Getting out the word and bringing home the sale
Retailers that sell a wide array of products can sell to a wide range of consumers. The eight retailers highlighted in this section have figured out innovative ways to reach a mass audience and make consumers comfortable making a purchase.
Everyone likes to laugh, and Buy.com has recruited a funny guy and familiar face, Howie Mandel of TV game show “Deal or no Deal,” to plug the site in TV commercials. Posted on YouTube, those improvisational ads have been viewed 12 million times, giving the online-only retailer even wider exposure.
Meijer, a Midwestern grocery and general merchandise chain that’s only been selling online for a year, has taken its site to customers’ computer desktops, offering a widget called the Meijer Mealbox that creates shopping lists and automatically populates them with discount coupons.
Most every consumer carries a mobile phone, and a growing number of those phones have computer-like power, boosting mobile commerce. Top online retailer Amazon.com and television shopping merchant QVC are among the m-commerce pioneers, letting consumers make purchases via text message.
Many of these sites are offering consumers more information, much of it coming from customers themselves. For instance, Walmart.com, the e-commerce site of retail giant Wal-Mart Stores, has introduced a feature called Connect And Share that includes blogs, customer reviews, and a question-and-answer section. SkyMall.com, the retail site of the airline catalog retailer, allows vendors and employees to respond to customer reviews, after revealing their affiliation.
ElderLuxe.com is focused on answering detailed questions its affluent, older customers have about its products. They need to know, for example, how big a walker is when it folds up and whether it will fit in the trunk of their car, and how heavy it is so they can determine whether they can lift it.
Online-only discount retailer Overstock.com revamped its home page to group products into 11 categories, each with several sub-categories visible to shoppers. This enables one-click access to many products. “We think the distinction between browsing and search is overdrawn,” says CEO Patrick Byrne, “and that it’s possible to synthesize the two into guided navigation.” Back to top
Rolling on
Shrugging off the recession, Amazon.com Inc. is using its financial success to deepen its web selection and features while staking out a leadership position in selling to consumers through mobile phones, television and an electronic book reader.
Amazon is moving from a position of strength. In the third quarter, when comScore Inc. estimates e-commerce sales grew 6%, Amazon’s sales grew 31% to nearly $4.3 billion. Net income rose 48% to $118 million.
The top e-retailer has plowed its profits into acquisitions that broaden its product selection, purchasing in the past year audio book retailer Audible.com, knitting supplies specialist Fabrics.com and AbeBooks, an online retailer of used, rare and out-of-print books. Amazon also began selling music and video downloads via its web site, and added office supplies and motorcycle parts stores.
Meanwhile, Amazon created a site called windowshop.com where visitors can browse through the current week’s best sellers in several categories, and added a currency converter so international shoppers can see prices in their own currencies.
In addition, Amazon, which is famous for recommending products to consumers based on their buying history, increasingly promotes installation services and customer support, and even points consumers sometimes to competing web sites to view related items, notes Ayat Shukairy, a managing partner with Invesp Consulting, which specializes in optimizing e-commerce sites. That bolsters its credibility, she says.
“With each new offer, Amazon redefines successful e-commerce from merely selling products to becoming a shopping portal and a place where customers will come first before they make a decision to buy products online or offline,” Shukairy says.
Equally noteworthy are Amazon’s moves into new channels. The retailer broke new ground in mobile commerce when it introduced last spring its TextBuyIt program that allows consumers to make purchases via mobile phone text messages. It extended a program with TiVo, the maker of digital video recorders, that ultimately will enable consumers to buy products with their TV remote controls. And Amazon is heavily promoting its own Kindle electronic book reader, hoping that will create a new market for digital book downloads. Back to top
It’s always a deal
Buy.com’s current marketing campaign, which has finally given it a recognizable brand identity, is a series of spots in which Howie Mandel, host of TV show “Deal or No Deal?,” uses his skewed sense of humor and improvisational skills to push the web-only retailer’s low prices and vast selection. Mandel bursts into people’s homes and offices, shows them how to shop at Buy.com, and waits with them until the merchandise arrives and everyone cheers.
The spots have racked up 12 million YouTube views in addition to the TV exposure, and Jeff Wisot, Buy.com vice president of marketing, no longer has to explain what Buy.com is when he meets people at parties. As for Mandel, Wisot says, “He would tell people to buy from us even before we hired him.”
Meanwhile, back in Aliso Viejo, Calif., the Buy.com team has loaded up features to compete with Amazon.com, the category gorilla among online mass merchants. Buy.com’s Marketplace program, one key to its vast selection, allows other merchants to sell through its site. The program is adding 20 new sellers a week and has more than 1,000 already in place. “We are pretty strict and we monitor them to make sure fulfillment is up to our expectations and customers are happy,” says Wisot.
The program has allowed Buy.com to add new product categories beyond its historic strength in electronics, computers, and related gear. Apparel is a new offering, as are shoes and jewelry. Wisot says product selection has doubled in the past year and a half.
The site all but overwhelms its visitors with information and options. The company solicits product reviews from recent purchasers, and a price engine on product pages lets shoppers compare prices and shipping costs from other sites. “We lose some customers this way, but we build a level of trust and they come back more often,” says Wisot.
A product question-and-answer feature is in testing. The site produces its own “how-to” videos and has created more than 100,000. And it offers many payment options, including PayPal, Google Checkout, and the recently added Bill Me Later. Back to top
Respect for elders
ElderLuxe.com targets older consumers of means. It offers “luxury for the elite elder,” which includes such products as long-handled grooming tools and scooters for those who have trouble walking.
“We want to make it simple and easy to navigate, but we don’t dumb it down to the point where it’s offensive,” says Patrick Conboy, founder and president of ElderLuxe LLC. “We want to provide a shopping experience that is commensurate with other fine luxury retailers, but not put off our higher-educated clientele.”
Those well-educated and well-heeled customers want information, Conboy has learned since launching the site in November 2006. They want to see every side of an item, which means multiple images. They want to know the exact dimensions of a walker and see how it folds up, so they can determine if it will fit in the trunk of their car and whether they are strong enough to lift it. Conboy has added more product photos to meet that demand.
“With ElderLuxe.com’s high-end products and clientele, they have done a great job creating a crisp
and concise brand that includes high-quality product images,” says
Ethan Giffin, founder of e-commerce consulting firm Groove Commerce.
To encourage customers to contact the web-only retailer, the home page features a box called Concierge Services that includes a picture of a smiling, grey-haired gentleman and text that says, “How may we help you?” Clicking that box takes the visitor to a page offering information on how to order, help with specific products, shipping information and other customer service features. The retailer soon plans to add a live chat service to make itself more accessible to its customers.
Conboy and his call center team meet each week to discuss the questions that come up, and to understand what might be behind those questions. Sometimes customers may have physical problems, such as arthritis or poor vision, and are embarrassed to bring them up. Conboy says his team tries to come up with discreet ways to raise such issues, so the customer doesn’t have to. Back to top
A widget comes up big
Grocery and general merchandise products retail chain Meijer Inc. has been selling products online for only about one year, but Meijer.com is breaking new ground with widget technology.
The Meijer MealBox widget was designed to help grocery shoppers plan meals by creating shopping lists that automatically populate with electronic coupons. Web shoppers then print the lists and coupons before heading to one of Meijer’s 185 stores in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky.
The widget—a tiny application that showcases information and performs narrowly focused tasks—can be copied from Meijer.com for placement on a personalized iGoogle page, a consumer’s page on a social network site, or a shopper’s own blog or web page. “The MealBox gives consumers a convenient place to plan meals for the week and make a shopping list, and ways to save money with coupons and sale prices,” says Dawn Bronkema, director of e-commerce marketing.
