very important. You should involve a testing team from early on in the requirements process, using business cases and performing continuous testing through the integration phases. After integration you still need several rounds of testing end-to-end, taking all scenarios and business processes. Performance and load testing are also important to ensure you can support a large number of sessions at one time.

How best can you combine the efforts of a “brand” agency with a “technical” implementation team?

The first thing your question assumes is that they are a team! Creatives and IT folks sometimes live in different worlds. It’s important to get at least one or two of your creative people (Flash, Flex, AJAX or whatever the site is going to use) in the room to build rapport together. When technical people go back to say they can’t do it, you can have an intelligent, friendly discussion.

Both need a lingua franca that relates back to the customer experience and business outcomes, not designing for the sake of artistic merit but for business results.

Next Webinar

Multichannel 2.0: Are you ready for the next generation of commerce channels?

While the retail store, call center, print catalog and website (Multichannel 1.0) still play key parts in multichannel retail, a new generation of shopping channels is emerging. Advancements in mobile, interactive digital TV, and in-store digital signage (Multichannel 2.0) will change the face of shopping as we know it - and could even mean the death of POS systems, making commerce platforms even more important to retailers.

Play futurist with Elastic Path Ecommerce Analyst Linda Bustos and Product Manager Peter Sheldon and explore the emerging technologies of mobile, interactive digital TV, digital signage and other Internet-enabled devices. This one-hour webinar will cover the possibilities and challenges for both IT and marketing professionals:

* How are retailers and shoppers already using Multichannel 2.0?
* What are technology vendors building to enable Multichannel 2.0?
* What are the technological barriers and how can you bypass them?
* How will you prepare for the next wave of shopping channels?

Sign up to attend

Date: Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Time: 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern
Presenters: Linda Bustos, ecommerce analyst, Elastic Path Software
& Peter Sheldon, product manager, Elastic Path Software

You may also like these similar posts:

• Webinar Recap: The New Ecommerce Dilemma: Buy, Build, or Leverage?
• The Importance of Requirements Diligence
• Webinar Recap: The Ecommerce Platform of the Future
• Next-Generation Ecommerce With Service Oriented Architecture
• Show and Telus: Solutions for the Complex Sale

Does this mean that in general, men are “hunters” and women are “browsers” online? If so, this is not unlike the offline world. In ‘Men Buy, Women Shop’: The Sexes Have Different Priorities When Walking Down the Aisles (from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania), men ranked “difficulty in finding parking close to the store’s entrance” as their number one shopping problem (29%). Women’s top beef was “lack of help when needed,” and one woman stated her favorite store’s sales associates “are always great. They always show me different styles. They will show me something new that’s come in.” A man of similar age responded “I haven’t had much interaction with most sales people. I don’t really need them — as long as they’re at the checkout.”

The differences don’t stop there:

• Women Shop Like Santa, Men Shop Like Scrooge. Women start their holiday shopping earlier than men, usually shop for more gift recipients. Men are more likely to become angry and frustrated by holiday shopping. (I also recall a study a couple years back by BIG Research that claimed men are more likely to grab gifts for themselves, mostly electronics).

• Men prefer coupons, women prefer sales. Perhaps this is because a coupon can be applied to something a guy already knows he wants, the coupon is a predictable discount and an extra incentive to reward himself. A sale applies to a number of products, the “fun” for women is browsing the sale to find great deals - it’s recreation. The reward is finding treasure and feeling like you deserve it because you found such a great bargain.

• Guys think about what can benefit them now, while ladies think about what benefits them long term. Perhaps that’s why women browse sales, they keep there eyes open for things they can wear next year or stash away for a future Christmas gift.

• Men and women view images differently and respond differently to humor. This impacts conversion for advertising, website imagery and messaging. They also prefer different colors (but not all women love pink).

• Men and women may buy the same products, but for different reasons. As Future Now’s Holly Buchanan points out, you can use customer reviews to identify which product attributes and benefits men and women rant or rave about.

So what?

Should you build a male site and female site with different colors, copy, imagery, products, navigation and page load speed? Of course not. It’s important to optimize for fast loading pages and logical, usable navigation for everyone. But you should look at your site and ask if your design and content decisions were made with bias. Personal finance site Mint.com’s redesign boosted performance by 20%, and Future Now’s Jeff Sexton suspects it’s because the new design is more female-friendly.

When promoting Kindle, Amazon targeted a men and women differently (recognizing logged-in site members) by showing male or female hands in the promotional banner.

If you use customer surveys like ForeSee Results, you can gather your own site-specific research. Ask for survey participant’s gender - but make it optional. Identify which are men’s biggest complaints about your site, and women’s. Make sure to ask ease-of-use, site speed and navigation oriented questions like “Please rate how well the features on [website] help you find the product(s) you are looking for” and “Please rate how quickly pages load on [website].”

Consider segmenting your email lists by gender (provided you asked in your sign up process) and testing coupon vs. sale headlines, imagery and even timing (start sending holiday emails earlier to females, or send fewer holiday emails to men).

You may also like these similar posts:

• Have You Mystery Shopped Your Site Lately?
• How to Grow Your Email List from Your Shopping Cart
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• Gift Cards: Still Hot in 2008?
• Eleventh Hour Holiday Email Marketing - Great Example From Circuit City

One of the findings I found most interesting was the most common reason site visitors would initiate live chat is if they experience an error during the checkout process (76%). Other reasons include asking general questions about products/services/policies, sales specials or inquiring about orders already placed.

Participants were asked to rank communication methods in order of preference for various situations. For problems in checkout, participants ranked chat first, then phone, then email. (Of course, Twitter is also an option!)

It’s not surprising that people would rather chat with customer service right away, online rather than pick up the phone, wait on hold or wait indefinitely for an email response.

If you do offer live chat, make sure customers can initiate a chat session from each step in the checkout process. This is especially important if you remove your regular site navigation in checkout as many sites do.

In the report, BoldChat also offers a couple useful tips:

1. Remind customers that live chat is an option if they’re waiting on hold for customer service by telephone.
2. Publish average wait times for all communication methods on your Contact Us page.

If you’re interested in the entire research, you download the report here.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Picking Up On Customer Anxiety: When to Trigger Live Chat
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• Checkout Inspiration From Top Converting Sites
• Bloggers Digest - 2/22/08
• ShopTogether is Live Chat Help on Steroids

“Useful information” did not make the list.

Last week I shared a shared a tip my manager gave me when I worked at a shoe store - when the store is “dead” - make a mess. Make it look like stuff’s going on in your store.

Another pearl of wisdom from my Al Bundy days is to “give customers free information.” I had a bunch of general and product specific facts in my shoe-salesgirl arsenal that I would casually drop in conversation with a customer. This would build rapport, trust and keep the customer engaged. Because I wasn’t a pushy salesperson - customers would spend longer time with me and were more open to my suggestion for cross-sells and alternatives. Even if a sale didn’t happen on the spot, I was sowing seeds in hopes the customer would be more likely to come back to our store, and more likely to approach me for help than other sales people.

Here are some examples of tidbits I would share. Some were product/brand specific, others were general:

• Certain shoes use vegetable dye which is more environmentally sound but is likely to bleed color the first time you wear it. So make sure to wear dark socks for the first couple wears, and consider spraying the inside with suede and nubuck protector.

• Suede and nubuck protector is like the all-purpose protector except with a finer mist so it penetrates the material better and covers more surface area.

• Rather than gluing the upper to the sole, Ecco shoes inject their rubber around the upper, so it’s near impossible to come apart. They also have removable antibacterial insoles that can be washed in a washing machine.

• Liquid shoe wax will dry out the leather so you want to use leather cleaner to remove old wax before piling on new wax or the leather will crack.

• The best time to try on shoes is in the morning when your feet are the widest.

When someone opens your retail email, it’s like they’ve entered your store. There’s no commitment to buy and they’re not even sure what they want to buy. Rather than just pointing people to the sale bin, or your new arrivals, or even the best seller - why not mix in some free information? This may help build rapport, trust and keep the customer engaged. Customers might spend longer time reading your email and be more open to your product suggestions. If a click/sale doesn’t happen, the customer may be more willing to open future emails from you and choose your store over others.

Use your product knowledge to “romance” featured products, including at least one interesting characteristic or useful benefit. LL Bean does this very well. You rarely see a featured product that doesn’t include some key benefit. For example, in this email: “Tailor made for warm weather, our cool, breathable Tropicwear Shirts block UV rays, wick moisture and stay wrinkle free all day long.” There’s even a link to a video for more information:

Check out more LL Bean email examples here.

What general and product-specific knowledge could you share in your emails?

You may also like these similar posts:

• Could Sold Out Products Increase Email Click Through?
• Retail Email: Sell or Inform? How About Both
• Social Commerce on Product Pages - Why Not?
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• Saving High Dollar Sales: A Great Example of Triggered Email

I’m looking for feedback. Based on what I’ve read on Twitter, the 2% of America that uses the micro-blogging service that will become the greatest marketing tool of all time until everybody switches to yet another platform in 2010 have strong opinions on these topics. What do you think?

Since I just couldn’t get my responses to fit within the 140 character Twitter limits (even less when you consider @minethatdata is required), I thought I’d answer them here on the blog and turn the questions over to you, the Get Elastic readership, to add your input.

Issue #1: Is it acceptable for a big-box retailer to offer merchandise online that is not available in stores?

Absolutely. The online channel can be a great place to clear out overstock/old stock/returned-to-stock items, manufacturer refurbs and so on. There are also items that it’s more cost effective to fulfill from one warehouse than to deliver to each big-box store, or which the retailer can drop-ship for special orders.

It’s generally accepted that product can vary from store to store in retail chains, even in the same city. And better selection is one of the appeals of online shopping. So I’d be surprised if customers balk at “online-only” items.

Issue #2: Is it acceptable for an online merchant to require you to place an item in the shopping cart in order to find out what the price of the item is?

The only reason I can think of why an online retailer would hide a price online is if it’s trying to bend Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) rules. From a manufacturer and competitor perspective, no this is not acceptable! It’s also risky from a customer expectation perspective. The ability to see a product’s price is one web convention that can confuse and irritate customers when broken. Most customers don’t understand MAP — all they see is a retailer that is hiding information unless you add the product to the cart.

Issue #3: Is it acceptable for big-box retailer to offer the same merchandise at different prices in different channels? For instance, can a retailer sell a television for $1,299 online, but the same TV costs $1,329 in stores?

Of course from a business perspective this is perfectly fine. Different stores have different variable costs (different rent/lease costs, minimum wage by State, cost to transport goods etc) and may price items accordingly. Also management may have discretion on when to mark down merchandise.

But I’d be interested in research on consumer attitudes about this. Some customers want consistency across channels — especially important for ROPO (Research Online, Purchase Offline) shoppers. Nobody wants to feel ripped off because they bought from a store.

Other consumers expect everything online to automatically be cheaper than in-store, and will be upset if prices are the same online. These customers don’t understand the online channel isn’t overhead-free. They don’t understand the investment in ecommerce technology, personnel to run the store/call center/warehouse/marketing and the operation/fulfillment costs.

I think it’s very difficult to always have seamless pricing across stores and channels. So the best thing to do is have an explanation for why prices may differ posted online, and train salespeople to be able to answer the question from the floor.

Issue #4: Is it acceptable for a big-box retailer to offer the same merchandise at different prices in different markets? For instance, can a retailer sell a television for $1,299 in Milwaukee, and for $1,329 in Philadelphia?

Yes, I believe this is acceptable for the reasons above. However it is risky if you use universal pricing on your website. A workaround is to use geo-IP targeting to pull the correct price list for a visitor and try to ensure consistent pricing among the stores in the region, or ask customers to enter a zip code to access the site.

Issue #5: Name one online brand that demonstrated an increase in sales and profit because they allowed customers to leave reviews of merchandise online, and attach a link to the case study you are referring to.

Mistergooddeal.com raised conversion by 40% after adding reviews (summary and case study). Not sure about sales and profit percentages.

