Dressed to Sell

Redesigning an Internet store may be all about finesse, but the results are all about finance. When Spiegel.com unveiled its new design in November, sales climbed 30% and traffic surged more than 60% in a matter of weeks. At a time when market speculation continues to propel some of the Web’s hottest retail properties, Spiegel executives say their relaunch already is paying for itself.

“We’re not making bets on the future of online sales,” says John Irvin, president of Spiegel Catalog, Downers Grove, Ill. “The Internet is a growing and viable part of our business—not in five years but right now.”

Irvin won’t give specific numbers, other than to say that Web sales are rising about 300% a year across all of parent Spiegel Group’s e-commerce operations. The units include casual clothier Eddiebauer.com and Spiegel.com, which like the catalog sells fashions, home furnishings and electronics to a customer base that’s 80% female. Richard Burke, managing director of Spiegel.com, attributes the rise in sales to the reasons behind the relaunch: simplicity and convenience. The navigation bar is better organized, pages download in a third of the time, and customers can move from the home page to putting goods in their shopping carts in just three clicks, down from four or five with the old site. “The redesign made all the sense in the world,” says Burke. “And it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than printing catalogs—about one seventh the cost of putting a catalog on the street.”

Far from cosmetic

Across Internet retailing, executives give similar reasons for a wave of site makeovers that are far from cosmetic. Spiegel, J. Crew, L.L. Bean, Garden.com, Furniture.com, Macy’s, Wal-Mart and others have recently rolled out redesigned sites aimed at improving both their appeal to shoppers and their ability to merchandise. All say they’re listening more closely to what their customers want, generally by inviting comments via e-mail panels, focus groups and tests involving customers or employees. A few plan to push the limits of personalization by experimenting with so-called narrow-casting, which tailors pages to each customer’s interests based on previous visits to the site. Established retailers like Spiegel generally undertake redesigns to increase sales, refresh their sites, keep up with competitors, or extend markets or product lines, says Duif Calvin, senior retail consultant at iXL, an internet strategies and services firm based in Atlanta. “Dot-coms are a little different and may change their sites two or three times in their first 15 months,” Calvin adds. “They launch with something very edgy. Boo.com is very edgy, for example, and very slow. My guess is that you’ll see a full makeover in four to six months to make the site faster, streamline ordering, and increase average order value.”

Though no one officially tracks Web store redesigns, e-commerce vendors, consultants and design firms say they’re seeing a steady uptick in new projects. “This activity is not so much about taking advantage of new bells and whistles as it is providing better service,” says Kim Free, director of e-business at CommercialWare, an e-commerce software vendor in Natick, Mass. “A lot of retailers dipped their toes in the water and launched sites when there wasn’t a clear set of rules about the basic functionality they needed to deliver. They looked at the Web as just a user interface and not a true transaction processing system. Now they understand that it’s the real thing, with real revenue and real possibilities for enhancing their brands.”

But possibilities remain just that without better links to the back office, Free adds. More than simply remodeling the storefront, many of today’s relaunches tie inventory, order processing and fulfillment more tightly into site operations. Marketing is another big driver, with e-retailers realizing that they’ll get more mileage out of personalization and customer service features if the infrastructure is there to support them. Though increasingly comfortable with the Web, shoppers won’t return to sites so overwhelmed that they freeze up or so cobbled together that they allow consumers to order goods already sold out. In fact, it’s clear that some angry customers will do more than vote with their mouse: Witness the class-action suit recently filed against Toys “R” Us by angry customer s who allege the retailer accepted online orders that it knew it could not fill.

Spiegel starts over

Spiegel.com steered clear of a Christmas catastrophe by deciding a year ago to rebuild its site from front to back. A newly assembled Web team found two major problems: The old site couldn’t handle an influx of holiday shoppers, nor would it survive the Y2K rollover. Though the previous design was just two years old, the site’s technology backbone was older and far out of sync with Spiegel’s growing needs.

Six more powerful servers now handle even more volume than 14 supported before the relaunch. In October, a month before the revamped site went live, Spiegel.com logged 529,000 unique visitors, according to PC Data Online of Reston, Va. The next month—thanks to the start of holiday shopping, plus e-mails inviting 175,000 customers to take a look at the new design—traffic surged to 868,000 without problems. Visitors tapered off at 543,000 in December, a pattern common among sites selling similar merchandise, such as Macy’s and Nordstrom.

Of course, Spiegel’s ability to sustain the increases in traffic—and sales—will determine the relaunch’s ultimate success. The crush of new visitors added 250,000 e-mail addresses to the site’s customer ranks, strengthening its marketing base. There’s no better message to send out than the arrival of new merchandise. And the task of loading fresh images and descriptions was literally taken off the Spiegel staff’s hands with the arrival of the new computer infrastructure. “The old site required a significant amount of manual work,” says Burke. “Since there’s very little carryover from season to season, refreshing the content was a huge process requiring us to call in staff from other areas to help.” A new content loader maintains specifications for headlines, text and images, allowing merchants behind the scenes to test new promotions and expand hot-selling categories without the technology hassles.

The streamlined site is obvious to customers, too. Catalog customers trying out the Spiegel.com simply enter item numbers to call up their selections. And because the new site is linked to Spiegel’s mainframe inventory system, what’s visible on the site is available in the warehouse. A real-time inventory system, scheduled for installation in the first quarter, will replace today’s batch processing and lead to further improvements. That way, a woman ordering a silk blouse will only see the colors available in her size.

Better-integrated systems also allow Spiegel to play to its strength as a marketer of lifestyle solutions by featuring entire rooms of home furnishings or complete wardrobe ensembles. Such merchandising strategies, common in paper catalogs, are complicated on the Web by the fact that unrelated goods not only come from different vendors and warehouses but require precisely structured calls to the database to organize and retrieve merchandise.

