An eCommerce Roadmap Whitepaper
Contents Merchandising; Sell, Up-sell and Cross-sell .................................................................................... 2 Product presentation – choose the option that‟s right for you ......................................................... 2 Manage Products - get the basics right ............................................................................................ 2 Related products – make it obvious! ............................................................................................. 2 Large product catalogues need a different approach..................................................................... 2 Rich Content Sells .......................................................................................................................... 2 Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – how to deliver real results ...................................................... 2 PPC – online advertising.............................................................................................................. 2 Organic search – takes time, but it‟s worth it! ................................................................................ 2 Let‟s get Social ............................................................................................................................... 2 Reviews– good or bad, they can deliver results............................................................................... 2 Mobile – the next big opportunity ..................................................................................................... 2 App or mobile or both? ................................................................................................................ 2 Cloud - everyone is talking about it .................................................................................................. 2 Multivariate Testing makes testing changes easy! ........................................................................... 2 Summary ........................................................................................................................................ 2
If you are considering launching a new transactional eCommerce site or revamping an existing site this whitepaper presents a number of key factors you should consider to maximise the success for your business. It is important to understand that people‟s expectations are changing. What was a good experience last year can look tired this year. This is understandable as people are exposed to more and more sites that are embracing new ways of interacting with customers. For retailers this means the online competitive environment is ever shifting.
Manage Products - get the basics right The basis of any eCommerce business is the products. Automating the process of getting product data from a backend fulfilment/ERP/WMS system into the eCommerce system seems simple enough but often doesn‟t work well. This is surprising as it is a regular business process to add, amend or remove products. All the cleaning-up of data and double entry just takes time and the amount of time wasted on such tasks can be substantial. By utilising techniques which allow for the seamless transfer of information between systems, including product data, inventory, pricelists, promotions and customers details, helps you to improve company profitability and allows you to redeploy resources. Staff can then focus on the business of merchandising, promotions or optimising the customer experience. For the reasons stated above, the attractive alternative to managing or maintaining product information in house, has prompted a large proportion of companies to seek the benefit of outsourcing services to product data specialists such as Brandbank and CNET. By utilising the information provided by 3rd party specialists, you can save time and money by not having to source product photography, summary data, and technical data and then continue to maintain the information on an ongoing basis. Again, this enables internal staff to focus on different elements of their role that can deliver greater benefit to the organisation.
Do the basics well. Get the product data flowing automatically from the backend systems into the eCommerce system.
Merchandising; Sell, Up-sell and Cross-sell Managing the customer experience so the customer gets what they want and you tempt them into buying more than they initially intended is a skilled art. Luckily online there are tools to help you do this well. Retailers know how to merchandise their products in store and via catalogues. Transferring the same level of insight and skill online is perfectly possible and with the amount of business intelligence data available in near real time there are plenty of opportunities to understand and then be creative. Product presentation – choose the option that’s right for you Category based product presentation is the basic norm which most people expect. This encompasses both standard categories such as Books->Fiction->Historical and special categories such as Sale->Books or Featured Offers->Summer Reading. How the products are displayed in a product listing presents an additional merchandising opportunity. It is best practice to give the customer the opportunity to change the product listing display to suit their preference, for example, price: high to low, bestselling or rating. However, how these listings work in detail can be adjusted to suit your business needs. For example, you might decide to manually boost a particular high margin item to the top of the listing with all the benefit that will have in terms of purchase volumes. You should be able to configure the default display to always display products that have got a price reduction at the top.
Large product catalogues need a different approach For retailers with large product catalogues it can be challenging to present an easy to use experience to the customer. Traditional static navigation becomes tedious to click down through multiple levels. In these cases faceted navigation/drill down can make a big difference.
customer the chance to see a particular item in use but also enables customer to take the shortcut and "buy the look" by purchasing a number of the items together.
Rich Content Sells If you just put basic product data on your site you don‟t give your customers much information on which to base a buying decision. If your competitors do it better they will sell more. My favourite recently was a site which had beds for sale but didn‟t have the dimensions available. If like me you don‟t live in a stately home where size isn't an issue this is a pretty big failing. So what does rich content mean in practice?