Issue #6: Name at least two catalog brands that dove head-first into physical retail stores, avoided crippling debt, and still managed to have a direct channel that grew at the same rate prior to diving head-first into retail stores?

Wow, that’s a tall order. Pass :)

Issue #7: It is generally accepted as a best practice that the airline industry charges customers different amounts for identical seats on an airplane. Is it acceptable for a multi-channel brand to charge customers different amounts for the same sku on the same day, akin to what the airline industry does?

This happens all the time. Many retailers offer coupon codes to email or affiliate traffic or first time/repeat customers. Esprit sent me a one-day-only coupon to use in-store via email as part of their loyalty program. Best Buy invited me to an exclusive online-only sale last Christmas.

As a Canadian, I’m usually charged much higher prices when online shopping from US sites, though they’re usually separated out into “shipping and handling fees.” And it’s annoying when you have to pay $2400 for software that students can buy for $300…but there’s rhyme and reason for these price differences. Nevertheless, this is acceptable in these cases.

Retailers using geo-IP to price products higher for wealthy zipcodes vs. less-wealthy — that’s a gray area.

Issue #8: If multichannel customers are the best customers, and all businesses have gone “multichannel” over the past several years, why aren’t there more “best customers” to prop up the economy during these trying economic times?

Multichannel customers may be the “best” customers, and there may be more of them thanks to businesses going multichannel — but multichannel customers are just as likely to feel the economic crunch as hard as those with single channel shopping preferences. The recession just doesn’t discriminate!

Issue #9: Is it truly necessary for a retail brand to have an outstanding “bricks and clicks” experience?

Although ecommerce growth is flattening, it’s still a channel of growth for many industries. If a retailer is looking to grow and reach new customers - online could be a safer bet than opening new brick and mortar shops. And if there is customer-driven demand for the online purchase option - then yes, it’s truly necessary.

Plus, there’s a lot of value in bringing the online experience in-store through kiosks and even mobile access to product information, videos and customer reviews which could boost in-store conversions.

But if you’re going to have an online channel - make it outstanding. In the last few months, 2 of Canada’s largest retail chains pulled the plug on their online stores. Could lack-lustre experience be to blame? Don’t have ecommerce just for the sake of having ecommerce.

Issue #10: Is it acceptable to allow an algorithm to fully optimize your search marketing campaigns, or should humans control the process, albeit at lower levels of profitability?

No way, it’s humans. Hands down. As wicked-smart as the engineers and mathematicians are that create the algorithms, there needs to be human oversight. Computers can’t build your keyword list without understanding which long tail keywords apply to your business and which should be added as negatives.

What if the algorithm decided to delete keywords with low click through rates without investigating the reasons behind the low rate?

And with the economy as it is, we can’t afford to put the entire paid search industry out of work, can we?

You may also like these similar posts:

• Circuit City Plugs Into Cross-Channel Retailing
• In-Store Pickup Tips for Multi-Channel Retailers
• Interactive TV Shopping: Not As New As You Think!
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• Multichannel 2.0: Are You Ready for the Next Generation of Commerce Channels?

COLLABORATE 09 is the premier event for Oracle database and technology professionals looking for best practices and real-world solutions. IOUG Forum session topics include database administration & warehousing, applications development, and business intelligence, and cover products including RAC, Fusion Middleware, Essbase, Stellent, BEA and many others.

• Drop by booth #4769 and say hi to the Elastic Path squad and check out our shiny new booth design. We’ll also have a draw for brand new Bose headphones.

• Elastic Path’s CTO Michael Vax will be speaking on Delivering Successful Enterprise Ecommerce Projects on Monday, May 4 at 1:15 pm.

• Party with Elastic Path and Oracle at the Peabody Hotel on Tuesday night from 7 to 10 pm! EP is bringing the DJ and some entertainment you won’t want to miss. There will also be a draw for some cool prizes. It’s free but space is limited to 150 guests, so drop by our booth to get on the list.

You may also like these similar posts:

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• Using the Force at Online Market World + Webinars!

* “Carrot” is a term for a message in the cart that tells you you’re $X away from a promotional offer - usually free shipping. Amazon’s Super Saver Shipping is a classic example.

I thought to myself — whoa, I’m being shown a personalized offer based on my browsing habits! This is HUGE! Then I realized after trying other category items that I had once again confused Star Trek with Star Wars. Hey, it’s an honest mistake, right?

But think of the impact this could have if retailers served more relevant incentives in the cart based on a customer’s session browsing history or purchase history. By “tagging” customers who click on certain categories or products, search for certain keywords or arrive from search engines through certain keywords - relevant carrot offers could be swapped in lieu of a generic “free shipping” or default giveaway product for all customers.

The tagging concept could also be applied to what kind of products are sitting in the cart. Perhaps you sell name brand and house brand items (Whirlpool and Sears’ Kenmore, for example). When your house brands have higher margin, you can offer free shipping at a lower cart threshold than branded items.

These are just a couple ideas for dynamic, personalized merchandising. Really, the possibilities are endless.

You may also like these similar posts:

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Consider this situation. Retailer sees that the site search box is rarely - if ever - used. Retailer concludes “Our customer doesn’t use search. We don’t need to worry about site search optimization because nobody uses it anyway.” Now efforts to improve searchandizing (the way you merchandize products in search results), personalization based on search behavior and improving site search usability become low priority or are disregarded altogether.

Suppose the “why” is the site design has camouflaged the search box. It’s just not where folks expect it, or it’s too subtle:

Examples:

In this case, a retailer could tweak the design, and revisit site search stats 1 one to 3 months’ time to see if there’s a difference. This doesn’t have to be split-tested — you could simply measure the before and after.

Of course, it may be a good idea to test different search box sizes, designs and placements using a website optimization tool like Google Website Optimizer, Omniture Test and Target or Sitespect.

