According to a Marketing Daily article by Sarah Mahoney [May 11], online retail is “bo-ring.” Well, I might go a little further; it’s uninspired, technically driven, over-analyzed and sterile. It’s become so grounded on SEO that all brand and character has been stripped and the experience has been commoditized where price is king and peer review the court jester – is it real? For many the experience relies on price comparisons from multiple sites and cross checking reviews to ensure their authenticity and validity. And that’s it.
Sarah’s article details how dissatisfaction with an online retail experience detrimentally affects sales and a mere single point increase in satisfaction netting out a 9% increase in revenues! Surely the same rules apply in the brick an mortar stores, so why then have we not translated basic principals to the digital realm?
There are similarities here to hype-cycles where we have gone past the initial peak of online shopping and the industry has now settled into a plateau where a lot of investment is made to make incremental advances in revenue and ROI is beginning to decrease. Shopping sites have become amazingly search engine optimized and offer the ‘searcher’ easy and rapid access to whatever s/he is looking for, buffeted by an over emphasis on predictive analytics; previously you bought x, therefore you might like y, or: other people who bought y also bought z, etc. etc. The question is how effective are these tactics versus the ‘annoyance’ factor? For many and especially the casual browser there doesn’t seem to be much on offer and the experience is obfuscated by a system that thinks it knows what you need or want and continually wants to ram it down your throat.
In many ways, it reminds me of the web fifteen years or more past, where everything internet was the fiefdom of IT folks (still is to many companies!). No strategy, no design, no ergonomic appreciation and no sense of ‘human’ problem solving. Just built sites that conform to a technology strategy that, apparently, we must abide to if our stores and products are to be found, not to mention to make our media companies’ lives easier. The heuristic approach that analysis of user behavior data has taken us has has left us uninspired, uninterested and unwilling to buy – at least at your store if you have failed to innovate.
Where we started with the almost completely useless, we surged forward to comprehensively utilitarian. We have developed shopping sites that are powered by some amazing technology and driven by incredible science. What is surprising is the divide between brand-based sites that focus almost entirely on experience and the current state of play with transactional sites that focus completely on conversion.
The problem is exacerbated in part by a combination of two factors. The first is the economic downturn that seems will maintain an effect on spending in the months to come. The other is the commoditization of many digital production services, namely web design. There are so many off the shelf, or hosted solutions for inventory and shopping that offer retailers low cost access to a presence online and, hopefully, revenue. So less inclination and cheap or even free tools equals “Bingo”, no? No. Template sites are boring, bad for your brand and where they might have made you sales before, seemingly will decline to do so in the future.
Now with the data that is being derived by folks such as Foresee Results, we are going to see a shift in the digital retail approach. Design for experience will begin to dominate as it does in many industries, and it will and must lead innovation. Creativity will force new technologies, approaches and processes for search to be effective and most importantly, will lead retailers to unique and highly effective digital solutions. As online retail continues to grow, there is an immediate opportunity for brands to stake a bigger claim by building trusted, enjoyable and inspirational experiences driving impulse and, of course, conversion.
See the article in Marketing Daily
