Retail, in the eyes of the everyday customer

The more filter options you offer, the more confident I’ll feel in finding the perfect product.  Here are the filter options backcountry.com shows for winter jackets–

Not only is this filter format helpful, it gives backcountry.com a hidden benefit.  When I landed on backcountry.com I was ‘generally’ looking for winter jackets.  After seeing the screenshot above I realized I wanted a windy weather jacket.  Backcountry literally changed my search criteria.

MetroKitchen.com is a site that specializes in cookware.  They have a simple, yet very effective Gift Ideas page …

… where shoppers select a relevant option and see a list of highly targeted gifts.

Opportunity: On “For wine fans” page (for example) MetroKitchen.com just lists products–

Which means I have to click the first item, read description, hit back button, click the second item, etc.  I wish they had presented Wine Gifts in this format …

… so the shopper could read a short description for each product and then visit product page to make purchase.

Gumshoe.com has a unique merchandising strategy.  They list their ENTIRE inventory of 100s of shoes on one page.  Play around with their filter options–

http://gumshoe.com/storefront/products

I’m a huge fan of top lists and believe every ecommerce site should slice and dice top lists in as many ways as they can imagine. There is no bad top list and no limit to how many you can create. Today I visited aveda.com and discovered 5 new ways to slice a list:

- Travel Favorites
- Award Winners
- Pro Picks
- Editor’s Picks
- Recently Launched

… Nice. Here is a screenshot:

Related articles: Our top 10 most desired items, Gift shoppers are different, Top sellers, Top seller lists

On the homepage of gardensalive.com visitors are greeted by the questions: what do you want to accomplish today? and what pests do you want to control today?

There are products that sell well and then there are those that people desire. And while any retailer can list their hottest sellers have you ever seen one list their top ‘10 most desired items’?

Before we jump ahead, let’s define a desired item. A desired item is:

- An item on whose product page customers spend inordinate time
- An item that tends to get ‘forwarded to a friend’ most often
- An item that is most frequently tagged on an external sites like thisnext.com
- An item that tends to get the highest number of shopping cart abandonments
- An item that is most often added to customer wish lists

To sum it up, these are items that people dwell over, but never manage to pull the trigger on. And thanks to the wonders of online measurability we can now capture this behavior on a real time basis.

As I’ve said before (here and here) every marketer at an ecommerce site must spend time thinking up clever top 10 lists. You can build this ‘desirability’ list by using any combination of weighted averages from the list above or add other attributes to build a fully custom desirability list that better represents your product-line and shoppers.

For an etailer like vintagetub.com, where products tend to be higher consideration items, this would be particularly effective. Premium products are different and people who buy them are not necessarily as drawn to what sells the most as they are to what is desired the most.

What do you think? Do share.

Update: Mike Johnson had a great addition:

Instead of 10 most desireable items, I’d like to see the 10 coolest uses/installations (in the case of the bathtubs) modifications, etc. to products–I think the case study mode is more effective at getting to the “me too” state. Example: http://www.shedshop.com/testimonials/shed_contest/2008/index.html

Orvis.com has a really cool feature called ‘shop my room’. This is a truly new shopping experience because it allows users to step inside distinctive home collections and see how products look in natural settings.

One of the biggest benefits of online shopping is that I can organize my consideration set based on cost, popularity, organic or any other parameter. So why most retailers don’t put this front and center on their sites is unknown. Folica.com is one eTailer that does do this really well. Notice the sorting options – Featured, Top Rated, Most Popular, New Arrivals, and Clearance:

Once you click on one of the top categories (Tools, Hair Styling, Hair Care etc) the inner page presents all sorting options again. Sorting is front and center on this site.

Low to high, high to low, list by name are all standard product refinement filter options. But for listing sale items an additional option is needed: Discount. The discount option should re-sort the list on the basis of discount, either $ or %.

An example from limitedtoo.com:

Gift shoppers are different. They just want to buy popular products.  So when you lead your gift buying audience to your gift page only list well document, extensively reviewed products.