The search box scenario is only one example. This could easily apply to any design element/feature of your site that you conclude does not get used because of lack of customer interest. If any of the following’s use is below what you would expect for your site, investigate “why” and ask yourself if design or usability is to blame:

• Search box
• Navigation menus (top, sidebar, footer, filtered navigation, visual navigation/AJAX menus etc)
• Contact us forms (link hidden? form design problems?)
• Live chat (interrupt too soon? link hidden?)
• FAQ (customer service constantly answering questions already addressed on your website?
• Wishlist (do you require registration?)
• Cross-sell/upsell (too much choice? not enough choice? irrelevant suggestions?)
• Gift finder (buried in site? difficult to use?)
• Email/newsletter signup (do you show a privacy statement? do you ask for too much information? is the link buried?)
• Customer review participation (is the process difficult? what are the incentives?)
• Customer feedback (is the link easy to spot? are your surveys too long?)

It helps to start with an expectation/goal/industry benchmark of what you expect usage of various features on your site to be. Then look for the “what” in your analytics. If they’re way off from what you expect, think about the adjustments/tests/surveys/fixes you need to improve them.

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• Amazon Tabs’ Extinction Means Better Customer Experience
• American Eagle Features Products on the Fly
• Book Review: Web Design for ROI

• How ecommerce projects are different from other IT and marketing projects
• What business and project management elements are especially important in ecommerce projects
• What technical elements predispose an ecommerce project for success
• The Top 10 things to do before project kickoff

In addition, we’re inviting the ecommerce community to share their own hits and misses. If you’d like to contribute your own experience, please contact me at linda.bustos @ elasticpath.com.

Webinar details:

Deliver Successful Ecommerce Projects

Thursday, April 30, 2009 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT

Register here

You may also like these similar posts:

• Webinar Recap: Delivering Successful Enterprise Ecommerce Projects
• Webinar Recap: The New Ecommerce Dilemma: Buy, Build, or Leverage?
• Integrating Enterprise Applications with Ecommerce Systems: Free Webinar
• Using the Force at Online Market World + Webinars!
• Connect With Elastic Path at COLLABORATE 09

The dynamic replacement is certainly cool But what if you deliberately mixed in some sold out products in your emails?

My first retail job was selling shoes in the mall. When the mall was “dead” and the store empty, we would begin to make a mess. We’d pull shoe samples off the shelf and throw them all over the floor. The idea was people browsing the mall are more likely to enter a store with activity than one where the sales girls are leaning over the counter tapping pencils and blowing bubble-gum.

In a way, using Sold Out labels in an email creates the impression the store is busy and successful. Not unlike when real estate agents list sold homes in the newspaper.

This would make a very interesting test, and I wouldn’t be surprised if click through is high on sold out items — we humans always tend to desire what we can’t have.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Could Personalized Cart Promotions Boost Conversion?
• Show Off Your Product Knowledge in Retail Email
• 5 Ways to Handle Returned-to-Stock Items
• Usability Review: The Sharper Image
• Multi-Store eCommerce: 4 Stores - 1 Checkout

Can’t see video? Visit this post on the Web.

Along with Faberge shampoo, the “Tell 2 Friends” adage has gone the way of the Dodo. In the Age of Twitter, it’s more like “Tell 2000 Friends.”

Consider this Tweet from Bazaarvoice CMO Sam Decker. Over 2000 of his followers potentially caught this tweet: “On hold too long with Zappos. I think my expectations are higher after hearing so much about their customer service.”

Zappos customer service did catch that tweet, and followed up swiftly with a coupon:

“Impressed @Zappos_Service saw my tweeted issue and emailed me a coupon as an apology. How many companies do that??”

And now I’m sharing the story with over 8000 Get Elastic readers.

Using Twitter for Customer Service

Consider watching Twitter in real time for mention of your brand name. It’s as simple as heading to http://search.twitter.com/ and typing in the terms you want to watch. You can even search like this:

“linda bustos” OR “get elastic” OR “getelastic” OR “elastic path” OR “roxyyo” OR “elasticpath”

Have your customer service reps keep a tab with the search and check every so often, or use a desktop client like Seesmic Desktop that will alert you for every instance of your tracked words.

This is also an example of how Twitter can be faster than email or phone communication - offering it as an option for Twitter users to contact your customer service reps directly rather than blasting a tweet to everyone can help avoid rants in the public forum.

Quick response is optimal, but any response is better than no response. How you handle positive/negative tweets is up to you, but the first step is to create that feedback loop so you can hear what people are saying about you.

You may also like these similar posts:

• 5 Tips for Testing Emails [Video]
• Circuit City Plugs Into Social Networking
• Bloggers Digest - 12/14/2007
• Tips for SEO Friendly Affiliate Programs
• Too Many URLs Spoil the SEO: Fixing a Common Ecommerce Duplicate Content Problem

Research from eye-tracking specialists Bunnyfoot and Think Eyetracking show that a model’s eyes influence your eye movement:

Bunnyfoot, via GrokDotCom

Think Eyetracking, via GrokDotCom

When conducting email tests, often the variables considered are subject lines, headlines, time/date of delivery, offers, call to action buttons, prices or featured products. But as Bryan Eisenberg suggests, you should treat a model’s gaze as a testing variable.

Though this research has been known for a while, most ecommerce creative using human models use the “here’s looking at you” approach:

Or the “looking in the opposite direction”:

With the occasional “looking at something”:

While I find the research fascinating, I’d like to see eye-tracking studies that compare when a model looks head-on vs. at a headline vs. at a featured product vs. at a call to action button — combined with actual impact on conversion and average order value / revenue.

Anyone?

You may also like these similar posts:

• Why You Should Always Be Testing: Interview With Bryan Eisenberg [Video + Summary]
• Should You Use Large Images on Category Pages?
• AB Testing Case Study: The Dangers of Overreacting
• Webinar Recap: I Know I Should Be Testing, But…
• Love Your Landing Pages - Webinar Recap

For example, Organize.com has used a pop-up coupon for first time visitors, offering $5 off if you buy something during your visit (not on your subsequent visit).

Here’s another offer for first time visitors (I used a different browser):

Whether these pop-up incentives are a turn-on or a turn-off for your customers is something you’ll have to test.

A few things to keep in mind if you explore this method of first-time-visitor personalization:

Should You Address “First Time Visitors” as Such?

Visitors that use different computers, browsers or who regularly clear cookies will show up as new visitors even if they’ve been to your site before. Same goes for visitors who visited some time ago whose cookies have expired. When these customers repeatedly see “Welcome first time visitor!” - what does that do to your brand? Does it become spammy?

And because offering discounts to first time visitors is technically price descrimination, it might put off some who think “What about us returning customers? Are we chopped liver?” You can still offer discounts without mentioning “first time visitor” as Organize.com does in the second example.

Incentives are No Substitute for A Clear Value Proposition

If you’re going to use pop-ups, why not split test an incentive vs. a clear one-sentence explanation of why the customer should buy from you and nobody else? Give the first time visitor a compelling reason to stay — especially when customers can easily find coupon codes in search engines for you or any of your competitors.

Don’t forget, it’s important that your UVP/USP (unique value proposition AKA unique selling proposition) is clear on your website for all visitors.

Deliver What You Promise

Test your coupons often to make sure the process works. The worst thing you can do is “forget” to apply or honor the coupon code at checkout. First time visitors are far less likely to ever return if they perceive they’ve been deceived.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Saving Sales With Triggered Coupons
• Price Guarantees: No Substitute for A Unique Value Proposition
• PPC Myth Week Pt 3: Kill Keywords That Dont Convert
• How Much is Your Coupon Code Box Costing You?
• Boosting the Value Proposition With Media Mentions

Let’s define the difference between:

Low prices: Retailer in general has lower prices than other online retailers or less than the products are priced offline. Examples: Amazon, Wal-mart, Tigerdirect, Overstock etc.

Low Price Guarantee or Price Match Guarantee: Retailer agrees to match the price of a competitor if the customer finds the item cheaper elsewhere. Subject to restrictions including lowest advertised price, US only, online only, in-stock only, exact model number etc.

110% Price Guarantee: Retailer promises to beat a competitor’s price by 10% or X% before or after the sale.

The Pros and Cons of Price Matching

These policies assure the customer you’re not trying to price gouge and will honor requests to at least match a competitor’s offer which is usually a customer’s expectation. And most retailers expect customers to be too lazy to comparison shop anyway.

They can also save returns post-sale, though most policies I’ve looked at actually restrict price match to pre-sale. When Amazon discontinued its price match policy, this customer simply returned his item.

But there are more cons than pros, including:

1. You interrupt the selling process, risk that customer never coming back.

2. If you encourage customers to start searching elsewhere, you take the risk they find a competitor with a better shipping rate, better product selection, better site usability, better prices across the board, and actual unique selling proposition (that’s attractive) or find the product available at a physical store.

3. If you simply match prices, why not just buy from the other guy? Saves the customer contacting you and waiting for your price match approval.

4. Reading price match requests, manually checking competitor prices and responding to them takes up customer service resources.

5. You condition your customer to be price focused rather than value/service when dealing with you.

6. You have to be very clear about your terms and conditions - which customers likely never read through or fully understand.

7. In this economy, many stores are going out of business or will take a huge hit on a loss-leader. Others sell refurbished goods which the customer doesn’t understand is not the same as non-refurbished.

8. Your conversion rates / ROI for various marketing channels gets messed up. Your Adwords may be driving a lot of traffic that leaves and returns to your site as direct type-in traffic, a browser bookmark or subsequent keyword search. Because most analytics credits the last referral, you can’t properly attribute success to keywords that referred the customer in the first place (without special software / hacks). Ditto for email / banner / affiliate / insert-marketing-channel-here.

Many retailers will only honor the price match before the sale, but a bigger issue is disgruntled shoppers who find a lower price after they’ve bought from you and seek a price adjustment. At least the price adjustment keeps the customer happy (and if issued as a credit may encourage a repeat visit or just a pissed off customer). Your attribution isn’t muddled and you are guaranteed the sale - it already happened.

What About 110% Price Guarantees?

This one is a bit more interesting from an economics perspective. Theoretically, if retailers really don’t want to budge on their pricing, they should all have 110% guarantees. This discourages competitors to lower prices because it only encourages the customer to buy from a retailer who will beat that price. If all retailers adopt the 110% guarantee and keep prices at full MSRP (manufacturer suggested retail price) the playing field is level again - no one wants to risk advertising a sale.

Of course this isn’t a perfect theory. It depends on the customer being fully aware of all retailers’ prices and policies. And we know most products inevitably go on sale. Unless retailers sit down for a pow-wow and agree on a markdown schedule, there’s going to be variation in prices.

There is something psychologically powerful about a 110% Price Guarantee. It’s not merely a price match - it’s a “we value your business so much we won’t be undersold” message. It speaks to the fear “what if I find it cheaper somewhere else” and assures you “we’ll take care of you.”

But there’s a major downside to 110% Price Guarantees. You can get burned by resellers who’ll find an uber-low price, buy up all your stock with an additional discount and resell it on eBay at a profit. Combine that with a free shipping offer and you lose big-time. Trust me, it happens.

Price Guarantees - No Substitute for The UVP

There are certainly psychological benefits to offering a price match or offering to beat competitor prices. It’s a marketing thing. It’s a customer service thing. It’s a loyalty thing. It’s part of your value proposition, if you offer such a guarantee.

There’s also plenty of reasons not to do them.

Whether you decide to use them or not, please understand price matching is no substitute for a unique selling proposition / unique value proposition. And don’t confuse Unique Value Proposition with your tagline / slogan either!

Further reading on value propositions:

Powerful Value Propositions (Webinar) by Marketing Experiments

The Value of a Unique Value Proposition by Bryan Eisenberg, ClickZ

Resources for Optimizing Your Value Propositions by Hunter Boyle, Marketing Experiments Blog

How Strong Is Your Value Proposition? by Linda Bustos, Get Elastic (yep that’s me)

All posts tagged “Value Propositions” on Get Elastic

You may also like these similar posts:

• How Strong Is Your Value Proposition?
• Convert First Time Visitors With Coupons
• Classic Closeouts: A Classic Case of a Clear Value Proposition
• Saving High Dollar Sales: A Great Example of Triggered Email
• 8 Ecommerce Loyalty Program Ideas

Outlet Stores

Zappos doesn’t frown upon ordering 3 sizes and 3 colors of a shoe to try on, with 365 days to return unworn merchandise. If returned items are no longer carried on Zappos.com or come back damaged, Zappos sends the soles to its (physical) outlet store. Other retailers have outlet sections on their online stores.

