The New Look

Sometimes even a retail web site that is doing its job can leave a merchant feeling the site could be a lot better, more focused on what customers want in the way of a pleasant and rewarding shopping experience that will keep them coming back. But where does a merchant start to act on that hunch? A good place is with the customers themselves.

That’s the approach that two major retailers undertook in redesigning their web sites this summer. But the fact that each redesigned and relaunched its site is about all they have in common. One retailer set out, at customers’ request, to create sensory overload for shoppers. The other sought to streamline its site and take shoppers directly to the merchandise they wanted. Each claims that the redesign boosted sales—further evidence that the web market is not, as was once thought, homogeneous. It’s becoming like the real-world market: Retailers need to define their audiences and go with what works for each one.

“Many things contribute to this customer perception of our brand, including store visits to interact with our products and our weekly ad,” says Barry Judge, vice president of consumer and brand marketing, Best Buy Co. Inc. “Our goal with the redesign of BestBuy.com was to better leverage that brand equity. The redesign allows us to move into a multi-channel space where we can offer customers seamless shopping both online and in-store.”

Before it relaunched BestBuy.com with a completely new design in late June, Best Buy asked customers what they liked about shopping at the consumer electronics retailer. Their answer: They liked what the brand stood for—a fun, hands-on shopping experience with a lot of sensory stimulation.

Playing up sensory overload

“During focus groups consumers describe us in positive terms such as dreamland, high energy and sensory overload,” Judge says. So Best Buy delivered what customers wanted, he says. Its new web site provides a slew of new ways to research, find and buy a product, such as a new home-page research center that provides answers to questions about products highlighted for sale in an adjacent section on the same page.

Federated Department Stores Inc.’s Macys.com is also responding to customer input, but through a more subtle approach of emphasizing product images on its home page and category pages without slowing down site downloading or navigation, president Kent Anderson says. “We added larger images because our customers asked for them,” Anderson says. He expects a near-term return on investment through increased sales stemming from the redesigned presentations, he adds.

Best Buy’s site redesign, launched June 27 with a boost from a limited advertising promotion and a temporary free-shipping offer on all orders, was a hit with shoppers, Judge says. “Initial response from customers was very positive and we observed a significant number of existing customers stopping by to check out our biggest store, our web site,” he says. Best Buy has not promoted the redesign in other ways.

The redesign, which was developed in-house, goes beyond making the site more fun and useful as a shopping channel. For one thing, Best Buy beefed up its web product assortment so that virtually everything available in stores is also on the web. Now it’s not only packed with more information, but it also fills a significant role in the retailer’s multi-channel marketing and merchandising strategies. “Our goal with the redesign of BestBuy.com was to better leverage our brand equity,” Judge says. “The redesign allows us to move into a multi-channel space where we can offer customers seamless shopping both online and in-store.”

Mimicking the ads

The new design also mimics the content and appearance of Best Buy’s Sunday newspaper advertising supplement, as well as including an electronic version of the weekly ad. Now whether customers read the paper supplement, view the web site or walk through Best Buy stores, they’ll get a consistent shopping experience with identical offers in all channels. “Design elements that appear in our weekly ad are familiar to our customers, so it was only natural that we would extend their use to our online channel,” Judge says.

The site redesign also supports the fact that 60% of Best Buy’s in-store shoppers research their purchases online. “Before, there was no real connection between our store and our web site,” a spokeswoman says. “But now if customers remember mid week that they saw a camera they wanted in the Sunday store ad, they can go online and find the same offer. We wanted to create an online customer experience similar to the look and feel of our stores and ads to make sure they all work together.”

To view the weekly ad, shoppers key in a Zip Code to call up the appropriate ad for the nearest store. Placing a cursor over the image of a product in the ad will pop up a window with product details. Included in the current printed weekly ad supplement is a promotion for the redesigned site, including call-outs to a temporary free-shipping offer on all orders and the ability of the new site, which has improved site search and navigation, to help consumers “find what you want fast.”

The redesign also provides improved functionality between the site and back-end systems, supporting several new features for an improved shopping experience, the spokeswoman says. A new site search function, for example, provides a drop-down list showing the number of search results from each site section, allowing shoppers to narrow down the results. It also lets shoppers sort the results by relevance or brand. Best Buy built the unique sort function on search technology provided by Verity Inc. New site navigation features include drop-down menus of products from a row of category links on the home page.

A new shopping cart suggests complementary products with links to their buy pages. It also provides links for adding a product to a wish-list, connecting to an application for financing, and purchasing a product service plan.