In addition to saving shoppers money on their grocery bills, the technology has cut Meijer’s marketing costs. “We publish a lot of information in circulars,” Bronkema says. “This is a new way to put that out to consumers, and we’re all looking for ways to cut costs. Printing circulars is expensive.”
The MealBox is a novel tool that gives Meijer a leg up on its competition, says Judy Foster, executive creative director at Grand River Interactive, an e-commerce design and software development company. “The MealBox tool is a global feature,” she says. “With the holidays coming, it’s a great way to help people set up shopping lists.” As a unique feature, Foster recommends placing the MealBox higher on the Meijer.com home page.
Consumers seem to like the widget. Within the first few days of the MealBox feature going live in May, consumers downloaded about 1,500 widgets, and about 70,000 coupons were printed off the widgets and redeemed in Meijer stores in the first few weeks, Bronkema says. And in the first week of October there were about 41,000 visits to the MealBox by subscribers. By then, 6,100 widgets had been installed. Back to top
A new take on navigation
Overstock.com Inc. takes pride in giving customers the tools they need for a satisfying shopping experience, including efficient site navigation. At the center of the home page are 11 vertical rectangles, each representing a major category, such as Home, and beneath the category head a list of sub-categories, such as Area Rugs. That way a consumer can get to area rugs, or dozens of other sub-categories, with a single click.
“We think the distinction between browsing and search is overdrawn, and that it’s possible to synthesize the two into guided navigation,” says Patrick Byrne, CEO. “We went with this navigation across the top where you basically refine by clicks, and filter products down to a subset.”
The navigation display also makes for a cleaner front page, says Jonathan E. Johnson, president. “It’s a lot less cluttered than it used to be,” he says.
The navigation tool helps Overstock customers make sense of the site’s vast inventory, says Mary Brett Whitfield, senior vice president at consulting firm TNS Retail Forward. While the Internet allows retailers to offer more products than they could in stores, consumers want sites that are tailored to their needs, she says. Overstock.com’s navigation bridges that gap. “They do carry a lot of stuff but you can pretty well narrow it down to the specific thing that you’re looking for,” Whitfield says.
In fact, adds Jim Okamura, senior partner at retail consulting firm J.C. Williams Group Ltd., “Being as big and broad and having the extensive assortment of things they do almost requires innovation in the ease of shopping and navigation.”
Overstock.com also enhanced its auction site in the past year, with checkout process improvements and the addition of bid cancellation and retraction.
“We think there’s a lot of discontent with eBay and we’re trying to capitalize on that by finding out what eBay people are unhappy about,” Byrne says. “Whatever it is that they’re looking for, those are the next features we build into our site.”
Overstock spent $3 million on developing the navigation display and $500,000 on the auction site, Byrne says. Back to top
Tune in, turn on
At QVC.com, the e-commerce destination of TV retailer QVC Inc., shoppers can tune in the broadcast. But they can also turn on a digital community to blog, view cooking lessons, catch up on the latest looks from Fashion Week and, of course, shop.
QVC rolled out the latest version of its e-commerce site late last year. To promote a deeper sense of community, QVC.com has been updated with customer reviews, interactive polls, blogs, live chats with QVC hosts and celebrities, and more sophisticated video. “We don’t reinvent our site design every other year,” says QVC senior vice president of platforms and broadcast technology Bob Myers. “We are following a strategy of adding to the web site the features and functions that build on our community of users.”
Since the new design went live, QVC has added 41,000 community members who collectively have generated about 219 million page views, Myers says. As a TV retailer, QVC has access to more than 94 million homes with cable TV. But a big part of its current merchandising strategy is using the web and its community to build consistent brand messaging across multiple channels.
“At QVC the TV interacts with the web at all times and vice versa,” Myers says.