Ebay/Amazon Marketplaces

Tapping into high-traffic shopping sites like eBay and Amazon is a great way to sell open-box/slightly damaged merchandise.

Returned to Stock Category

AltEnergy lives its renewable energy philosophy with its Open Box/Returned to Stock category:

Down-selling on Product Pages

I’ve never seen a merchant “downsell” its own stock before (well, other than Amazon promoting marketplace offers), but CSN Stores shows relevant returned items on product pages for huge savings:

Giving Back to the Community

Mountain Equipment Co-Op is not necessarily doing this but it could tap into its own Gear Swap community to sell merchandise it can’t advertise as in “new” condition.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Emails Using Calls-To-Auction
• 5 E-tail Strategies for A Tough Economy
• Merchandising Usability: Better Ways to Display Product Recommendations
• Manufacturer Saves Stock-Out Sales With Partner Referrals
• Amazon Product Ads: Good Idea? Bad Idea?

Office Max takes another approach - show the coupon box with a link “How do I get these?”

When you roll over the box, you see this:

Promo codes are available to email subscribers - an incentive to opt in to the email list, whoopee! I think this is rather brilliant.

Unfortunately, Office Max doesn’t link to the email sign up in the box. Fair enough, you want the customer to complete the transaction. You could add an opt-in checkbox on the cart summary page that doesn’t hijack the customer out of the checkout process.

Another hiccup is the email sign up is only accessible from the home page. Perhaps putting it in the header or footer would make it easier to find, or would increase sign ups when people land on the site on a product page.

There’s also no way for the customer to enter a promo code right away without signing up for email and waiting for the first code. Worst case scenario, customer defers the purchase until they can get a promo code and abandons cart.

Hat tip to Jason Billingsley for spotting this.

You may also like these similar posts:

• How Much is Your Coupon Code Box Costing You?
• Reducing Anxiety on Cart Review Page: Show SKU Thumbnails
• Free Shipping: Got It? 10 Ways to Flaunt It
• How To Prevent Viral Voucher Disaster - A Lesson From Littlewoods
• Have You Mystery Shopped Your Site Lately?

Facebook Connect is a way to “take your online identity with you all over the Web.” It’s an example of websites sharing data with each other to enhance the user experience with each Web property.

Could this concept work in an online shopping context? Particularly for personalization?

Last summer, Amazon introduced Checkout by Amazon. Using IP-recognition, Checkout by Amazon allows retailers to provide Amazon’s over-81 Million customers the option to checkout with 1-Click using their Amazon account information. Like PayPal and Google Checkout, Checkout by Amazon is a way for customers to retain their privacy and checkout faster. But with Checkout by Amazon, retailers can also show Amazon cross-sells and up-sells to earn affiliate commissions.

But what if Amazon started sharing what it knows about a customer’s browsing habits and purchase history with other retailers to better personalize the shopping experience? When an Amazon customer lands on your site, your personalization tool would connect with Amazon to show cross-sells based on past history. Example: customer bought Sony Playstation, you’d serve up Playstation accessories and games, rather than other console brands on the home page.

• Customer wins: better personalized shopping experiences on external sites
• Retailer wins: better merchandizing ability to new shoppers
• Amazon wins: Amazon could offer subscriptions to its service for retailers (you don’t think Amazon would do this for free, do you?)

Of course privacy is a concern, so it would be opt in like Facebook Connect:

“Would you like to connect [Online Retailer] with your Amazon Account for a more personalized shopping experience?”

(Buttons) YES, Connect Me / NO, Thank You / Tell Me More

By proceeding, you are agreeing to Amazon Connect Terms of Use. By using [Online Retailer], you also agree to the [Online Retailer] Terms of Service.

Logged in as Linda Bustos (Not you?)

The idea is not “here’s something that Amazon could/should do.” Rather, I ask the question - what are the opportunities now and in the future for personalization — will there be sharing of information between businesses? Will web users embrace such sharing?

What do you think?

You may also like these similar posts:

• Amazon Checkout: Do You Really Wanna Get In Bed With Amazon?
• Amazon Ditches Better Together for Bundles
• ShopTogether is Live Chat Help on Steroids
• Search Within A Search - Good Idea?
• Multi-Store eCommerce: 4 Stores - 1 Checkout

Can’t see video? View the post at Get Elastic.

In the presentation I mentioned a few websites, tools and blog references and as promised they are listed below:

SplitTester.com - calculator to determine if test is statistically valid
http://splittester.com/

Istorez.com - browse by topic/holiday/season, retailer, category
View entire campaigns of competitors, get inspiration, build swipe file of design, copy and headlines
http://istorez.com/

Sample Size calculator
http://tinyurl.com/sample-size

Track offline conversions
http://tinyurl.com/offline-tracking

At the event, I was asked to clarify what “honeypot addresses” are but did not address it in the video, so I’ll do it here. A “honeypot” address (also known as a spamtrap) is an email address designed only to receive spam. Sometimes this is an account someone uses to fulfill the email field requirement in certain forms to receive certain offers (admit it, you’ve got one). It can also be an old address that has been abandoned for a while that is deactivated, and then re-activated to catch email senders who continue to send to old lists. More details here.

Later in the evening, the group discussed email cadence (the frequency which you email) and how long is too long to wait to email someone. The Bronto Blog has an interesting article on the issue of “email shelf life.”

You may also like these similar posts:

• Golden Rules of Introducing Sister Sites by Email
• Free Holiday Email Marketing Resources
• 13 Ways to Categorize Gifts in Holiday Emails
• Bloggers Digest 2/15/08
• How Did Target Miss My Inbox?

