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Buydig.com has a specific objective in mind when making decisions about how to merchandise products: the consumer electronics e-retailer wants shoppers to have all information they need to make a purchase decision in one click.

That thinking drove a decision early this year to add interactive product tours containing video, animation and other rich media content from vendor SellPoint Inc. (formerly Tentoe Inc.) to the site. “People online always are looking for as close to a hands-on experience as they can get,” says director of marketing Jack Baum. “The tours take our product description up to the next level.”

What’s true of shoppers at Buydig.com is true of online shoppers everywhere: when they can’t see or handle a product first-hand, they want the next best thing. “Our goal is the closest we can come to putting all the data and information and experience in their hands,” Baum says.

There’s no shortage of new product display technology designed to decrease the gap between how customers experience a product online vs. in-store. In the relatively short period of the last 10 years, basics such as the ability to zoom in on a product image have become mainstream in how e-retailers merchandise products. Now retailers and technology developers are building on that base. The new generation of tools for visual online merchandising is more dynamic, more detail-rich, more interactive and in many cases just plain more fun for the consumer.

A bit more soul
“A lot of sites were able to compare products, but now they’ve added color to it. Or if they had customer reviews, they’ve added video to them,” says Lauren Freedman, president of online retail consultants The e-Tailing Group. “Retailers are elevating what could have been baseline functionality so something that was flat has a bit more soul.”

Julian Chu, director of client success at e-commence platform vendor Demandware Inc., says rich imagery around product presentation is on its way to becoming “table stakes. Now people are trying to figure out how to take it to the next level,” he says.

One way retailers are doing so is by making new use of static product images. Powered by Ajax and similar technologies, new online merchandising methods make the experience of viewing even a static image more dynamic—for instance, by popping up a larger view of a detail of the product or by offering more information about it as the shopper mouses over the image.

Case in point is the “Try It Under” feature on HerRoom.com, a lingerie site operated by the Andra Group Inc. The blouse overlay feature, created and patented by CEO Tomima Edmark, enables shoppers on a product detail page to mouse over a menu that appears at the side of a product image to change the image, showing how a bra would look under different neckline styles, such as a scoop neck or v-neck.

“We wanted to give women even more information than they could get from a bricks-and-mortar store,” says Peter Kooiker, senior marketing analyst at the Internet-only store. “In a store, a woman would have to bring in or purchase numerous blouses in order to get the same information that we provide online.”

Kooiker will not disclose conversion or order size metrics for shoppers engaging Try It Under vs. those who don’t. “But I can guarantee,” he says, “that if we ever took it down there would be a hue and cry from customers.”

Another example of newer, more dynamic approaches to online merchandising is the diamond search tool developed by online jeweler Blue Nile Inc. Shoppers using the search tool can manipulate sliders to change search parameters by individual product attribute—raising or lowering a desired price range for a diamond, for example, or the range of a diamond’s carat size. Moving the sliders via mouse changes the set of search results without shoppers having to make a single click. “The whole idea of browsing in place is a major theme with rich Internet applications,” Chu observes.

New site search functionality at outdoors outfitter The North Face is another example of how browsing in place is revving up merchandising and boosting sales. Using Fluid Inc.’s interactive merchandising tool, Fluid Display, the retailer’s merchandising team first created more interactive product displays, using color change and magnification options that do not require downloading new pages. Then the team embedded these interactive options for consumers right into search results pages, on which customers now can view all available color options for an item by changing product color of the thumbnail image on that page.

Buying more
The retailer estimates that adding interactive elements to search results has increased conversion on technical (specification-heavy) products by 90% and increased conversions from search pages by 101%. “We knew adding interactive displays meant more consumers would engage with our products. What our results showed was adding interactivity also convinced more shoppers to buy,” says Sarah Gallegher, online manager at The North Face.

The move to more dynamic and interactive product display doesn’t stop with easier manipulation of product images. Polo.com was one of the first apparel sites to offer fashion show videos. Now, a few years later, others are doing the same, but with a key difference: They’re tying online video more tightly into the purchase process to make it a true merchandising tool in addition to a brand-building feature.

Ann Taylor Stores Corp. works with on-demand technology vendor Scene7 Inc. on several rich media applications to support online merchandising. Last fall the retailer ventured into online video. A fashion show produced for the fashion press but captured on video for AnnTaylor.com—a process repeated for the spring collection—has become the most clicked-on content, reports Ann Taylor Direct senior vice president Michelle Pearlman.

