Retail, in the eyes of the everyday customer

The amount of people taking you up on a given offer on your site. Take rate is used to measure micro-conversions. These can include:

- Newsletter subscriptions
- Downloadable materials such as ebooks
- Case studies
- White papers
- RSS subscriptions
- “Add to Friend” links for social networking sites
- Up-sell and cross-sell offers added to shopping cart

Personal shopper (personalshopper.com) is a great idea and I believe the concept has potential to grow into a significant retail disruptor. Unfortunately, as of now, the site is still very primitive. But watch this space. Very soon they or another similar idea will take off. The missing ingredient is strong editorial. What the retail world needs is a site where products are featured and reviewed by non incentivized teams. Once I find a site that understands my persona, makes recommendations for me and educates me along the way I would be happy to use them as my main conduit for shopping.

Posted online is a brilliant lecture on Successful Web Analytics by Avinash Kaushik. One of the points he makes (correctly) is that companies care a little too much about what goes on their home page. This is such a heated topic that departments fight over home page real estate and as a result inner pages get little attention.

But what most retailers forget is that 80% of site visits are generated through search engines; so the determination of your landing page is made through the search query entered and not you. Retailers need to start looking beyond home pages and focus on other (more important) objectives like findability, brand message consistency, call to action completion and site experience.

According to a survey of visitors to major internet retailers of books, music, movies and games, Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) is the most reliable and responsive on the web.

I have talked abut the ‘Grand Retail Unified Theory‘ in detail and very strongly believe this is where the future of eCommerce lies.  So far most eCommerce strategy has been focused on building a stores and jamming traffic through SEM/SEO.  This is redundant because it leads to a 4% conversion rate.  At best.  Back in the day when paid advertising was cheap no one really cared if click-throughs were unqualified, but now, advertising costs have rationalized and the glory days of blanket advertising are numbered.

But this is good because it has re-highlighted leading edge thinkers like Avinash Kaushik and Eric T. Peterson who rightly believe that the true power of the online medium lies in its ability to reveal ‘intent’.  What they are saying, in effect, is that the online experience should be a close approximation of customer aspirations.

Another idea that further reinforces the grand retail unified theory is presented below:

Retail supply chain is hugely sophisticated.  Most retailers know exactly where a specific product is: store, warehouse, transit etc.  So with such high levels of sophistication why not bring some of that magic online.  While browsing Macys.com every non first time visitor should be able to see which SKU’s are available at the local Macy’s store.  In fact the site should have a feature that allows browsing of only store specific inventory.

Talbots.com attempts this by placing a tag called ‘find this item in a store’ but this is a global tag and does not filter by store.

Omniture just bought Visual Sciences for $394M. Details at: http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=785202

According to ComScore online sales in the third quarter rise 18 percent to $48.6 billion. Total e-commerce sales for the year are on track to hit $200 billion.

BuyCostumes.com started using video on their site last year. Back then it looked clunky and force fitted. 365 days later they have developed a better integrated experience. Video is still used for only popular items but customers seem to like the new site experience better because according to compete.com the ‘Attention’ on the site has gone up 7% from the same time-period last year:

Also, you can check out their video experience at: http://www.buycostumes.com/Search_All_video/Category/0/Product/10179/ProductDetail.aspx#

Bonus: Here is some interesting Halloween trivia:

- Halloween is a $5 Billion dollar a year market
- The average person spends $65 bucks on Halloween ’stuff’

According to ratings service provider BazaarVoice PETCO found that products without reviews have a 20.4% higher return rate than those with reviews, and products with 50+ reviews have a return rate that is half of those with less than 5 reviews. Full story here.

Tolerance Boost is net change in ‘Click Tolerance’ once a customer reaches the site. For example, Buy.com has a powerful video review section. So if the Buy.com Click Tolerance is 7 and a browser clicks on the product video link this does not automatically drop click tolerance to 6. Depending on the customer experience at the video section click tolerance could shoot to 9 or drop to 5.