Agenda

• Understanding what models are available
• Understanding your ecommerce needs
• Finding the right model for your enterprise

Understanding what models are available

Choose the Model:

Image Copyright ©2009 B2C Partners. All Rights Reserved. Selecting the Right eCommerce Software in Six Weeks or Less

• Custom - Enterprise Software (Buy or Build)
• Console - Software as a Service (Lease Technology)
• Crew - Full Service Providers (3rd Party End to End Solution)
• Catalyst - Small Business Solutions (Starters), less than $5Million in revenue online

Every new market starts from “Build”

• A small number of pioneers started to build ecommerce applications for their internal use
• Web services companies started to develop ecommerce functionality for their clients (shopping cart etc)
• Some started to productize their solution

At first choices were limited to Build vs. Buy decision. With the introduction of SaaS (software as a service) solutions, the decision became more complicated.

SaaS (Software as a Service)

“Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a software deployment and subscription pricing model in which an enterprise application is delivered and managed as a service by software vendor to meet the needs of multiple customers simultaneously”
- THINKStrategies, Inc.

SaaS examples:

• Email marketing
• Payment Gateways
• Shipping services
• Web2 Community Services
• Fraud detection
• Rich media (streaming)

Vendors like Amazon or Demandware offer a complete set of ecommerce services in a hosted solution. SaaS solutions are priced on a subscription basis, often based on the number of users or transactions.

Leveraging existing enterprise systems

The model you select will have a degree of each of build, buy and leverage. If you’re doing SaaS, you’ll still need some integration with your existing systems like order management, CRM and others. You most likely will use other 3rd party applications as well - web analytics, customer reviews etc. These may also use the SaaS delivery model.

SaaS pros and cons

Pros

• Fast to market
• Lower upfront cost
• Easy to scale with demand
• Continuous enhancements via ongoing updates and upgrades
• No additional hardware and lower internal staffing requirements
• No worries about upgrades

Cons

• Penalized for success (pay more for more traffic, revenue etc)
• Cannot innovate on your own pace, features you want may not be on their roadmap
• Difficult to integrate with internal systems
• Security concerns (Firewall, for example)
• Full dependence on SaaS vendor
• There may be some compliances issues that will prevent you from using SaaS

Buy pros and cons

The buy model still requires you to do some custom development and integrate with internal and external systems.

Pros

• Feature rich packages
• Continuous investment by vendor into new features and enhancements
• Time to market slower than SaaS but significantly quicker than build
• Some prebuilt integrations may be in place
• Vendor support with operational issues
• There are SI and developers with previous experience
• Robust and well tested and used system

Cons

• Expensive
• You may get more features that you actually need, features you want may not be on their roadmap
• Monolithic solutions that may be difficult to adopt, may be hard to integrate with existing IT systems
• Complex application to learn and manage
• Locked with vendor solution, difficult to switched if not satisfied
• Pace and freedom to innovate are limited
• May not fit your unique requirements

Build pros and cons

Pros

• Build exactly to your needs
• Take the full advantage of internal systems
• Be unique in market place, competitive advantage
• Fully leverage your previous investment in ERP and other internal systems
• More abilities with existing brick & mortal experience

Cons

• Longer to implement than SaaS solution
• Requires knowledgeable IT staff or SI (systems integrators)
• Initial cost is higher than SaaS

What is an ecommerce framework?

An ecommerce framework is a system providing feature rich ecommerce functionality that can be extended by your internal IT team, system integrators, or vendor.

Pros

• When using an ecommerce framework you can easily select what modules you want to use and take full advantage of existing Enterprise systems like your own order management, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) etc
• You have the advantages of build without starting completely from scratch - it’s a good jumpstart
• You can still leverage additional 3rd party SaaS vendors
• Get benefits of buy solution - development, testing, support, upgrades

Cons

• Longer to implement than SaaS
• May require more time building if really innovative feature
• Requires knowledgable it staff/ SI
• Cost initially is higher than SaaS

What is a hosted managed model?

Your ecommerce services are hosted and managed by a vendor but with the option to take it in-house at any point. Brings element of SaaS into operational model.

Pros

• A middle ground between SaaS and custom build solution - custom built for you, not shared across other customers
• You have an option to move solution in house at later date
• More freedom to innovate
• Less load on internal IT organization
• Does not require internal IT skills
• No operational risk or overhead
• You can do a combo between build & buy
• Easy to scale with demand

Cons

• Still limited control
• Not as easy to integrate with internal systems as with in house hosted solution
• Security risks

Understanding your ecommerce needs

Assessing your requirements and resources

Complexity

Consider how your ecommerce needs may change over time (at least 3-5 years ahead).

• Do you have single or multiple ecommerce initiatives?
• What does your organization sell? — Single catalog or many different types of products and services?
• How will you deliver the ecommerce experience?
• What type of ecommerce? B2C, B2B, Both?
• Evaluate your ecommerce ecosystem. Do you plan to provide ecommerce services to your vendors, partners, customers, or resellers?
• How different are those offerings from your own?

Uniqueness

• Do you have a unique business model, selling channel, or product?
• Are you creating an innovation to stay ahead of your competitors?

Integration

• Internal
• ERP (Orders, pricing, catalog)
• Content management systems
• Customer relationship management

• External
• Analytics
• Tax calculation
• Product reviews

Urgency

• Do you have a current solution?
• How much time to you have to develop a new solution?
• Will this ecommerce solution be rolled out to one or more business units all at once or one at a time?

Strategic importance

• How strategic is ecommerce to your success?
• Is time to market critical to your success?
• How fast will your ecommerce needs evolve?
• Are you taking a global or local approach?

IT budget

• Do you have enough budget (i.e., capital and recurring expenses)?
• Will this cost be shared amongst different departments?

IT skills

• Do you have an experienced IT team that can drive ecommerce initiatives?
• What are your IT policies on in-house development?
• Do you have trusted SI or partners that you can rely on?

