In a jewelry store, consumers like to try on items and look at them from all sides. In a bookstore browsers flip through books, scan the table of contents and look over the back page. How do you recreate similar experiences online to generate additional sales?
Online-only jeweler Ice.com Inc. and multi-channel bookseller Borders Group Inc. are both trying to address that question with new technology. And executives from the two companies explained how they used customer feedback to fine-tune their implementations in a session this week at the Internet Retailer Web Design ’08 Conference in Miami.
With 40% of customers returning items because they found the products did not look like the same as it did online or didn’t fit right, Ice.com has begun testing video as a way to provide customers with a better view of the jewelry for sale, said Mayer Gniwisch, founder and president. The e-retailer started modestly, investing $1,200 to produce a video last Valentine’s Day that, posted on YouTube, produced $400,000 in sales.
Encouraged by that experience, the web merchant created videos for 200 of its best products and in December performed an A/B/C test: some customers saw the site with no video, others went to a page where the video launched immediately, and others went to a page where the visitor could click to launch the video.
Which generated more sales? The pages that launched the video immediately, Gniwisch said, without disclosing actual sales figures. He says returns also dropped when customers watched product videos.
Besides convincing him of the value of online video, Gniwisch says the results show that such testing is not just for selecting colors or the location of buttons, but that it’s also an effective way to test business concepts, such as whether to employ video online.
For Borders, customer feedback has played a role as the bookseller prepares to relaunch after Borders.com moves off the e-commerce platform that Amazon has hosted since 2001.
At the center of the home page of the new web site, which has been in beta test since the fall, is a graphic element called the Magic Shelf that shows rows of books, much as they would be displayed in a bookstore. By clicking on a book, the visitor can see inside it and look at what’s on the back cover.
Borders turned to a social networking forum that matched its customer demographics, Gather.com, and invited forum participants to comment on the beta site, Kevin Ertell, vice president of E-Business at Borders Group, told the Web Design Conference. Most of the feedback was about Magic Shelf: most of those commenting liked it, but some had complaints about it being slow to load and difficult to navigate.
Borders turned to site development firm Allurent to improve the user experience, with the result that the Magic Shelf now loads more quickly and offers new features. For instance, mousing over a book cover produces a “quick look” box that provides a summary of the book, shows its price and allows the customer to directly add it to a shopping cart. The user also can now drag the entire shelf from one side to another to see more titles.
“The difference in response has been tremendous,” Ertell said. The new Borders site is set to go live this quarter.
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