Retail, in the eyes of the everyday customer

Cover Plug is an innovative baby safety product and is available at the following etailers:

– thebabysgallerie.com
– chelseasroom.com
– wrapables.com

Each of these retailers has a different selling style.  Here are the three product pages:

– thebabysgallerie.com

– chelseasroom.com

– wrapables.com

Pick the design, layout and content you like best.  Now let’s see comparative traffic trends:

Now I know this is an isolated example and wrapables.com might have more traffic for a number of reasons (paid search spend, product depth, pricing strategy etc) but I am willing to bet that good design (and content) drives repeat visits.  Even if I didn’t buy the product today odds are I’ll remember wrapables.com over the other two.  That makes all the difference.

Related article: Same Product, Totally Different Brand Experience

I came across a delightful little store today.  Actually, I know nothing about them but the warmth of their homepage instantly made me feel conformable and built credibility.  See, instead of having boring sectional links zebs.com has used pictures of their employees.  Zebs understands something most retailers don’t, customers prefer shopping with companies that have real people.  Customers today are aware of how easy it is to setup an online store and are quite skeptical about the hundreds of stores that show up when you Google “gourmet barbecue sauce.”  Zebs.com understands that a first time visitor is in a skeptical state of mind and I think they do an excellent job dispelling that thought:

Another etailer that uses this strategy well is pangeaveg.com.  This is their homepage, notice the “Favorites of the Pangea Staff” on the top right:

I know Amazon.com owns a patent on “1-Click ordering” but what about their site design itself? Obviously Amazon.com serves as a great design inspiration for any ecommerce site but can I legally rip off their design?

This morning I came across an online store delphiglass.com.  This is not some small under the radar etailer, delphiglass.com is a vastly popular online store and according to Compete their site gets over 89,000 unique monthly visitors.  Here is where the story turns bizarre—

Amazon.com homepage:

Delphiglass.com homepage:

Amazon.com left navigation:

Delphiglass.com left navigation:

Amazon.com home button (mouse over):

Delphiglass.com home button (mouse over):

I tried to do some background work to see if this store is connected with Amazon but found no evidence.

And speaking of copy, check out:

Doesn’t humidi-pak.com look suspiciously similar to Apple’s older homepage? here, refresh your memory:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060106235740/www.apple.com/

– They still don’t let customers review products.
– Generic filter options – price, title and new.  What about – most popular, biggest discount, most gifted, VHS, etc?  They do have a Best Seller list but that sorts all titles, one can’t search best sellers within a category.

They have adopted the lowest common denominator with their eCommerce strategy.  Here is what I would have asked before undertaking the 18 month redesign -

- Why do people shop at ShopPBS.com? Why should they?

- Is it fair to charge $30 for a DVD? And if we can’t control price how do we create rich experiences to offset price?

- For someone who bought previously do we provide an incentive to shop again? Do we guide this customer to a product related to their purchase history?

- Why not let customers watch DVD trailers?

- Should we create subcategories for the “Business Management” section? example – Strategy, Change, Inspirational leaders, etc.

- Does the same architecture make sense for every section? No.  Business interviews are time sensitive – There is a video on “Winning Customers Through Savvy Sports Marketing” with Gary D. Forsee
 (CEO – Sprint Nextel).  Only problem is that Mr. Forsee has  been ousted from the company.

I believe copy makes or breaks a sale, but I also believe site aesthetics (design, IA, imagery etc) make or break a sale. It’s very frustrating to see that sites that fulfill criteria 1 fail in criteria 2 and vise versa.

Case in point:

Bonsaiboy.com: Unknown site with great copy and a shitty user experience

Redenvelope.com: A very well known site with superb aesthetics and worthless copy

I wanted to see how different retailers sold the same product, and so, for the sake of this study, randomly picked the Alpine CDE-9870 car CD system and compared it with 2 retailers specializing in car stereo systems:

- Crutchfield
- Car Toys

Both Crutchfield and Car Toys are established multi-channel players. Crutchfield mails out 6 million catalogs (Source: Hoovers.com) and Car Toys has 50 retail locations (Source: Hoovers.com).

But when it comes to shopping experience the sites could not be more divergent.

Read the rest of this entry »

CNBC started promoting their new website in the October – November timeframe and launched it on Dec 05, 2006 (according to archive.org). In the next 10 months traffic jumped 139%. 334,000 new readers have been added to their previous installed base of 200,000 readers.

So what does this mean?

CNBC is a news portal where content is expected to be king. Yet new design has given them access to more customers than what they originally had. If a design insensitive demographic has reacted this overwhelmingly to a free news portal imagine how they’d react to bad design coming from a commercial eCommerce site?

Before:

After: