To educate their employees, they have sessions created and presented by GameStop, as well as vendor specific sessions that are presented by the various game and hardware manufacturers.    The expo’s presentations are created by publishers directly for an audience of store managers, who will return to their GameStop stores and promote the upcoming titles.   The exclusive access these store managers receive is a perk that few other retail employees receive. 

Beyond the educational benefits, attendees are given swag including full versions of games, signed autographs from celebrities in the industry and other cool toys. 

Anyone know of other retailers that do this?

One thing I’ve noticed that I’m not excited about it the number of sessions led by vendors. Shop.org has been very good in the past about focusing on retailers giving the presentations and this year seems like they’ve taken a 90 degree turn. There are still quite a few retailers presenting and lets hope they keep a tight hold on the vendors from pitching their wares for the hour.

The show kicks off Monday night. If you are at the show, drop me a note and I’d love to meet up with you.

HP has a fantastic lab and was kind enough to give us access to their top of the line systems.  They have a giagantic XP SAN with I think it was 172 TB’s of storage.  We had a set of three large Itanium servers to run a 3 node RAC Oracle config on and used about 16 app servers to pump orders in via web and interactive interfaces. 

I snapped some quick shots of the lab and some of the Superdome systems they have available in the lab. 

Next week, I’m off to Vegas for Shop.org!

Avinash Kaushik wrote a great post about tracking offline conversions at Tracking Offline Conversions: Hope, Seven Best Practices, Bonus Tips.  I interviewed Avinash last year about his book in this post – Q&A with Avinash Kaushik, Author of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.

On Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, they talk about their latest improvements in indexing Flash content in Improved Flash indexing.   I still wouldn’t use a great deal of Flash for an e-commerce site, but it’s good to know that they are making progress on improving this area.

For me, I know it’s the Newegg ad.  It provides more insight to what the sale has to offer and there’s more to intrigue me to go deeper.  The Circuit City ad just tells me they are having a sale.  Being that’s it a holiday weekend, I know every retailer out there has some sort of sale, so it doesn’t do much for me.

Thinking about the contrast of these two email campaigns inspired me to write these tips for creating content for your e-commerce email campaigns.

1. Provide value
   If you want a customer to read your email and engage with you, provide value.  This can be as simple as providing sales information on multiple products that may be of interest to the customer.  It can also be articles on how to get the most out of a product that is sold, or links to the top rated products in a category or popular conversations in the retailers social forums.
2. Be relevant
   When recommending products to your customer, recommend products that are relevant to them.  If you have order history that tells you the type of products your customer is interested in, then suggest products in the same categories.  As an example, no retailer has done a better job at recommending products via email to me than Amazon.  I have bought at least a half dozen books that I had no intention of buying, but Amazon recommended other books on the same subject that I purchased from recently and I followed through and purchased the recommended books.
3. Provide expertise
   Provide expertise when recommending products either from your merchandisers that know the products well or from the wisdom of crowds.  One of the best uses of reviews or rating data from a service like Power Reviews, is being able to take the ratings and use those positive reviews in your selection process for the products you recommend.
4. Be considerate of your customer’s time and attention span
   Enable the consumer to quickly peruse the email and decide if there is something of interest to them.  If it’s cluttered or vague, it’s difficult to understand the value proposition and make a decision in 5 seconds or less.  Avoid vague offers like “15% of most items in electronics”.  This requires the consumer to come to your site and hunt around for the products that qualify for this discount.   Instead show one of the products in the category and the impact on price and then tell them that the discount applies to other products in the category with a link to a product assortment page only showing those products that the discount applies to.

All of these items require more effort on the part of a retailer.  If you go through the effort of providing content that your customer wants to see, it will convert into additional sales and a better customer experience for the long term.

Here are the main factors, check out the document for the background behind each.

1. Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.

Even though the topic is mainly centered around experience through an application, it also has great information if you are working on customer experience in the store. 

I particularly liked two parts in the later half of the presentation where they talked about the Peak End Rule and The long wow.  Enjoy!

My wife was speaking with our daughter’s 4th grade teacher and she told my wife that she wanted to have the class read The Westing Game before school was released for the summer.  Unfortunately, the school library only had a few copies so my wife and I decided to purchase the needed books and donate them to the school.  We spent the following weekend visiting a few book stores and bought all of the copies they had, but we were still short about 10 copies. 

My wife logged on to BN.com and added the 10 copies to her cart and Barnes and Noble reported that they had them in stock.  She selected expedited delivery which is 3 days or less.   Upon BN’s receipt of the order,  they promptly sent out an email telling her that the books would ship the following day.  This was great and my wife was pleased knowing that the product would arrive before the end of the week so the class could begin working on the book soon there after.

Two days later BN followed up with an email saying that due to “an unexpected delay” they were unable to ship the merchandise for 1-5 business days.

Due to an unexpected delay, we are unable to ship the merchandise listed below in the time frame indicated in our previous email.  We anticipate that your merchandise will be shipped within the next 1-5 business days. (Please note: business days are Monday through Friday, excluding holidays observed by the Post Office.)  As always, you will not be charged until this merchandise ships from our warehouse.

 

We assume that you still want to purchase this merchandise.  However, if you would like to cancel this portion of your order, you may do so online at:

www.bn.com/orderstatus.

 

Please accept our sincere apologies for the delay.

 

– Barnes & Noble

Disappointed at losing 3 days in the process, my wife started working on an order with Amazon.com.  Miraculously,  two hours later we receive another email saying that our order is packed and ready to ship. 

Thank you for shopping with us.Your order is now packed and ready to leave our warehouse. The details of your order appear below. Within one business day of receiving this email, you may track the delivery status of your order at *UPS Tracking Link*.

When a tracking number is provided, please note that we’ve assigned it before giving the package to the carrier. Tracking details for your shipment may not be available immediately. Some carriers do not have weekend pick up service, and will not process tracking information until the next business day following the completion of your order. You may need to check the carrier’s site periodically for updated information.

We appreciate your business and look forward to you visiting us again soon at http://www.bn.com.

– Barnes & Noble

 

So at this point my wife is left with a WTH moment and not sure whether to trust the first or second email.   Fortunately the package arrived a few days later, but she was left with a distrust of BN and their ability to execute on an order.   The next time she goes to place an order, she’s going to have to wonder if BN will be able to ship the product or if she should just go to Amazon.com from the start. 

I’m not sure if this was caused by inaccurate inventory data or a poor order management system/process for tracking the status.  But this is a basic level of capability that consumers have come to expect and not being able to provide this greatly affects the customer experience.

When determining your priorities for your online strategy, if you can’t provide the basic level of capabilities, then raise the priorities for these improvements and lower the priorities of the latest greatest trends going on in the online world.