Sticking Around

Sounds great, right? But here’s what’s tricky about being sticky for retail sites: stickiness doesn’t necessarily mean sales. When shopping is just one of many reasons to hang out on Yahoo and other multi-function web destinations like it, visitors can and do spend hours on the site without making a single purchase. “A site may give people free email, so they stay on it more, but they may not be in a purchase mode,” says Sean Kaldor, vice president of e-commerce at Milpitas, Calif.-based Neilsen NetRatings. “If I had a store, this would be like setting up a patio outside and giving away free hot dogs. People hang around my front door, but they’re not really in my store shopping.”

In fact, little independent research exists as yet that provides hard data correlating either page views per visitor or duration of stay on a site with increased spending per visitor. At the Washington-based National Retail Federation, Internet retailing Vice President Scott Silverman says members talk more of how to convert shoppers, get them to return, and keep them satisfied than how to get them to stay at a site longer.

“If your metric as an e-retailer is duration of time a person stays on your site, how are you to know that they’re not on your site for a long time because they can’t find what they need rather than because they’re enjoying themselves so much they don’t want to leave?” Silverman says. “I don’t see that there’s any direct correlation between revenue generated and the amount of time someone is on your site.”

That said, who’s winning the stickiness derby among retailers? In May figures from MediaMetrix, for example, Coldwatercreek.com ranked tops among apparel sites, with the average visitor spending 18 minutes per usage month. JCPenney.com followed closely with visitors spending an average 17.2 minutes, and iTurf.com sites came in third at an average 15.7 minutes.

In looking at what kills stickiness even at a content-rich site, many consultants say speed, or lack of it, ranks at the top. “The reason people leave sites is primarily because they’re slow,” says Alan Benick, an analyst with the Boston-based Yankee Group.

Yet until recently, Akamai and other content distributors such as I-beam, Adero, Digital River and others have been serving up speed to support entertainment sites more than retail sites, where the use of rich media isn’t yet as widely established. But that will change as broadband access spreads out to home shoppers. “If things were to go on exactly as they are now there’d be little need for it,” Kaldor says. “We’d all be delivering very small streams, which could be handled effectively out of a central server. The content distributors are getting ready for when everyone has high speed access.”

“That might not be an issue for me if I’m at work with a high-speed connection, but if I’m on a dial-up modem from home, that’s significant,” says Benick. In fact, with about two-thirds of home users connecting to the Internet at modem speeds of either 28.8 or 56Kb, it’s an issue for most home shoppers, which makes it a problem for e-merchants as well. Zona has estimated that e-commerce sites lose as much as $362 million in sales per month due to slow page downloads and shopper bail outs. If that number is correct, recovering all those lost carts might increase Internet retailers’ sales by 10%.

Page design—specifically, limiting byte budgets—is one way to speed up download times, as is spreading content distribution to other servers. But speed and its technological underpinning are only one peg of site stickiness’ three-legged stool. Leg Two? Navigability; which includes the increasingly popular personalization features that mine information about users’ preferences to present a customized face to each regular visitor. “You’re going to go back to a site if every time you’re there, they seem to know exactly what you want, regardless of the fact that you may be really irritated that they’re collecting information on you,” says Jilani Zerebi, principal analyst at Current Analysis, a Sterling, Va.-based market research firm.

The third leg is content, and lots of it. For retail sites, that means not only product assortment, pricing and shipping, but also other features meaningful to the customer that go way beyond shopping. A Jupiter Communications survey of 50 most-visited sites—including retail and others—found that most of them employed features to increase stickiness, giving visitors reasons to stay at the site longer and to visit several times a day. Some 60% of the top sites offered chat, for example, while half offered email and more than a third offered games.

But again, retailers should tread carefully—browsing is good, but it depends on what kind. If shoppers spend 10 minutes in a brick-and-mortar store, they’ll be exposed to merchandise and sales, and the chance that they’ll make an impulse purchase goes up. The same principle can work on the web—browsing a site can lead to purchasing—but not if visitors are spending their time at the site browsing free email.

So how do e-retailers pick content that promotes the kind of stickiness that can lead to sales? The key for retail sites, say industry consultants, is to select content that always keeps visitors in an engaged, potential shopping mode, and e-retailers are finding some creative ways to do it.

“Our research shows people will spend more than twice as much time in a shopping environment when there’s more information there for them to use in making their decision,” says Kaldor. Specifically, he adds, “We’ve seen significant increased usage when you offer the ability for people to talk to other people about products.”

Kelley won’t disclose numbers, but says that giving Ashford watch shoppers click-through access to community members at TimeZone who will swap unedited information and opinions with those weighing expensive watch purchases increases shopper confidence. “We believe that has an impact on conversion,” says Kelly. “Giving people the opportunity to get more involved and giving them more content that directly relates to the purchase they’re considering become a major point of stickiness for the Ashford site.”

With a business model based on both commerce and advertising revenues, and an audience of teens, Alloy.com takes another approach to community and stickiness on its site, where 1.3 million unique visitors each month rack up an average 14 minutes per visit according to May figures from Media Metrix. “The community features are what keep users on the site the longest,” says Susan Kaplow, director of content. “Applications that let teens express themselves in the form of quizzes, polls and other voting mechanisms are extremely sticky applications for the site, as are the different forms they can use to message each other. Teens are by nature inquisitive, and are constantly belly-button gazing as they figure it all out. An adult doesn’t make time to do that.”

But because teens do, Alloy can monitor the popularity of various applications and integrate them with contextually relevant shopping opportunities. Fashion quizzes, for example, one of the site’s stickiest features, might link directly to merchandise offerings. Having built its base of registered uses to 2.3 million over the four years since its launch, Alloy now is seeking to leverage it by going after more sponsorship opportunities with big advertisers. It already has deals with top consumer products companies such as Procter & Gamble and Eastman Kodak. Analysts project that the company’s 1999 revenues of $30 million will more than double to $70 million this year; a much larger percentage of revenues than in years past is expected to come from sponsorship deals.

Within the mantra of content, community and commerce, stickiness has a particular meaning for retail sites, and its value to those sites depends on their objectives. As in the case of Alloy, stickiness may stretch out into lengthy stays with content designed to build and hold an audience that can be merchandised for ad revenues as well as commerce. For others, the value of stickiness is measured in a few minutes of extra time per visitor that link directly to cross selling and upselling opportunities.