Faceted navigation shows at each click, the categories within a category and also the number of products in each of those sub categories. Faceted navigation can also work on multiple categories at once enabling users to select things like category, colour and price range all at once. This reflects how people think - I want a pair of black shoes, size 9 for under £80. Making things simple and reducing the number of clicks for the customer makes the experience more convenient and enjoyable. Related products – make it obvious! Many products relate in some way to another product. People who buy a laptop may well also be interested in buying a rucksack with a laptop pouch. Whilst these product linkages or accessories are self-evident to most people by presenting them together you make it convenient and tempting for the customer to consider buying the additional related product. Managing related products and accessories isn't rocket science but done well it can have a notable effect on average order value. Another type of related product placement is the "People who bought this also bought this" approach. This feels different to a customer as it has more the feel of a recommendation. Additionally, this approach has the potential to create a purchase recommendation that is not as obvious as the accessories approach. Lifestyle or solution merchandising can be a very powerful way of presenting products to customers. Presenting whole outfits in fashion retailing is the most familiar way in which we see products presented together. This approach gives the A full range of merchandising functionality can help you drive those all important business KPIs. Merchandising managers aren't usually short of ideas in how to merchandise their products, more often they are short of the means to do so.
Make your product data accurate, rich and relevant. If you have technical products with a lot of product data take some care to display it in a user friendly manner. Using categories for the data often helps to avoid long pages of technical specifications. If your product data is good you can also introduce a product comparison function. Use images. Pictures speak louder than ….. Ok, ok you've heard that one before. Use buying guides. It isn't practical to write wonderful prose for every product. What you can do is write a guide to help people to understand and select the right product for them for a given category. For example "Choosing a rucksack for backpacking", Don't forget video. Producing good quality video of things like product demonstrations has become easier. You don‟t even need to host the video yourself as you can use YouTube which, with its 3 billion views per day is a testament to people's desire for video. It is worth noting that YouTube has changed people‟s expectations of video as well. If the sound and picture quality is good enough, with well thought out and insightful information then you will be forgiven if the lighting isn't perfect. Customers don‟t expect Hollywood quality productions.
All of this content is a key strategy in making your content findable via search. More on that later.
Giving people the feeling you know something about what you sell will give them the confidence to buy.
Workout how you can enhance the content you provide to your customers. Make sure you have a sustainable internal process to ensure you become an expert destination site for your chosen niche. Plan your content strategy in conjunction with your search engine optimisation strategy to get the greatest value.
some links are worth more than others as Google will rate a link from a high quality site e.g. the BBC more than others. 70% or so of the ranking or importance of your content comes from the inbound links you receive. Choosing the right key words - You need to be realistic about this. It‟s very difficult to get to number one for generic terms such as „women‟s clothes‟ or „digital camera‟. That‟s why you have to think a little more strategically about which search terms make sense for your business. Many companies have a team of people dedicated to managing them, but if you don‟t have that kind of resource there‟s a simple solution: the 80:20 rule. Look at the products that bring in the majority of your revenue and profit, and concentrate on the 20% of products that bring in 80% of the revenue.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – how to deliver real results It is all very well having all your products on the web – but you need visitors as well. SEO is an often quoted acronym which has acquired a mystical aura. SEO is just a suite of techniques that include both business processes and technical best practices to ensure that your content and products appear at the top of search results. In short SEO brings you high quality traffic. There are two often confused parts to search strategies – paid search and organic search. Paid search is buying online ads usually on a Pay Per Click (PPC) basis and trying to optimise the conversions. This is the digital equivalent of putting an ad in a newspaper. Organic search is all about managing your site and content such that it is search engine friendly. PPC – online advertising PPC campaigns are a good way to get qualified visitors to your site. When someone types in a search in Google, Google delivers text ads along with the search results into the page the consumer gets back. What ad gets shown is determined by which business bought the keywords that were typed for the search, how much they bid compared to other companies, the relevance of the landing page etc etc etc. This way there is relevance – the consumer gets a relevant ad and the advertiser gets a relevant consumer viewing their ad. The advertiser only pays if the consumer clicks on the ad. Organic search – takes time, but it’s worth it! The search engines change the subtleties of the rules from time to time so optimising organic search over time is a movable target but there are some constant factors. The big factors in organic search are: Inbound links. If there is a link from an external site to content on your site then Google makes the deduction that your content is valuable. It works like a vote or a thumbs up for that piece of content. The more the better, although
