Flowers/Gifts/Jewelry

This time it’s personal

IRWD2010 Conference

Internet Retailer Best of the Web 2007

1-800-Flowers.com
BlueNile.com
BuildABear.com
Ice.com
Zazzle.com

Flowers, gifts and jewelry all revolve around very personal matters. Be it for Mother’s Day, a friend’s birthday, an engagement or an “I’m really sorry about what I said last night” apology, these items all are purchased for very specific reasons. As a result, shoppers have very specific needs that require a rather personal touch. So merchants selling flowers, gifts and jewelry must know their customers thoroughly to best communicate with them as well as meet those needs.

The five outstanding retailers in this category all understand this extraordinarily well. And they base their product offerings, site design, and product creation and ordering processes on this key fundamental that makes some e-retailers in this category truly shine.

When it comes to knowing exactly what customers want, for example, Zazzle.com literally has a unique product for every single shopper at the site. It sells merchandise that shoppers customize as they see fit. T-shirts with their own madcap slogans, posters that can include the official art of popular cartoon characters or TV shows, greeting cards with the family name and picture, customized versions of actual U.S. postage stamps, and much more. What makes this site stand out is the easy and fun process by which customers use numerous simple web tools to whip up their very own creations.

Having products that fit a customer’s wishes is great; but if a merchant cannot get that message across it may not be able to win the customer over.

This is an area where Build-A-Bear Workshop Inc. is far ahead of many competitors. The principle is the same as Zazzle’s except the personalization is confined to teddy bears and their accessories. Not only do the web tools that enable product personalization foster an entertaining experience, the site also offers numerous interactive games and other content. And Build-A-Bear is pushing the online envelope with its smart use of online video. To help shoppers better understand what the bear-building parties it offers in local stores entail, the e-retailer shows online customers an actual party via web-based video.

It is these kinds of personal touches that are grabbing shoppers who need to make a truly personal decision.

Sometimes flowers are just not enough. That’s why 1-800-Flowers.com is pouring it on with teddy bears, chocolate, cookies, wine and popcorn. And even hard goods like Swarovski crystal butterflies or a Lenox porcelain birthday cake. 1-800-Flowers.com, a pioneer in e-commerce as well as one of the most adroit marketers of the 800-number, has been branching out in a big way. But its signature ease of use and customer service are still in place.

1-800-Flowers started out in 1976 as one flower store, then added 13, then a phone service, and finally a web site. This year the company stoked its growing gift-basket business with the purchase of confectioner Fannie May. While swanky candy is already represented in its product line by Godiva and Joseph Schwartz, Fannie May appeals to more middlebrow palates and pocketbooks. A box of 25 Fannie May truffles, for example, sets a customer back only $22.99 compared with $34 to $64 for the upscale brands.

This acquisition joins the company’s previous diversification plays such as Plow & Hearth (gifts for home, hearth, yard and garden), HearthSong and Magic Cabin (toys, games and other kids’ gifts), The Popcorn Factory, and Greatfood.com.

Not that the flowers are being neglected. The company recently touted its signing of floral-designer-to-the-stars Nico de Swert to the team that supplies the Designer Flowers section of the site.

Despite the potential confusion of these proliferating offerings, the 1-800-Flowers.com web site remains a model of clarity. Pull-down menus let customers narrow their search by 11 different criteria, including occasion, price and product type. If they’re pressed or lacking imagination, the “find a gift fast” option further streamlines the process. And at every turn, customers can see what’s available for same-day delivery. And for those in doubt about the propriety of their choices, there’s a “Gift Etiquette” tutorial section provided by the one and only Emily Post.

1-800-Flowers.com also plays the multi-channel game very well. Its Bloomnet franchise network of local florist partners now numbers 9,000, up from 6,000 earlier this year. That kind of presence enables same-day delivery in hundreds of markets, vital for a business whose lifeblood is the impulse purchase. This growing network will give traditional industry leader FTD a run for its money.

If there’s such a thing as a flawless online order experience, BlueNile.com has it in its sights. The pure-play jeweler is admittedly obsessed with the concept of the perfect order—from the industry-leading diamond search tool it built internally to guide the buyers of diamond engagement rings through some 50,000 stones to the 99.96% on-time order delivery rate that it keeps trying to push toward 100% to the phone calls it answers at its customer contact center within 15 seconds.

Blue Nile even unpacks some of the orders it’s packed up before they leave the house to see whether the bubble wrap is placed correctly around the wrapped gift and the tape is placed in exactly the right location on the Fed-Ex box. If not, the retailer tracks down why and makes sure it won’t happen again.

Admittedly, the outer wrappings seem a small issue compared with everything else that goes into the purchase of a significant piece of jewelry online, but it shows how the jeweler leaves no stone unturned in its quest to “over-deliver” on customer expectations. “We do the same kind of thing in every area of our business, whether it’s marketing, customer service or merchandising,” says Darrell Cavens, senior vice president of marketing. “Everything that goes out our door gets the same level of quality, service and experience, whether it’s a $50 item or a $50,000 one.”

This year Blue Nile fine-tuned an already powerful diamond search tool, creating a template that collects live feedback while customers are actively engaged in the selection process. It has rolled the lessons learned from that effort out to collect feedback on other key site applications. That’s just one more way Blue Nile has been able to grow sales, generate repeat business and keep customer satisfaction high.

Chad Doiron, strategist in the Internet practice of retail consultants Kurt Salmon Associates, gives Blue Nile high marks for a quality of experience that matches the price of the ticket. “The site projects a luxury feel,” he says. “They were the ones who proved that you could sell luxury items online.”