New sections on the home page include a list of self-service links, such as for tracking orders and checking the availability of rebates; and a research center, including links titled “Which Intel Notebook is right for you?” and “Guide to Lynksys wireless networking.” The questions pertain to items for sale in an adjacent section, and they change periodically to a new list of topics related to a new list of items for sale. For now, Best Buy staffers change the suggestions manually; they are working on an automatic rotation, the company reports. Other home page links take shoppers to the Reward Zone loyalty program and a section for purchasing gift cards. “With the relaunch, customers can now take advantage of the same financing and promotional offers, along with an expanded assortment of products, in whatever channel they choose,” Judge says.

Big, speedy images at Macy’s

IRCE 2008 Conference Multi-Media CD-ROM

While Best Buy undertook a complete redesign, Macys.com has taken a fine-tuning approach. One of the first retail web sites for a major retail department store chain, Macys.com has redesigned its pages to place text links more strategically as well as to emphasize larger and more prominent product images.

The redesign, which was done in-house, emphasizes more images as opposed to text links on the home page, while emphasizing both images as well as text links on product and category pages. Macys.com made the changes after analyzing shopping behavior to learn the type of images and promotional presentations that led to the highest add-to-bag and sales conversion results. “For example, we learned that customers do not value text links on our home page, but do respond to specific offers in text format at the category level,” Anderson says.

The 10 product category sections across the top of the home page each includes several text links such as “Bonus roaster with George Forman grill purchase” in the housewares category. But each category also features several high-resolution photographs that can be enlarged multiple times with a new multi-directional zoom feature from TrueSpectra Inc. “We have learned that compelling creative drives more conversion, so the re-design of the category pages took that into account,” Anderson says.

But even with all the additional imaging, speed has not become an issue, he says. “We’re making a major investment in a coding effort to assure the speed of our site,” Anderson says. “Macys.com is one of the fastest web sites in its category.”

Servers in strategic locations

The retailer is also working with Akamai Technologies Inc. to deliver pages faster through strategically placed web servers, providing better access for consumers regardless of where they’re located, Anderson says. “We know that in certain parts of the country—Phoenix is a good example—our customers’ online shopping experience is slower than in New York or San Francisco due to their local access to the web and where we locate our servers,” he says.

A test of the Akamai service during last year’s Christmas holiday season found that it enabled consumers to download pages faster. “Response time in getting product pages from the web was substantially improved,” Anderson says. “At the same time, our conversion rate and sales increased substantially over the prior year’s holiday season.”

Anderson says he expects web site speed to improve throughout the U.S., leading to increased sales as customers experience faster and easier online shopping—even with the increased emphasis on larger images and zoom technology. “We know over a period of time we’ll get more sales from Phoenix,” he says. l

paul@verticalwebmedia.com

Using metrics to understand customers’ needs

Sometimes customers tell a retailer what they’re thinking without even knowing it. It’s called metrics. That’s how Tower Records learned what it needed to do at TowerRecords.com, Kevin Ertell, senior vice president, direct to consumer, told the eTail 2003 East conference in Boston last month. “There’s too much staff conjecture about what works,” Ertell said.

And so Ertell ran tests in three areas of TowerRecords.com to determine how well the site converted browsers to buyers. “Science beats conjecture every time,” he said.

Using Fireclick Inc.’s NetFlame product to take a close look at the site, Tower learned customers weren’t clicking where it wanted them to. A home page cluttered with up to 15 promotions was confusing. Tower Records cleaned up the page to highlight only a few major promotions, made images smaller and easier to load and moved a major promotion to the page’s center. The result: the major promotion garnered 9.4% of the traffic vs. 0.4% pre-redesign, conversion rates went up 25%, page load times decreased by 38%.

Next, managers turned to the checkout page, using NetFlame to understand how customers navigated the page and Webhancer to collect data from 15,000 users at TowerRecords.com and two competing sites. The registration page popped up as an area of concern. A site that explained why registration was important had an exit rate of 5.7% and dwell time of 46.27 seconds. The exit rate at a site with little explanation was 11.6%, with a dwell time of 36.14 seconds. Tower Records’ was 8%, with customers lingering for 29.98 seconds. Conversion rates showed equal disparity: 3.88% and 2.26% at the other sites; 2.5% at Tower.

At checkout, things were equally grim. “Tower was the poorest performer of the three,” Ertell said. Tower reduced the number of checkout pages from five to three and removed all images so pages would load faster. It also increased the explanation of the value of registration. Results: in one week, conversion rates went up 18% and abandonment rates went down 12%, Ertell reported.

Finally, it looked at customer satisfaction using ForeSee Results Inc. and the American Customer Satisfaction Index. While Tower Records earned a score that, in Ertell’s words, “rivaled Amazon’s,” 88 out of 100, the process uncovered problems with shoppers who didn’t buy. They gave Tower Records lower scores on product information and functionality and complained about the five pages for checkout. They were asked about their primary purpose for coming to the site. “25% came with the intent to purchase but the conversion rate was nowhere near that,” Ertell said. The data are new enough that Tower Records hasn’t yet determined how it will approach that problem, he said.