Annual exercise

With these and other advantages in the offing, most Internet stores are now putting a major redesign in the works every 12 to 18 months. Right on schedule, Garden.com has revamped its site four times since its launch in 1996, most recently at a cost just under $1 million. “It’s a pretty significant investment, but definitely worth it,” says Lisa Sharples, vice president of marketing and cofounder. “As soon as we finish one relaunch, we’re already talking about the next.”

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And for good reason: Garden.com’s latest makeover, a six-month project completed in September, cut the rate of abandoned shopping carts on the site by 25%. In fact, says Sharples, the rate is a closely watched metric that launched the entire project. After studying click streams, conversion logs and feedback from customers, Sharples and her colleagues decided the problem lay with the site’s navigation. In the four years since its debut, the e-retailer’s product offering had grown by a factor of 10—from 2,000 to more than 20,000. The site had simply outgrown its navigation footprint, making shopping difficult.

“Navigation is really tricky for Net companies in general and something that’s always evolving,” Sharples says. “All those people with master’s in library science should take jobs at Net companies, because organizing the navigation is really an art.”

Changing Garden.com’s navigation started with the home page, which the redesign team concluded was too much of a jumble. “We really looked at how we present information,” explains Sharples, “what’s at the top of the fold versus what you have to scroll down to see.” Above the fold, customers now get a navigation bar containing the site’s four main sections, a separate list of services for Garden.com members, search and browse functions, and two seasonal promotion boxes. Below the fold, the site is just as clean, with a plant finder rounding out the search engine, teasers promoting the Garden.com quarterly magazine and monthly discussion topics, a few more promotional boxes, and a link to customer service information.

Sharples sees other e-retailers undergoing similar less-is-more redesigns. “Simplicity is definitely taking over. It’s so tempting to put more and more on the home page, and yet that isn’t the answer.”

Dropping crumbs

The home page is just the first layer. As shoppers move into Garden.com, what Sharples calls a “crumb trail” travels with them. Designing this level of navigation was complicated by the fact that it could not simply read the code for the last product a customer happened to click on. Lavender, for instance, is both an herb and a perennial, so it’s housed in both departments. The trail had to be different for each product, based on how the customer got there.

Before and after the redesign, Garden.com checked in with customers to make sure that changes worked as intended. Using a system of focus groups, e-mail panels and one-to-one usability testing, the site’s redesign team gathered both general feedback and specific details about how customers experience the site.

About 20 customers participated in usability tests, which asked them to search for products, browse special promotions, place an order, and carry out other tasks. Sharples considers the tests both a reality check and a valuable pipeline for ideas. “Usability testing allows us to see new perspectives, and it vividly points out where the site is inconsistent or confusing.” Garden.com’s latest redesign added a Web chat option for customer service. But usability tests showed that customers couldn’t relate to “chat,” says Sharples. “They told us that anyone who wants help doesn’t want to chat about it.” The solution: rename the feature “Live Help.”

Reactions like that will help Garden.com prepare for narrow-casting, the next wave of site design. The approach uses personalization data and previous shopping patterns to tailor pages to each shopper’s tastes and needs. A Garden.com customer from Boston who logs on to browse for flower seeds, for example, will first see an array culled from the database especially suitable to the growing conditions in Boston.

Though Sharples considers narrow-casting a major focus of future designs, she acknowledges it runs the risk of setting unwanted limits for customers. Shoppers new to the Web often complain that e-retailers don’t offer enough merchandise, she adds. That’s sometimes the case, but in others, shoppers either can’t decipher the categories used to organize the goods or figure out how to drill into the selection. Finding the right products to feature—and pointing the way toward more—will pose challenges as e-retailers try to adjust pages to make shopping more intuitive.

“We ultimately want each customer to have an experience that’s uniquely theirs,” says Sharples. “But if every experience is one-to-one, it’s harder to make generalizations about the site’s overall direction. And I don’t want to limit customers’ choices, because they might be shopping for someone else.”

Brian Sugar, former director of new media at J. Crew, foresees similar tradeoffs as the apparel retailer carries out its own narrow-casting decisions on the heels of a redesign that went live last August. “If we know your size, we’ll make sure it’s pre-selected. If we know you like blue, that’s the color you’ll see on the model,” says Sugar. “Little touches like that can make a big difference to the customer.”

Customers of Jcrew.com already have experienced a rebuilt site similar in scope to the Spiegel relaunch. The two-tiered project involved both new front-end and back-end systems. The relaunch, J. Crew’s first major upgrade of its Web store, technically began last January but took shape between May and the August debut. “The driving principle,” says Sugar, “is that we wanted the site to be its own, not a catalog derivative.”

Yet J. Crew wanted to tap merchandising expertise from people who know its goods better than anyone: its own staff. A merchant from the retail side and another from the catalog operation ordered all new photos to give Internet shoppers larger and more detailed views of fit, color and texture. The redesigned site makes these images available through view-all options. Click on sweaters, choose “view all,” and sweaters of every style appear in thumbnail images. Choose a style, and each sweater pops up in every color.

The redesign team gambled with horizontal scrolling, a decision aimed at replicating a stroll past store display windows. “We viewed it as an experiment, and we learned two things,” says Sugar. “The first is that we can’t wait for broadband. The second is that not everyone knows you can scroll from left to right.” Slow connection speeds and confusion over how to scroll through the site put an end to the experiment within two months. Sugar will only concede that the feature was ahead of its time. “The site is one major learning infrastructure,” he says. “It gives us the ability to learn about our customers and present merchandise in new ways. We’re a direct marketing company. The ability to segment our customer file and give them personalized offerings is a dream come true.”