Your ecommerce expertise

• Have you managed online stores before?
• What is your organization’s experience in online marketing, site optimization, customer support?
• Will you need to coordinate online and offline channels?
• Are you aware of ecommerce regulations
• Do you have experience using Web 2.0 social networking?

Finding the right model for your enterprise

When to use a hosting solution (SaaS)

When your competitive advantage is not your unique ecommerce features but your unique brand, merchandising, and marketing.

Example: Snowboard retailer + Power Reviews

Customer leveraged PowerReviews’ AnswerBox solution to supplement its existing content and successfully answer a wide array of customer questions that hadn’t been adequately addressed by their standard descriptions.

They selected a SaaS model because:

• It got them light years ahead of where they were (urgency high)
• All the heavy lifting was with the SaaS vendor (IT skills low)
• PowerReviews provided guidance for best practices (expertise low)

When to buy

Example: Apparel retail chain + ecommerce platform

The apparel retailer had multiple brands and had never sold anything online. Ecommerce was another way to serve customers and capture any lost revenue from out of stock items in bricks-and-mortar stores. The buy model worked for them because there was low complexity and the ability to be unique.

When to build

Example: Travel booking site + ecommerce solution

The client was a travel agent with 20,000 users daily. They needed a web interface for their clients to search, book trips easily while advertising trips based on particular trip requirements. And back-end systems to manage deals and other business-related data. They also needed an interface for suppliers’ to fill in their offers.

The solution was a custom build using J2EE, Oracle 10g, and Solaris technologies. The build solution allowed them to fulfill many complex and unique requirements. Build was the best choice because:

• The subject of sale is compound (e.g. package consist of multiple components like hotel reservation, airline tickets, car rentals) and these components need to match each other by multiple factors (time, price, destination etc)
• System has many external dependencies (registration systems like ITA, SABRE, PEGASUS) which change and require performance tuning – often means deep refactoring
• Multiple different pricing systems that reflect individual agreements with hotels, airlines etc
• Specific Cache of requests – the system is caching individual items (e.g. registration in certain hotel) and operates with cached or original items depending on business flows

When to use an ecommerce framework

Example: Aeroplan + Elastic Path

One of the most successful airline loyalty rewards program in the world, Aeroplan wanted to expand their loyalty program and promote non-air rewards. Aeroplan selected an ecommerce framework because it had complex and unique requirements:

• Dealing with redeeming Aeroplan mile points (as opposed to dollars) for non-air rewards
• For the non-air rewards they had to amalgamate hundreds of partner products into a single catalog
• French and English

When to use a hosted managed solution

Example: Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store + Elastic Path

Elastic Path won exclusive rights to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympics Winter Games online retail program. We are running the Vancouver 2010 online store under a hosted managed model:

• Created the online store with the Elastic Path framework
• Did front end work (design)
• Purchasing
• Merchandising
• Marketing
• Customer Service

Questions

Talking to IT budgets/pricing, are there some estimate budget ranges between models?

You can only compare relatively - can’t talk in absolute numbers because it depends on your requirements. SaaS is typically for lower budgets, then buy, then build the most expensive.

Can you elaborate on the hosted managed model?

Hosted / managed is where you buy the system or license the software, operated by vendor with dedicated hardware and also can be modified for you. For example, Elastic Path does the Vancouver 2010 Olympic store. The Olympic Committee decided to go with the hosted/managed model because they didn’t have the IT or marketing/merchandising/operations staff to carry the project.

In your opinion, what business model will be most prevalent in 2009?

There are many different customers looking for ecommerce solutions - so it really depends whether you are enterprise or middle market - there are 2 different trends. Smaller retailers / mid-market in this economy are going toward SaaS and enterprise with complex needs they’ll use a build from scratch or framework to build on top of to meet the needs that SaaS can’t address out-of-the-box.

Can you think of any risks going with a SaaS offering? Do you see SaaS offering sufficient flexibility for ecommerce projects in the future?

SaaS vendors are working hard to increase flexibility of their offering but the limitation of the model is the majority of their customers may not need/want the innovation. You don’t want to disrupt the happy situation of customers by building things they will never use but their service fees pay for the development of. Another risk is that your SaaS vendor may face financial trouble and if they go out of business, you have no option to quickly take in house. You’re dependent on your vendor.

Does Elastic Path have a European presence?

Yes, we have a UK office to serve the EU.

How do you determine ROI for ecommerce projects?

How strategically important is this decision for you? Are you looking for a solution that will help you grow your business? Ecommerce is still in early stages of growth so many companies look to new markets/new offerings and ecommerce allows them to do it. Your ROI depends on many factors. The time to recoup the money you invested and see ROI also depends on how complex your solution was.

What are the technical aspects of open source and Elastic Path?

EP is built with best of breed open source components (Java based). Your developers don’t need rare skills to work with it. In general, Bill Mirabito in Selecting the Right eCommerce Software in Six Weeks or Less classified open source as “Catalyst” - you can use open source if you really need to have a simple solution and faster time to market.

Next Webinar

Deliver Successful Enterprise Ecommerce Projects

A successful ecommerce project is a beautiful thing. It can raise revenue, reduce cost, and strengthen a brand. Unfortunately, the visibility of ecommerce and the breadth of stakeholders can amplify the usual project risks—availability of IT skills, understanding of business needs, scope control, accurate estimating, and so on.

So whether you are replacing your platform or just adding a new recommendations engine, how do you make sure your ecommerce project succeeds? We sifted through the results (and in some cases, debris) of ecommerce projects over the last 10 years to bring you this “on the ground” view of what to do to turn the odds in your favor.

In this one hour webinar, Elastic Path COO, Gordon Janzen, and Atul Jain, HCL Technologies Associate General Manager, will help you answer the critical questions for delivering a successful ecommerce project:

• How are ecommerce projects different from other IT and marketing projects?
• What business and project management elements are especially important in ecommerce projects?
• What technical elements predispose an ecommerce project for success?
• What are the Top 10 things to do before project kickoff?

Presenters:

Gordon Janzen, Chief Operating Officer, Elastic Path Software
Atul Jain, Associate General Manager, HCL Technologies

Thu, Apr 30, 2009 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT

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