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. 

I came across a useful free tool for creating heatmaps of your website design at Feng Gui.   The site allows you to type in your url or upload an image and it creates a heatmap based on what it thinks a real human would be most likely to look at.  The application uses a ViewFinder algorithm to create a saliency map based on objects in the field of view that stand out relative to neighboring items. 

Recently Feng GUI released the results of a study that they say proves the accuracy of the application.  According to the study, the heat maps produced capture 70% of what a traditional eye and mouse tracking application would show. 

I see this tool being useful for early and often testing of new layouts and designs.  Because it’s much quicker and cheaper than running a eye tracking test with multiple subjects, you can use this application at each iteration of a design to see if you are getting the desired results.   I don’t think it can be a true replacement for eye tracking, as the heat map only produces a static moment in time showing the highest areas of interest.   It doesn’t give you any insight whether humans will have difficulty navigating your site, understanding your product details pages or filling out the checkout form at the end of a transaction. 

Circuit City’s

WSJ: Why do you think the new, smaller-sized store will improve Circuit City’s profitability and sales growth?

Mr. Schoonover: It offers a different experience. Customers can touch and compare, and learn how to use the most complex products and services that we sell.
 
It is a more efficient use of space. Typically, our stores are 35,000 square feet, and less than 18,000 of that is selling space. The new prototype is 20,000 and has 17,000 of selling space. This fundamentally changes the economics. We can get higher revenue per square foot, higher-margin dollars per square foot, and we can find additional sites that weren’t necessarily available for our old box.

I’m a big believer in high interactivity shopping experiences, so it will be interesting to see what they do with the new store format.  The main concern I have is the smaller stores.  Will this mean a smaller product selection?  Will they turn into the Radio Shacks in the malls?  It’s almost as if they are positioning themselves between Best Buy and Apple, and I’m not sure they can build an identity between these two and flourish.   Apple has set the bar high for shopping experience and Best Buy’s product selection is better than all except for Fry’s and a couple regional players. 

WSJ: How is Circuit City’s multichannel approach — store, Internet and call centers — any different from the approach of its two bigger rivals, Best Buy and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.?

Mr. Schoonover: We have a culture that is beginning to cooperate and work together to provide a customer experience that is different and better.

One example is our “24/24″ promise. Order online, and we’ll have your purchase ready for you at a store in 24 minutes. If not, we’ll give you a $24 gift card. Our technology is unique and allows us to make that promise. Another is content. We have product reviews by leading consumer magazines. We have a whole explanation on what you need to make this new digital entertainment world work.

The 24/24 program that Circuit City has produced is one of the best implementations of Buy Online, Pick Up In Store, however they have to figure out how to integrate it into the rest of the store.  Recently, I bought a hard drive for my wife’s computer via the 24/24 program.  The BO/PUIS experience was great, service was fast, and it was waiting for me when I got there.  When I walked into the store, I saw a DVD on the rack that I’ve been meaning to pick up as well so I took it to the counter with me.  When I asked the store associate to add it to my order he explained that he couldn’t.  I figured it was a systems technology issue since the web order had already been paid for on the web, so I asked for the associate to just do a second transaction after we were done with the first.  Surprisingly, he said that they could only do 24/24 orders at that counter, and that I should go to lane 1 to check out for the DVD.   This is obviously a dissappointing downturn to the experience and I wonder how many lost opportunities this has presented for Circuit City.

 The other thing I would have liked to hear in Philip’s reply was that Circuit City would be capitalizing on a wider product selection available on the web with the ability to deliver to store; or order from the store and deliver to my home.  As Murphy’s Law dictates, as soon as I replaced my wife’s hard drive, her DVD burner went out and I had to go shopping for a new one.   So I went online to CC’s website and looked for a DVD burner with a SATA interface.  They had one in the web catalog yet out of stock, and none in the stores.   So I switched to Newegg.com where they had 26 different burners available from about 9 manufacturers.  Multichannel retailing to me is about giving the consumer the best benefits of each channel and choice of how & when I get the product. 

TD: What do you think the business will look like in five or 10 years?

Mr. Schoonover: I think it could be a great services business with retail roots.

I think it could be the best and most convenient multichannel retailer in our sector.

And I think we can have a very different but very cool store experience.

I thought this was an interesting reply.   I’m with him on these three, but I think he should reverse the order of the answers.

A few other interesting pieces on Circuit City this week.

Circuit City’s Schoonover Just Doesn’t Get It  - Seeking Alpha

Circuit City prototype comes to Houston

Changing the label at the bottom left corner to Retail Vertical will show the top use of Flash by retail category instead.

Update: I’ve moved the visualization to after the click as it was too much on the homepage.

The data came from my top ecommerce sites mashup.