IRCE 2008 Conference Multi-Media CD-ROM

Scene7’s platform serves video clips on a web page created by Ann Taylor. Clicking on a Shop the Looks link on the home page of AnnTaylor.com brings shoppers to the page, which offers the option of clicking on a tab to open a window that plays clips. The page itself features thumbnails of outfits modeled in the show. Mousing over the thumbnails brings up a larger image of the outfit; clicking on the thumbnail brings up information on components of the outfit, with the ability to click through to buy them directly from the page.

Pearlman would not disclose incremental sales attributable to online video, but she says it’s been a strong sales tool. The videos also have given the brand added exposure through postings on venues such as YouTube.com and Google Videos. Additionally, because fashion collections preview ahead of when shoppers can actually buy the apparel, using the web site to direct shoppers to Ann Taylor’s call center to pre-order outfits gives the merchant another merchandising tool. The site of sister brand Ann Taylor Loft has been hosting its own fashion video and supporting it with similar product display functionality, with results much like those of AnnTaylor.com, Pearlman adds.

So far, shoppers can’t shop and buy directly from the video as they can from catalog pages displayed online. But Pearlman says she’d like to explore this as a next step when the technology to support it becomes available.

“The first step was to prove that people want to watch the video and want to shop from the fashion show,” she says. “We’ve proven that case. The next step is making it an even more interactive experience.”

Not every online merchant is adopting more advanced merchandising functionality available via rich media, loosely defined as interactive multimedia applications. In the 6th Annual Merchant Survey by The e-Tailing Group, about 50% of the 167 merchants surveyed reported using video for product displays on their site, for example. “Merchants looking to differentiate themselves are looking at better ways to show the product and give people a better feel for it by incorporating things like video and alternative views. But I would still say it’s far from the norm,” Freedman says.

Adding features and functions of any kind to web sites carries a cost, another reason newer dynamic merchandising tools at this point make more sense for some retailers than others. “There is cost not only in technology but in managing these kinds of programs,” Chu notes. “It takes people time, and you have to focus your merchandising team on the right activity.”

Category competition
But those at the head of the curve in using rich media for online merchandising say they’re seeing results. In The e-Tailing Group survey, of the 54% to 61% of respondents who said rich media applications are having an impact on their site, 85% said they enhance the customer experience, 65% said they increase conversions, 47% said they increase average order size and 38% said they reduce returns.

Following a pattern typical of technology adoption, rich media likely will become standard first with retailers in certain categories looking to differentiate. One driver will be how competitive a product category is, Freedman says. For example, retailers might be more aggressive in the hotly-contested consumer electronics category. The nature of the merchandise in certain categories also lends itself naturally to the experience served up by rich media, Freedman adds, pointing out categories such as apparel and home, where the tactile component is more key to buying.

The ability to see how a product works—which video or animated product displays provide—is especially important to a sales proposition where a product is complex. “You don’t need a product tour for an eight-pack of AA batteries,” says Dennis Marshall, vice president of marketing and product management at SellPoint. “The products really begging for tours have a complexity and are multifaceted, like digital cameras, laptops and appliances.”

SellPoint’s clients are manufacturers who pay to have interactive tours of their products produced and syndicated to the 85 retailers in the vendor’s network who subscribe to receive feeds of this content. Retailers pay nothing to add tours to their site. The tours are launched from the relevant product page on a participating retailer’s site through integration with the vendor’s platform.

With no investment required, Marshall explains, retailers measure these tours’ value in two ways: influence on online conversion and offline sales among shoppers who look for detailed product information online before closing a deal in a store. Though he would not disclose specific numbers across the company’s retailer syndication network, Marshall says incremental sales directly attributable to the product tours range from “single digits into double digits” based on tracking sell-through from shoppers who took a product tour vs. those who didn’t.

It’s difficult to track lift in store sales attributable to a retailer’s site hosting product tours. But the easy availability of detailed product information from multiple sources online, particularly in categories such as consumer electronics, suggests retailers can’t worry about whether rich media content offered online in the name of merchandising will result in a sale that closes elsewhere: To be considered by consumers, retailers need to be on the bandwagon, experts say.

Marshall’s view of how online product tours are evolving might just as easily be applied to how any of the new online merchandising technologies will evolve, whether they’re on the way to becoming standard, just emerging or only a gleam in a web developer’s eye. Collectively they’re raising the bar on what it takes to engage and sell to consumers on retail sites. To stay with the pack, online merchants face having to respond to the trend at some point in the not-too-distant future if they haven’t done so already, he contends.

“Retailers we work with understand people shop online at their store and at other stores,” Marshall says. “If they don’t find the information they want at your site, they go somewhere else. So the retailer’s best opportunity is to provide the most information possible on the site. The biggest risk they face today is in not providing all the information people are looking for.”

mary@verticalwebmedia.com