Like its retail stores, BuildABear.com is built for fun as well as commerce. Sure, a kid or adult can custom-design a teddy bear from the fur up. But they also can come to the site just to play games, design e-cards, download pictures or participate in a book club. And they can do it in English, French, German, Swedish, Russian, Japanese and a variety of other languages.

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“They support 12 localized web sites for markets around the world,” says John Yunker, president of Byte Level Research. “That’s just remarkable as retailers go.”

While the site layout is consistent from market to market—most carry the same features as the U.S. site—Build-A-Bear also offers localized content to address cultural differences between countries, Yunker adds.

One potential downside to the Build-A-Bear site, however, stems from the many interactive features it offers, Yunker contends. It’s bandwidth intensive. “On a dial-up connection, it’s not a user-friendly web site,” he says. “As they continue to go global, they’re going to have to take that into account in markets that may not have widespread broadband penetration.”

But the site’s interactive features are what make this bear roar. A page listing the schedule for a Build-A-Bear Workshop on Tour, for example, enables visitors to click on the paw of an animated bear driving a bus down a highway to honk the horn or take a sip from a soft drink. A shopper also can listen to various sounds and phrases before selecting one for her customized talking bear.

Further, visitors are invited to participate in no-purchase-required sweepstakes, sign up for an e-newsletter, watch a Build-A-Bear party via online video technology, and schedule a party at a nearby store.

The home page highlights new bears with tie-ins to newly released movies or ongoing sporting events. In early November, for instance, the site featured a “Make-Your-Own Mumble Weekend,” spotlighting a limited edition stuffed version of Mumble, the star of the animated feature film “Happy Feet.” For Build-A-Bear, it’s this kind of interactivity for customers that truly is a happy feat.

Ice.com continues to forge ahead with ways to make the online shopping experience as close as possible to that of walking into a fine jewelry store.

Earlier this year Ice.com acquired Diamond.com—a deal that expanded its market reach into loose diamonds. But rather than just capitalize on Diamond’s presence in the loose diamond market, it developed new ways to sell its products and engage customers. Ice.com’s new loose-diamond ring configurator, for instance, is designed to replicate an in-store shopping experience.

“Diamond configurators normally start with choosing a diamond,” explains Pinny Gniwisch, co-founder and executive vice president of marketing. “Ours offers three ways to buy a diamond ring: You can choose a ring band first, choose a diamond first or choose to browse. It’s similar to the way you might speak to a diamond dealer in person. It’s less technical, more user friendly.”

Mary Brett Whitfield, senior vice president at consultants Retail Forward, says Ice.com also excels at addressing other needs of online jewelry shoppers. It reminds them on every page why online buying is safe, for example, and “it also lets you shop by category, product type, price and brand,” she says. “Other jewelry sites don’t always let you shop as easily.”

Ice also has been polishing its site with Ajax technology to make pages with multiple product images load faster.

And on the marketing front, it’s reaching out to new customers in innovative ways. By creating blogs such as SparkleLiketheStars.com and JustAskLeslie.com—initially intended as informational sites for existing customers—it has driven more traffic to Ice.com and boosted its natural search rankings.

Now it’s moving into social networking sites, such as Facebook.com and MySpace.com, offering free jewelry to participants who upload and judge videos featuring Ice.com’s products along with its logo.

With its combination of merchandising, marketing and customer service, Ice is on course this year to boost sales by nearly 50% over 2005—a natural outgrowth of providing a site that people want to visit, Gniwisch contends. “The issue isn’t whether a visitor buys or not,” he says, “it’s whether she has a great shopping experience.”

Zazzle.com has the advanced look and feel of a web site that spawned from a doctoral student’s computer science thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In reality the company’s roots are closer to Stanford University. The founders, CEO Robert Beaver and his sons, Jeff and Robert, are all former Stanford economics majors who started Zazzle in the family’s pool house.

Today, backed with $16 million from investors such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which made early investments in Amazon.com and Drugstore.com, Zazzle is refining an e-commerce business strategy that marries online merchandising with digital content. On Zazzle.com, users can personalize and purchase T-shirts, coffee mugs, bags, postcards and buttons. Through a relationship Zazzle has with the U.S. Postal Service, shoppers can also personalize stamps.

But Zazzle is as much a digital community as it is an e-commerce site, says Robert Beaver. Zazzle combines a just-in-time manufacturing process with easy-to-use online design tools and a large collection of digital images from The Walt Disney Co., the Library of Congress and others. This combination enables consumers and businesses to create and store personalized images and create personalized merchandise. What makes the site unique is the sense of digital community Zazzle is building among its core users of artists, photographers, designers, business owners and online shoppers, says Manivone Phommahaxay, senior user experience specialist at Molecular Inc. “The interactive page features invite shoppers to view detailed images, test out color combinations and even browse other products instantaneously without multiple page refreshes,” says Phommahaxay. “Shoppers no longer have to wonder what their personalized T-shirt might look like because the site shows it to them.”

Early on Beaver handled the business side of the start-up while his sons concentrated on web design. Now the company sees a future as both a web retailer and as a third-party services company. In August, Zazzle launched a program that represents an overarching effort to expand its business by enabling customized product creation on third-party web sites. Zazzle’s Create-a-Product API offers web sites a one-click way to turn digital content, such as images, designs, photos and text, into custom products such as T-shirts and mugs. “We’re a web retailer that’s grounded in being a good technology company as well,” Beaver says. “Lots of retailers can sell online. Our model is different because we’re focused on merging e-commerce with digital content and an interactive community.”