Retail, in the eyes of the everyday customer

At this point it is becoming painfully obvious that the online marketplace is quickly moving from the niche to the mass. In terms of profitably at least. We’ve already seen ice.com raising $47 million to capture the jewelry ‘niche’ market, and then etsy.com raised another $27 million to capture the niche ‘handmade’ market. And then last night Amazon announced their ‘all cash’ $300 million dollar acquisition of audible.com.

Related article: Online consolidation

I love subscribing to newsletters from my favorite online retailers. iStorez.com is a service that takes all those HTML e-mails and puts them online where they can be indexed, searched, and organized. The site also offers personalization and social networking.

This is one sexy service because it takes focus away from the retailer and gives it to the customer, where it belongs. So when you are in a shopping mood and vaguely remember a sale for flat-panel TV just go to iStorez.com and review the offer then.

ThisNext.com is a social shopping service that I suspect will be a really big in a few years. The idea is simple: registered users review and link products sold on various e-commerce sites. The hope is that the wisdom of the crowds would eventually bubble up the best products. As a consumer my only critique is that I wish the site had more of an authoritative editorial review in addition to customer posts. I’m not sure if etailers shy away from expert editorial content because it is expensive or because they have data that shows it does little to push the revenue dial. Anyway, the reason I wrote this post is because ThisNext.com has just raised $5 million of VC capital and I hope they use some of that money to beef up their own editorial content.

After 6 years serving the $1.7 Billion dollar online cosmetics market Gloss.com (180 on IR 500) has shut down.

Gloss.com was run by the $7 Billion dollar cosmetics giant Estee Lauder. Traditional retailers are quickly finding out just how competitive the online arena is. Here is a chart comparing traffic between Gloss.com and other beauty product etailers:

Domestications.com is a monster e-commerce site with over 621,000 unique monthly visitors (according to compete.com). Here is a quick run on errors I noticed on the site.

Login. I tried playing with their ‘forgot login’ page:

Next page asks me for the answer to the reminder question; how do they even know what my username is?

Error page. I should have known.

Counter top appliances page: How exactly do I buy the stand mixer with bowl cup (you will notice the item is not for sale)?

What exactly is the extreme bed-in-a-bag? The site promises a price of $49.99 but the add to cart options don’t add up to that. In fact, no combination adds up to $49.99. What exactly are they selling on this page: extreme bed-in-a-bag, curtains or valances?

If it seems I am being over critical please factor in that I found these errors in under 5 minutes on the site. I was not really looking for anything in particular, just generally reviewing the buying interface.

Another case study: Wilsons leather

Allrecipies.com is a great site and I often use it for recipes and cooking instruction. The other day I found a dish called anniversary chicken. Only problem was that I didn’t have teriyaki basting sauce. I wish the ingredients were listed in a format where I could mark a little x on an item I did not have and then have the site recompute and list all chicken dishes that did not need teriyaki basting sauce.

Being in the eCommerce world I’ve bought several eCommerce related books through Amazon. Still, I was a little surprised to receive this email:

QVC is the second most profitable network in all of TV land. They make their money selling products, lots and lots of them. But I was a little surprised to see a little section on their site called Model’s Closet, here they actually sell the products worn by their presenters. Is this too much or is QVC a retail genius? you tell me.

Ultimately your online storefront is just that, a storefront. Many retailers forget that good retailing is so so much more than having a slick eCommerce site. Fortunately we still have companies like L’OCCITANE en Provence. I don’t know of other retailers that do this but L’OCCITANE provides braille labeling on their products. Why? because respect is one of their core tenets. This includes respect for the environment, consumers, suppliers and employees.

They have just inspired a new customer, me.

Related article: And what about love

Amiestreet.com is a great music site I discovered through TechCrunch. But they send too many emails. I love them but I need them to slow down and it’s a pity their email only highlights an unsubscribe option when what I really want is an option that lets me reduce emails to once a month. Now I’m sure I could visit their website, login, go to my account and make those changes (may be) but I am far too busy and far too lazy to do that.