I’m a huge fan of top lists and believe every ecommerce site should slice and dice top lists in as many ways as they can imagine. There is no bad top list and no limit to how many you can create. Today I visited aveda.com and discovered 5 new ways to slice a list:
- Travel Favorites
- Award Winners
- Pro Picks
- Editor’s Picks
- Recently Launched
… Nice. Here is a screenshot:
Related articles: Our top 10 most desired items, Gift shoppers are different, Top sellers, Top seller lists
While on the oakley.com I wanted to check out what they had for prescription glasses so I went to their search box and keyed in “prescription”. For the search the results page highlighted a related New Release, Top Seller and Featured Item. Brilliant idea. Below that they also presented a result set of 96 items:
Much later, after several other clicks, I discovered Oakley also has a homepage for prescription glasses, see below:
What I don’t understand is why my search couldn’t just take me to this page.
I believe the soul of a brand should permeate through every instance of customer interaction, not just a silly TV commercial. Patagonia, it would seem agrees. I signed up for their catalog and this is what their Thank You screen said:
This is one of those moments when I wish I was flexible enough to kick my butt. I simply wish I had thought of this first. Shopflick is a new startup in the online video-shopping marketplace. The big advantage Shopflick has is that it’s the first startup in this space propelling it to instant fame. The site is still in beta but I look forward to playing around with it once my application is approved. There are many things that are awesome about the Shopflick business model:
- Virtually untouched market Shopflick will benefit from a land grab
- Video adoption is increasing rapidly, good timing
- Shopflick does not carry inventory, producers do
To read more about the company visit the TechCrunch article.
This morning TechCrunch reports Yahoo! plans to enter the analytics space with the purchase of IndexTools. Microsoft and Google already have their own analytics solutions.
InternetRetailer reports Coremetrics, part of the analytics big 3 has just raised another round of capital. This time London-based private equity firm 3i has invested $60 million into the company bringing total funding to $111 million. In the past year Coremetrics increased its customer base by 46%.
No etailer likes it when a customer unsubscribes from their emails. I am always curious about new email marketing strategies so I subscribe and unsubscribe at a fairly regular rate. After reviewing few email samples I scroll to the bottom of the email and click the unsubscribe link. I am then taken to the retailer’s unsubscribe page. What’s odd is that I don’t recall any instance where an etailer enquired about the reason of my unsubscribe?
Instead of just loosing me the etailer should ask questions like:
- Are you unsubscribing because the content was boring?
- Are you unsubscribing because we sent too many emails?
- Are you unsubscribing because we were sending promos you were uninterested in?
- Are you unsubscribing because you’ve found a better site?
- Other? If other please specify
If you are aware of examples where etailers have asked such questions please share.
Related articles: Email marketing: The next generation, Email Marketing - Subject line and Yelp is not a Dating Site, But…
Marketers looking to unearth zappos.com’s secret sauce should analyze the table below:
RedEnvelope has been struggling for a year now. Their stock has plummeted 97.2% and now Wells Fargo is tired of bankrolling them. I think she’s ready to pass on now.
Sitting from here it looks like RedEnvelope was a solid business so I’ll be curious to find-out just what went wrong. If you have any ideas please let me know.
I have always believed that to succeed online etailers need to think about doing things that are impossible offline. Woot.com exemplifies this idea with their ‘one product a day’ format because they know no retailer can economically copy them. But then we also have instances were retailers flip the game, noticeably Blockbuster’s foray into the DVD rental market which was exactly the same as Netflix except customers could also walk into stores for new DVDs.
Anyway, back to my story.
This morning I came across a video for the new Borders store and it’s bloody awesome. The reason why this will work is because instead of fighting online retailers Borders has created a store with features unavailable online. Have a look:
