Retail, in the eyes of the everyday customer

Mint.com is an award winning personal finance site that helps 900,000 US consumers track their spendings, and they may have a valuable piece of data for retailers.  I know most retailers are very glum these days with the worsening market reports.  But we should listen to Mint’s CEO Aaron Patzer because he has access to hard facts.  Aaron’s message to all retailers: “your customers are spending $400 less each month than they were a year ago, have burned through half of their savings, and on average have taken on an additional $5k in debt.” This is nothing to rejoice over but it’s certainly not Great Depression bad.  Every retailer (online and offline) will have to work a little harder every month but if you can keep your existing customers and push just a little harder to get a few more conversions then you should be able to keep sales from going down.  Those that can hold on till next year will have a disproportionate advantage when consumer spending picks up and half the competition is out of business.  Hang in there.

I was on the Wish List page on tenderfilet.com and noticed a search box.  Being a curious monkey I entered ‘h’:

tenderfilet.com wish list search

I was surprised to see this list pop up.  The screenshot below is a partial screenshot of the results page:

tenderfilet.com search results

It has the customers full name and address.  Would you consider this a design flaw?

If you want to check this out on the live site click here.

It sucks when an interested customer stumbles on your site only to discover that the item they were just about to buy is out to stock.

This morning I was reading the hugely popular Outblush blog where they profiled Karacoma Sofa.  After reading the article I visited conranusa.com and realized the product was “Temporarily out of stock”.

I wish the message would have said “Temporarily out of stock — drop your email address and be the first to be notified upon availability”.

This would be a win win for the retailer, either they would get a future sale or walk away with the consolation price of my contact information.