Web technology remixes in new ways that promise to dramatically change the customer experience
By Mary Wagner
A couple has been searching for a dining room set, a key purchase for their new home. Going to a retailer’s web site, they initiate “co-browsing” of the product page that displays the leading contender, inviting the wife’s sister and the couple’s decorator for a live session during which all parties explore product features, color options and combinations with different chairs simultaneously in a shared, real-time view. With every opinion that counts represented right there in the same session, the couple closes the deal on the spot and the retailer racks up the sale online.
Mainstream retailers are not offering this type of online shopping scenario today, but the ability to do so is closer than one may think—the technology needed to enable such exchanges between shoppers and merchants already exists.
As online retailing moves deeper into its second decade, astute merchants are past launching wow-factor applications simply because they can. Today, potential new shopping applications that rival anything consumers have seen in the online gaming world or on a movie screen are, in effect, waiting in the wings. But those new applications that actually make it onto retailer sites—including, likely in the near future, the one described above—walk a fine line. They must incorporate enough innovation to keep the experience continually fresh, engaging and above all useful to consumers, without moving ahead of consumers’ willingness or ability to accept new shopping tools and patterns.
The shopping tools some retailers will roll out this year walk that line, designers and developers say, in many cases using new combinations of existing technology, and little-used technology now more widely compatible with a new generation of web browsers. “Clients come to us with business problems, such as different target segments they want to go after,” says Chris Gokiert, COO of interactive agency and web design and development firm Critical Mass. “We spend time on what different customers are looking for before we even start to decide what technology we are going to use.”
Online marketing is buzzing about Web 2.0, social networking, AJAX and AJAX-like technologies. How marketers will attempt to capitalize on those trends and utilities over the near term is all about trying to make them pay; in softer benefits such as brand differentiation and direct ones such as increased conversion.
For years marketers have talked about replicating the offline experience online. The new crop of online shopping tools gets even closer to it. Fry Inc. is in development on several concepts that further narrow the gap between how customers shop for clothing in a retail store and how they shop the same category online. For example, to shop an apparel or department store in the bricks-and-mortar world is to walk among the racks, grab a pair of jeans here and a scarf or blouse there, and head for the dressing room with the gathered loot. But online, shoppers are forced to stay within one category at a time.
To free shoppers from having to skip between categories and refresh pages in the course of assembling an outfit, Fry’s concept arranges navigation and product presentation to enable shoppers to move among categories in a continuous scroll format, giving them the ability to view all the products they want across categories in a quicker manner.
Another concept looks to streamline the decision process by giving online shoppers the ability to round up multiple elements of an outfit and drag them visually into a sort of holding pen as they shop. Currently, putting items in the shopping cart is the most common way for online shoppers to save items for later consideration, and adding them to a cart requires shoppers to select a size, color or other specs at that time.
“But adding an item to the cart doesn’t necessarily mean that the shopper is going to purchase it,” says Fry senior strategic analyst Dayna Bateman. “They may add it to their cart, but then they may be going somewhere else to comparison shop. This differentiates the purposes for which users are adding to a cart.” The online feature, with the working name “the rack,” would always be present on the screen as a collection of product images that lets users add, subtract and compare. Additional product detail could appear over each item as shoppers mouse over it in the rack.
“You like this blue shirt and this green sweater. You can just drag them all into the rack, and once you get there you can start making choices. You don’t have to go somewhere else to check price or size or availability because you can do it all from that area,” Bateman says.
Dragging apparel
Another concept in development at Fry addresses the reality that virtual figures or body shapes for trying on clothing online never truly reflect what people really look like. This new concept takes a different approach to online wardrobing, with the goal of depicting color and style combinations interactively rather than attempting to show how a garment would look on a mock-up of the shopper’s figure. It enables users to drag different items of apparel from different categories and arrange them in different ways: for example, dragging a greatly magnified detail such as embroidery on a skirt next to a jacket to see how closely the two colors correspond.
