Retail, in the eyes of the everyday customer

There are hundreds of ecommerce best practices, and it’s hard to remember all of them.

SeaEagle.com embodies the spirit of BetterRetail.  If you are new to BetterRetail no need to read archived posts– just head over to www.seaeagle.com.  Five minutes on the site will give you new insights for your own store.

Features I like best

• “180 day trial & FREE SHIPPING ON ALL BOATS” available through 10/31/2009. Time limit on offer encourages visitors to take action.  If they don’t want to add to cart they can easily call their toll free number:

• Allows customers to self-segment:

• Fantastic use of customer testimonials (written and video) and loads of customer submitted “in use” photos:

• Video confidence builder:

• Advertisement confidence builder:

• Multiple micro-conversion opportunities:

micro-conversion 2

Micro-conversion 1

• Amazing product pages. Let’s review this page as an example: http://www.seaeagle.com/MotorMountBoats.aspx?cl=HomePage.

1. Great tittle: “Ideal for Fishermen & weekend Boaters on a budget”
2. Quick bullets for competitive shoppers:

Quick Bullets

3. Emphasis on limited time sale offer for impulsive shoppers:

Instance 1

Instance 2

4. Lots of customer submitted “in use” pictures + testimonials for humanistic shoppers:

Testimonial

5. Lots of content + downloadable PDF spec sheets for methodical shoppers.

[Note: To learn more about humanistic, methodical, impulsive and competitive shoppers head over to grokdotcom.com ]

6. Product pages have been cleverly constructed for all kinds of potential buyers:

a.) SE 9 Startup Package for first time buyers
b.) SE 9 Fisherman’s Dream Package for the serious fisher
c.) SE 9 Motor Package for premium buyers

Let’s review the first time buyer experience.  This is the product page:

Everything here is perfect but what I find particularly innovative is that Sea Eagle understands a first time buyer might be interested in a used boat.  They even show how many they have in stock (3) and give great reason to buy one:

Why buy used?

7. Final reassurance on add to cart:

Final reassurance

Other Case Study: Moosejaw.com

Few weeks ago I was having an informal chat on online strategy with the owner of Kidbean.com, which is a specialty etailer for organic baby clothes.  The site already pulls in thousands of monthly visitors and Melissa (the owner) was not looking for a redesign so we brainstormed on ideas she could implement herself, right now.

As Melissa told me the story of KidBean I got really excited because this completely changed my opinion about the company.  Anyone can set up an online store, few have an authentic story.  A site visitor could visit “About Us” to hear snippets of her story but we wondered if we could summarize it (elevator pitch style) and place it right on the homepage for everyone to see.  The other nugget to jump out was that kidbean.com doesn’t carry brands that fail their fair labor, environmental, veganism, and safety standards.  This was a huge ‘aha’ moment because it completely changes the context of kidbean.com.  It’s no longer just a store where people add products to a cart but rather a filtering system that hand picks products for a very specific customer profile (Vegans).  Kidbean.com helps parents save time by performing the filter function for them.  This adds a premium value to the store but a first time visitor has to dig to discover this differentiator.  We decided to include this page link (in bold) as part of the homepage elevator pitch content.  10 minutes after our call Melissa had implemented the changes and the test was officially live.  In essence, all she did was add a snippet of text to the homepage.  One month later I inquired about results and received this email:

PS: I have the store owner’s permission to reproduce this email.

Google ‘hot sauces’ and hotsauceworld.com is the first result that pops up.  For every hot sauce seeker hotsauceworld.com is a mandatory stop and every month over 15,000 fellow seekers land here.  Being that hotsauceworld.com gets all this organic traffic as a passionate hot sauce enthusiast I have a few suggestions.

Idea 1

Build a list of five recognizable hot sauces (Maybe: Tabasco, FRANK’S RedHot hot, Sriracha, Cholula Hot Sauce and El Yucateco Green Mexican Hot Sauce).  I would then hire a professional hot sauce taster (they exist for wine and coffee so probably also for the hot sauce world) and ask him/her to classify each sauce against this palette of five.  So, hot sauces under Tabasco are similar in taste to Tabasco.

Whenever someone makes a purchase I’d add samples of the five base sauces to the order.  This way shoppers can familiarize themselves with base flavors.  Any sauce that has a flavor outside of the five sauces will have it’s own category called “unique”.  The five flavors I’ve chosen are random, I’m sure the store owner could do a better job picking representative base flavors.