Another way QVC is building a better bridge to its online shoppers is through mobile commerce. But what separates QVC’s mobile channel from most others is its text message purchasing program, which enables shoppers to complete a transaction in just a handful of steps. “With the launch of QVC’s mobile services, we’re continuing to deliver our customers an enhanced shopping experience. They can now shop QVC anywhere, at any time,” says Myers.
The closer ties between TV and the web work well because passive QVC TV viewers are now active QVC shoppers online, says Betsy Emery, founder and chief executive officer of Tellus, a retail web site design firm. “Instead of just watching and calling, the shopper becomes more engaged across the entire buying cycle when she wants and how she wants,” says Emery. Back to top
Taking flight
Turning a back-of-the-seat airline catalog into a $75 million e-commerce business is no easy task. But SkyMall.com has done just that by making it easy for shoppers to quickly drill down to a desired product page from the home page using category tabs that become more specific with each click.
The ease of navigation is crucial as SkyMall.com offers a broad selection of luxury and specialty products, ranging from toys and collectibles to pet supplies.
“They present a lot of products with a clean use of space and make the site easy to navigate,” says Lee Diercks, managing director of consulting firm Clear Thinking Group LLC. “It is kind of like an eBay for frequent travelers.”
Enhancements during the past year include a Spanish-language version of the site and currency conversion for the euro, British pound and Canadian dollar. Additional payment options include no payments for 90 days when using PayPal for purchases of $50 or more, as well as Bill Me Later.
“We felt PayPal 90 days and Bill Me Later would be good additions in the current economy,” says Art Apostle II, vice president of e-commerce for Sky Mall Inc.
Product reviews and ratings allow vendors and employees to post responses to customer-written reviews. Vendors and employees are required to identify themselves.
“It’s a way to respond to customers regarding product issues and has driven some vendors to improve their products,” says Apostle. “The approach has been well received by our customers.”
A new feature allows customers to sign up for RSS feeds that deliver alerts to mobile phones about new products in categories that interest the consumer. The target audience is frequent travelers in their early thirties who like communicating by text messaging on their mobile devices, SkyMall says.
“RSS feeds are relatively new as a marketing tool, but the potential to use it successfully is there because it is a cutting-edge communications tool,” says Chris Vicente, senior manager, Products Consumer Markets Group, for consulting firm BearingPoint. “It’s always good to try new marketing concepts.” Back to top
A big community
Like the bricks-and-mortar stores of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Walmart.com is big and bustling.
And even as the site attracts more than 26 million visitors a month, company officials are trying to keep those consumers engaged so they do more than just buy the merchandise they came looking for and quickly depart.
Navigation is key, because of the retail giant’s extensive inventory. The left-side navigation column on the home page lists broad categories, and a click on each reveals sub-categories, in some cases more than three dozen of them.
“Because this company sells just about everything, having a good way for customers to sort through and find everything is really important, and they’ve done a good job at that,” says analyst Nikki Baird, managing director of Retail Systems Research.
The site also offers visitors a chance to communicate with each other. Walmart.com recently introduced a section of the site it calls “Connect and Share,” which includes blogs, visitor reviews, a question-and-answer exchange on the retailer’s products, and stories written by customers about their shopping experiences. And not all the content relates to shopping. Prior to last month’s election, the section featured videos of the two presidential candidates.
The objective of “Connect and Share,” according to Walmart.com, is “to help our customers better connect with one another and share ideas, tips and experiences about Wal-Mart products and services.”
With the placement of “Connect and Share” at the bottom of the home page, however, many visitors may miss out on it, Baird observes.
She and another analyst, George Whalin of Retail Management Consultants, also question Walmart.com’s decision to place a large advertisement in the middle of the home page. “I think it’s a big mistake, especially since it doesn’t have anything to do with their business,” Whalin says. Otherwise, he says, the giant e-retailer does “a great job of showing off their merchandise and specials.”
And that, after all, is the primary point of Walmart.com’s web site. “Our vision is to be the most visited and valued online retail site by making it easier for our customers to shop Wal-Mart,” the company says.
