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

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I loved working in retail. The pace of it, the volume of goods, the customers, the camaraderie of the team. Using early Psion series 2 hand held computers to count stock while earning some student cash in the food department at Marks and Spencers in London’s King’s Road. Inspecting the shopping baskets of celebrities. But what I remember most clearly is the quality of display and service to which we aspired. For example:

• ensuring that the display ends were always full, so that when you entered the store it looked well stocked, even though it quite often wasn’t
• monitoring stock levels of the top 20 lines (smoked salmon, champagne, caviar, that sort of thing) to avoid customers’ dinner parties being ruined by the absence of the crucial ingredient
• placing new lines in optimum locations so they can be seen
• opening additional checkouts if queues started to form
• having staff always on hand to help customers find the foie gras
• a consistent layout, flowers and bread at the front, cold chain to the right, groceries to the left, freezers at the back, so you know where you are
• customer services provided in a prominent location

Why then, do I find online retail so universally uninspiring? Because very little, if any, of the above has been translated into the online space. Food retailers from upmarket Ocado to value-driven Asda have websites that ask you to wade through lists (optimistically labelled as aisles) and then to scroll through endless items with miniscule thumbnails. It doesn’t have to be like this. I see no reason why the general idea behind the iTunes store or the BBC iPlayer site cannot be applied to grocery shopping, presenting things in an intuitive and appealing way. And when it comes to delivery, extra vehicles should be allocated to continue availability at the most popular times.

That said, some retailers are trying. Same day delivery for the instant gratification generation in London and half a dozen American cities from Amazon is more like it. And aggregators like Kayak for travel and confused.com for car insurance show the benefit of innovation and making things quick and simple for customers.

But the sad bottom line is that for the shopping any household needs to do most often, for the food and the washing powder, the experience is depressing. We could fill a shopping basket with ideas to make things better.

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Brilliant though Google and other search engines are at bringing some level of sense and order to the billions of web pages out there, they all still rely almost completely on our ability to look for something in the right way. Keywords are really that – KEY!

Luckily as the amount of content online grows so does the average level of skill of people using search engines. Two years ago the average number of keywords entered into Google’s search field was not much more than 1.5, today it is more like 3.0. We are being more specific when we search which is a good thing – finding a million or more results is hardly a badge of honour now is it?

In spite of this there remains the ‘Did you mean?‘ problem or the ‘Did we mean?‘ problem as I would describe it.

As an agency advising our clients on SEO or search engine optimisation one of the toughest tasks is convincing businesses to think like customers and ensure the way they write about themselves online does likewise. By all means ‘build it’ but they won’t be coming unless the way you talk matches the way they search!

Take Last Exit and PaperVision for example. We are a Papervision3D agency and would like to be found as such when potential clients search for this kind of service online. Because PaperVision is a new technology however the challenge is to make sure we talk about it in the right ways. The correct description for this Flash plug-in is PaperVision3D but a quick check within Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool reveals a whole host of ways people are looking for it – papervision 3d, paper vision 3d or even pay per vision 3d are all commonly used. 

This wouldn’t be a problem but as I say above search engines rely on keywords in a very exact way. Try it yourself – a query of ‘paper vision 3d agency‘ will deliver very different results to one of ‘papervision3d agency‘ regardless of the fact both may be intended to find an agency supplying PaperVision3D.

Granted this all sounds very anal indeed but the truth is that Google and the other search engines are very anal indeed! Words, and the exact way they are used, are all they have to go on when routing that important query of yours to a handful of those 3 billion web pages!

The solution is writing for the web, making frequent reference to important keywords, and writing like the customers you want to attract would ask for you.

The solution is really not rocket-science, or should that be rocket science!

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We all have some sense of the extent online research for product purchases and recent research in the US shows that 6/10 people make the internet their first choice for research items ultimately purchased in the brick-and-mortar-store. More an dmore retailers, therefore, are eliminating web-exclusive prices or extending them to instore pricing.

Some stores such as Staples, are offering kiosks where shoppers can peruse their websites and garner product information and reviews. The opportunity this offers is an ‘infinite aisle’, where shoppers are exposed to the stores full inventory regardless of what the store might currently have n stock. In response to this, it’s interesting to note that loss of sales to competitors due to stockouts measures $93 billion in 2008. Two reasons to have kiosks in store: 1) offer more information and empower your customers and 2) avoid losing customers.

The question this beckons is whether response policies, particularly regarding shipping and handling, need to be in place to ensure that custom is not lost, even with the ‘infinite aisle’ and, perhaps perhaps more importantly, whether retailers should consider how their website are planned and designed to allow easy or even seamless transition to an in-store kiosk application environment. The users extended cognitive architecture is completely different in this situation and as we research the psychographics as part of determining site strategy, instore browsing and researching probably should be properly taken into account.

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After enjoying a lovely weekend in the Hudson Valley with my wife, we stopped by our old Friends Sean Nutley and Gregory Triana at their kitchen accessories store ‘bluecashew – Kitchen Pharmacy‘, tucked away in the beautiful town of High Falls. I first met Sean and Greg back in ‘99 when we were sharing a space in Chelsea Market; me with my old company Deepend and Sean and Greg as SBN, an event production and PR company. We got along instantly and decided to barter services; they threw our launch party, which was awesome, and we helped re-brand them as bluecashew and develop their first website. They still use the logo that my best designer of the time Angela Lidderdale created.

So, as usual, our vist turned into a shopping extravaganza. We’re no different from many people in modern day America, we take great pride in the stuff we own and enjoy the shopping experience itself, granted, but the fact is that every time I visit bluecashew, I find products that I have longed to find but couldn’t as well as many products that are simply better than the bulk standard utensils I’ve purchased from Bed Bath & Behind. Viking products are not easily come by in my local stores and are bloody awesome. Beautifully designed and built to last. But, Joseph Joseph, being from my home country and fantastic, utilitarian designers create true objet d’arte for the home. I almost don’t care what ‘it’ does, I just want it!

Sean and Greg have assembled a phenomenal shopping experience for all kitchen fiends out there by assembling the very best products based on functionality,durability and quality and of course, beauty. They’ve recently launched their inventory online and are currently wading through the sea of search engine optimization. Go check out the online store and let me know if you agree. Better yet, take a short vacation and drive (just 2 hours) up to the Catskills and see the store for itself, while enjoying one of the country’s most beautiful national parks.

OK, like the car posting not strictly in market but, Hey, I mentioned their website didn’t I?

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