Changing content. The content on your site needs to change regularly. Up-to-date content is seen as relevant, current content. Write your content for the keywords you want to be found by in search queries. If you want to appear at the top of the search ranking for “washing machine spares” then make sure you write content with those words in them. Human readable urls – Google ranks pages with urls that relate to the content of the page higher than those that do not. You should also consider that the more SEO friendly your content is the lower price you will pay to advertise. This sounds a bit strange at first but there is logic in it. Google wants its ads to be relevant for the consumer so that the consumer sees the ads as relevant information. If you want to buy the keyword phrase “washing machine spares” then the click through destination where the consumer goes when they click on the link in your ad (the landing page) should be about “washing machine spares”. If it isn‟t the consumer isn‟t getting what was expected. Google discourages this via a metric called the quality score by making the price for the keywords higher for landing pages that don‟t relate well to the ad link text. Of course, the greatest reason to make your ad text and landing page strongly linked is that it will maximise your conversion. Google is top of the heap but don‟t forget about Bing, AskThere and Yahoo well. in optimising your urls and is greatasbenefit content so people find you rather than your competitors when they search PPC campaigns, when managed well, can bring you high quality visitors. Above all SEO is a journey not a destination. Build it into your business processes. If don’t have the time and resources to do it yourself get some outside help. SEO is too important not to do a good job.
Let’s get Social Facebook is easily the biggest site in the UK with more than 16%1 of the total page views. Pause and think about that - one site has 16% of the total page views for the whole of the UK.
Reviews– good or bad, they can deliver results Reviews have become a standard element of the eCommerce landscape. The difference now is less do you have reviews but do they add value to the customer experience? Customers trust other customers more than they trust you. If used well, reviews are a great way of promoting your products and services.
Facebook generates nearly 10% of all upstream traffic to UK websites. Only Google generates more traffic. For many retailers this makes Facebook an important place to engage and generate business. The question is, how? Implementing the "Like" button on product pages is simple and lets customers who like your product post this on their Facebook wall for all their friends to see, which in turn generates traffic and sales for you. This is simple and requires no day to day investment by you. Thereafter you can create a "brand" page on Facebook. This is a place where you setup a profile of your business and post news or offers and answer customer queries. This is only useful if you build campaigns to recruit your customers as followers and thereby gain an audience to engage with. The important point here is that you need to proactively manage the Facebook community when you create a brand page. Be prepared also for people posting negative comments - if you handle this well you gain real credit for your customer service. Your brand page can become much more if it makes sense for your business. Facebook is also an application platform that lets you build social experiences to engage with people leveraging the Facebook network.
You can integrate Facebook into your overall communication and engagement strategy quite simply but you need to manage the community of followers well. The resulting traffic and purchase boost can be substantial.
1
Econsultancy, UK Internet Statisitics Compendium, May 2011.
However, too many retailers have implemented reviews just to tick the box. Having review functionality with no reviews is worse than not having the functionality at all - it leaves your site looking as if nobody can be bothered with what you do. To make reviews work you need to: Encourage people to review your products. Use the reviews to drive the customer experience. Lists of the most highly rated products appeal to people as a short cut to get the best product. Using quotes from the customer reviews and aggregated data provides fantastic marketing material to use in both online and offline campaigns. "97% of the bikes bought from us last Christmas got 5 star reviews"
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Reviews can build trust in your products and services in the eyes of customers. To gain the most value you need to encourage customers to review purchases as a part of your overall engagement strategy.