Idea 2

Hotsauceworld.com currently ranks sauces on four levels: Hottest, Hot, Medium and Mild.  This means nothing to me.  What I describe as hot might be medium for you.  The most popular hot sauce in the US is Tabasco it’s taste and hotness is universally recognized.  I would use Tabasco as my average hotness point and categorize each sauce on a gradient scale above and below Tabasco.  Now I would use our hot sauce expert from Idea 1 and have him/her rank every sauce on this new scale.

I’ve been seeing quite a few Moose Jaw stickers on vehicles lately, so I visited Moosejaw.com to see what all the fuss was about.

1) The first thing I noticed was that the web site had a personality.

Notice the top right corner + message under the ‘sign in’ link:

About Moose Jaw section – notice the highlighted section:

2) But they also utilize innovative marketing:

3) They’ve figured out how to use their evangelists. Below is a snippet. The site has over 1,110 customer submitted, Moose Jaw branded photographs.

4) But to really experience how Moose Jaw stands out visit their return policy section. Link below:

http://www.moosejaw.com/moosejaw/dept.asp?s_id=0&dept_id=241

Personality isn’t just fun and games, it actually lifts sales. Plus if you have a personality it gives users an excuse to talk about you. In the last 6 months traffic to moosejaw.com has spiked over 51.3%. Not too shabby at all.

Other case studies: Domestications.com and Wilsons leather

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

Every day I visit one eCommerce site to do a quick audit (against a list of best practices). This morning I visited Bissell.com and found absolutely no shortcomings on their site:

Site traffic: 223,451 unique monthly hits – Good
Site navigation: above average
Product page: has product video – Great
Larger images: check
Features page: well designed numbered feature list
Widgets: compare list – Good
Documentation: positioned at a visible screen location – Good
Outgoing links: I noticed a small error here – product is listed at $169.99 on bissell.com but at $149 at the recommended online retailer – but this is a quick fix

Essentially the site is good, but is matching best practices good enough?

The marketing manager responsible for bissell.com probably does not own their ‘Pet Hair Eraser’ cleaner, nor does the designer who built this page, yet they are responsible for adding features that convert browsers to shoppers.

If I were the marketing manager I’d call or email customers who own the ‘Pet Hair Eraser’ and ask questions like: What about the store/website influenced the sale? – product description, price or a knowledgeable sales person.

I’d also enquire about features they found and liked after making the purchase. Finally, I’d thank them for their time by giving a generous discount on an accessory for their Pet Hair Eraser.

Background

Wilsons operates about 410 stores in the US. When Wilsons Leather realized after the holidays last year that its old web site lacked the pizazz to attract and keep customers, it decided to outsource its e-commerce platform. Now it serves customers with the latest online features at fractional operating costs and with an internal e-commerce staff of one instead of 8.

Strategy

The fact that Wilsons Leather has chosen to outsource their site might suggest it is a low revenue contributer despite getting over 151,000 monthly visitors. If the channel is not bringing in revenue independently I would focus on using it to leverage Wilsons 410 offline assets.

One simple idea is creating a ‘make list online, select offline’ interface. By moving focus away from buying online and redirecting it to a store visit Wilson might do a better job converting leads. To make this worthwhile (for the customer and business) two things need to happen:

-Value added incentive (for customer): The online store should allow customers to select from a range of designs/products online and then setup store appointments. This way even if a local store does not have a product it can be sourced for the customer to try out.

- Trackability (for business): if any sort of measurement has to be made this visit needs to be tracked. Fortunately just the act of building a list does the trick. Once the browser has built a list and booked a store visit a request is submitted to the store. The online session is now trackable. As a bonus now the sales contact can prepare for the visit.

Interface observations

- The store locator tab at the bottom of the home page only allows for a ‘by State’ selection. Why not allow people to directly enter zip codes?

- As we discussed getting shoppers into the store (in a meaningful way) is a key strategy. This interface does nothing for that:

If someone comes to this page straight from the home page we should inform them about the ‘make list online, select offline’ feature. I would not only measure how many clicked on it but also how many of those clicks converted into store appointments.

- The search result lists a number of Malls. I would link to those Mall websites also. The reason Wilson’s leather has a mall strategy is because they want to leverage on mall shoppers. Giving shoppers more than one reason to visit your retail store could improve ‘actual’ visits.

- I would also use the website to notify the store on other products the browser viewed during the session. This way if I also look at the Business and Travel section on the site when I walk into the store the salesperson could also ask me if I was still interested in leather bound notebooks.

- When I looked for ‘hats’ this is the above-the-fold result:

- The search for the keyword kids (which is a top navigation item) did even worse:

What do you think? I’d love feedback.