This concept, which goes by the working name of “the outfitter,” uses portable network graphics (PNG) images, which have greater transparency than JPG or GIF images. That enables product image overlays such as a blouse overlapping a skirt. PNG files have been in existence for some time but haven’t been used often in retail applications because they were not supported by most web browsers. However, they’re now supported across the current iterations of Microsoft Internet Explorer as well as backwards-compatible with the last few generations of IE because of the addition of new code.
Other versions of the concept incorporate the community aspect that is a hallmark of Web 2.0 development by enabling one shopper to invite others, by means such as e-mail or instant message, to a co-browsing session. In the session all invited shoppers can interact with the same products and features from their respective browsers. They could even potentially tag the outfits created in the session and save them online to help populate others’ search results. The concept builds on co-browsing functionality developed for use by online agents at customer contact centers by pushing it into the peer-to-peer realm.
Some versions of these concepts—and others—are only months away from deployment on retail sites, according to Fry. “The retailers we are presenting the concepts to are really seeing the benefit in better reflecting the in-store experience that guides users in their purchase process,” Bateman says.
Though AJAX, short for asynchronous Javascript and XML, has been making headlines in industry news recently, the technology has been around for years. Now, the rise of broadband, better browser capability and other factors are pushing it into wider use among application developers.
The technology and others like it don’t require an entire web page to be reloaded each time a user makes a change. This speeds up the display at the consumer interface and opens up more creative possibilities for web application developers. One result is that online shopping can potentially be made into a much more immersive experience. But here, retailers must gauge how much shoppers are ready to accept and what would actually help shopping.
“If every online experience were like Second Life, I am sure people would be bailing out of the experience right away,” says Gokiert, referring to the increasingly popular multi-player virtual world where people interact, play, do business and otherwise communicate online.
Pared down
Gokiert, however, already sees online retail moving toward a pared-down version of these complex virtual worlds in some of the rich media applications going up on sites that make shoppers feel as though they are interacting with a person rather than a feature set. For instance, Critical Mass built the online avatars, dubbed “learn mores,” that help guide shoppers through the computer configuration process at Dell.com, and also has worked on developing them for other companies.
On content-rich sites such as Dell’s, the avatars can target customers less inclined to dig out deep content themselves. “It puts the information in plain English, in a conversational manner, and there’s animation that goes with it. So users are more engaged because they have someone ‘talking’ to them,” Gokiert says.
The avatars are just one aspect of a larger trend in retail web design that seeks to deliver ever richer, faster online shopping experiences. A newer build on that is that shoppers now also want to compare and share opinions about that product with others online, a phenomenon Gokiert calls the “community and experts” trend.
Gokiert’s team is working for a number of clients on developing applications that pull third-party product reviews from the web universe onto the retailer’s site via data feeds and content licensing agreements, where needed. Gokiert sees the seed of future iterations of such shopping applications in sites like Rottentomatoes.com, which compiles film reviews from multiple sources and summarizes that aggregated content in its “Tomatometer.”
“It’s not that Rotten Tomatoes is saying it’s the expert, but it’s providing a forum. More and more you see this idea that you can aggregate content, bring it in, and say that this is what everybody else is saying,” he notes. “You used to have this experience by going to a community forum as a destination, but now companies are bringing the community onto their sites and slapping it right into their buying experience.”
Development and design firms and interactive agencies across the board are using AJAX and like technology to develop a range of similar tools that enrich the shopping experience, improve product visualization, and give shoppers greater ability to interact with the site and with each other within the shopping experience. Aquantive’s Avenue A/Razorfish is one of them, and it’s also using the technology to develop a shopping tool specifically for one of retail’s most sought-after customer segments: the power shopper.