Mobile – the next big opportunity Mobile devices are becoming a significant opportunity for retailers as the technical maturity of both the devices and the systems available have improved dramatically and also become more affordable. In considering your strategy there are two main avenues you can travel down – Apps or mCommerce. Apps are the native clients you install onto your iPhone or Android phone. Apps provide a different feel to browser based experience. mCommerce is a browser based experience where you present a mobile version of your online store.
provide a specific mobile experience by re-using existing content and assets efficiently. Again focus on customer experience. The amount of data presented to a mobile consumer when browsing a site often undermines the user experience. Long pages with large images means there is a lot of data to download. Whilst the touch screen devices have increased in capability over the last few years the throughput of the mobile networks has not kept pace. As such users have to wait too long for pages to download often leading to abandoned browsing sessions. To get the best experience page content needs to be optimised and in particular images need to be re-sized for an optimal balance of visual clarity and size. Once upon a time mobile payments focused on how to take payment without having to type in credit card numbers as typing was too cumbersome. This is becoming less of an issue as smartphones mean the user experience is becoming easier. However, look out for contactless payment systems using NFC (near field communications) in the coming months.
The ubiquitous nature of the phone means it will play a big part in retail experiences in the coming years. If you haven’t started working on your mobile strategy you probably should. Experiment and learn to get prepared for the future.
App or mobile or both? The single most important point to note is that this is not an either/or decision. Apps and mCommerce do have over-lapping capabilities but it is where they are different that it is most interesting. The big thing an App can do that an mCommerce experience cannot do is access the phones hardware. So if you want to create an experience using the phones camera as a barcode scanner or a location based store finder then the App route is the way to go. If your goal is a browsing and shopping experience then either an App or mCommerce can do the job. For most retailers mCommerce offers the most interesting immediate opportunities as it gives a move into the mobile arena which is most similar to the existing web business processes. In considering your mCommerce strategy you should consider the following: Experience is king. Forget about what you think you can achieve easily. Unless the customer experience is good it will fail. Even on iPhones and Android phones where you can zoom in and out on a browser page presenting a web optimised page to consumers on a mobile device rarely works well. There are a number of systems available which allow existing eCommerce infrastructure to
Cloud - everyone is talking about it Cloud computing, the ability to have a business system deployed onto a remote hosting environment that is securely accessible via the internet is a big topic currently. Where cloud computing differs from pure hosting is that systems designed to operate in the cloud can be scaled to meet increased capacity very easily. Retail is a very seasonal business and is ideally suited to benefit from the advances in cloud computing. Letting someone else worry about the technical infrastructure issues of running your platform and also having the option to increase capacity at busy times of the year lets you focus on core business issues and less on infrastructure issues.
The seasonal peaks in many retail sectors means cloud computing can help avoid the cost issues of building infrastructure just to handle the very busiest periods.
Multivariate Testing makes testing changes easy! Small changes in copy, images and layout can increase conversion rates – but which changes will make the difference? Knowing what will work and what won‟t has in the past been a guessing game. With the emergence of multi-variate testing tools this guess work can be eliminated. Multivariate testing (MVT) enables retailers to create alternative versions of copy, images, and layouts and to then test the effects on defined goals such as conversions or account registration. Comparing multiple different variations of items singly or together allows a retailer to get an overall picture of which changes will affect revenue. By testing the various options with a proportion of the real site traffic enables retailers to get concrete information to optimise changes enabling informed decisions and dissolving disagreements. Some examples of the tests retailers typically want to do: Location, size and shape of the “Add to Basket” button” Image sizes – do hero images increase conversation rates? Redesign a product detail page Change the layout of the home page
Multivariate testing is going to transform the way retailers think about building online experiences as continuous optimisation becomes practically achievable.
Summary eCommerce for retailers has been around for 10 years but has yet to reach a high degree of maturity at all levels in the industry. The quality of customer experience varies widely from excellent to abysmal and all steps in between. If you consider the growing effects of consumer‟s social interactions and the use of mobile devices for multitude of things beyond making phone calls then it becomes clear that retailers have work to do to keep up with customer needs and expectations.
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