A retailer client in the cooking category that noticed a number of its customers were buying frequently and in high multiples realized that professional chefs also were buying on its site. But unlike the home cook, a consumer more likely to be romanced into buying a product by beauty shots or lifestyle content, these power shoppers already know the value proposition of what they are buying, want to buy it quickly, and get out. “They may be restocking and need to place an order for seven to 10 items, in multiple quantities, and they need to do that in an efficient process,” says Garrick Schmitt, head of user experience at Avenue A/Razorfish.
Power shoppers
Schmitt and his team are working with Microsoft’s rich media Internet application platform to build a tool that lets power shoppers select multiple categories, slide volume up or down, and see pricing and shipping information in real time without having to refresh the browser. “We are leveraging our work on the b2b side in terms of a procurement tool and looking at how that applies to the consumer space,” Schmitt says. “You can see where this exists across other customer segments where power shoppers are hamstrung by the traditional product catalog. We’re looking at ways to blow that open and make it much more efficient for the professional. There is a real desire to look at that high-value segment of the marketplace in a new way.”
E-commerce platform developer MarketLive Inc. is focused on a particular aspect of the tools, technology and trends that are providing a base for building the e-commerce sites of the future: how to make any of it pay off for the retailer in terms of its direct effect on merchandising. So among the tools queuing up for potential development on its platform for retailer use are two concepts that seek to do just that, including a merchandized social networks toolkit and a concept currently going by the working name of one-click cloning.
“This year we are plotting to marry some of the technologies we already have—the ability to personalize, the ability to communicate externally, the ability to build microsites—and essentially use the social networking phenomenon to merchandise,” says MarketLive CEO Ken Burke. “Integrating customer reviews and ratings has been done. Bringing that to the next level is figuring out how to reach out and connect with individual social networks that exist out there, and hopefully automating that process.”
The idea is to make the online retailer a locus of people coming together, Burke says, a role bricks-and-mortar stores already serve. One MarketLive client, for example, is an automotive parts distributor that counts members of auto enthusiast clubs among its best customers. MarketLive is working on concepts that would enable the distributor to merchandise directly to those clubs and their members in a number of ways that connect back to the distributor. For instance, it could provide a toolkit, that the distributor could in turn make available to the clubs, containing tools the clubs could use on their own sites, like blogging or message boards, that allow members to communicate with each other.
“So you’d be providing them with a bit of an infrastructure, and then feeding product information back to the group that is personalized for them,” says Burke of how online retailers could merchandise to social networks under this scenario. “It leverages existing technology to get closer to those individuals.”
MarketLive also has its eye on another trend: the increasing demand among retailers for fast and easy site replication as another way to merchandise products. More merchants are saying they want to use the web to expand different product lines beyond what they have in other channels, but they need to be able to bring in enough web business to make it viable. A microsite that wraps additional content around those expanded product lines to create a whole brand identity online is one way to accomplish that, but building it internally from scratch could take a merchant six months or more, experts say. The one-click cloning concept now in development at MarketLive is a toolkit that automates the process.
Burke adds that several of MarketLive’s retailer clients are interested in microsites as a merchandising strategy around very specific product lines. As tools to easily launch microsites become more available, “I think you’ll see more and more of it,” he adds.
Baby steps
Because both consumers and retailers are just now beginning to understand new patterns in how shoppers interact with brands in a web world, the tools that could abruptly push those patterns in one direction or another are, for now, best left in development, some industry observers say. The upcoming generation of new online shopping tools, they add, takes a thoughtfully-conceived step in a new direction, offering more rich media, more ways to engage with the merchant and the merchandise, and more personalized content.
To start to take that step, forward-looking online retailers and the web developers they work with are today combining existing technologies in new ways and benefiting from a wave of consumer adoption that is making standing technologies available to a wider online audience.
“It’s actually the greater adoption of things such as broadband that’s made it more possible to use existing things like Flash and video and create more immersive experiences online,” says Gokiert. “Today it’s almost more about enabling what’s already out there.”
mary@verticalwebmedia.com
