Color technology makes the difference as e-retailers fine-tune tints to spike sales

Even the tech-savviest among them aren’t immune to problems. “I ordered a coat over the Internet and it turned out to be a totally different shade of green than what I saw on the monitor,” says Lia Schubert, an analyst at Boston-based InfoTrends Research Group, a market research firm. Back went the coat, and down went Schubert’s level of trust in color representation on the web. “Even with my awareness of this issue, I was still shocked,” she says.

Early shoppers didn’t buy much apparel or many cosmetics online, so sharpening up color reproduction has until lately ranked low in the priorities of e-retailers. “They’ve had other issues to deal with, like getting their product images up online at all,” says Schubert. But as more web shoppers venture beyond books and gadgets, and more have Schubert’s experience of sending for—and sending back—color-sensitive products that flunk the front-door test, online color correcting is taking on a new urgency for Internet sellers of apparel, furniture, cosmetics and art.

Research firms are tackling the color issue in increasing numbers. And as they pile up data, the dotted line connecting web color representation to online shopping behavior starts to look more like forged-steel links.

Here’s a sample: in a study by InfoTrends last December, 81% of those surveyed said concerns about inaccurate color depiction affect their decisions to purchase color-dependent products via the web. A BizRate study in March found that 50% of consumers would not make future purchases from an online merchant that delivered an item in a color that didn’t match their expectations. And 60% of online consumers in a recent study from Cyber Dialogue don’t trust the colors viewed on their monitors while 30% bailed out of online purchases due to uncertainty about the color.

Much of the research generated so far to demonstrate shoppers’ concerns about color depiction online has been sponsored by color solutions technology developers. The studies above were commissioned by Imation Corp. and E-Color Inc., two leaders in the growing field. But that doesn’t negate the importance that consumers attach to color representation—in fact, most retailers probably know intuitively that how a color is depicted on a shopper’s computer is important. Independent research shows that e-retailers aren’t waiting to hear from customers about color concerns; the issue is already rising on their radar screens of its own accord. In a May report from Forrester Research on online fashion marketing, e-retailers ranked color correction at 3.5 on a scale of 5 in importance to sales.

At the front end, where product images are captured on camera and color depiction gets digital, transferring color from one imaging format to another constitutes yet another set of opportunities for color to stray off the mark. “The fundamental problem is the physics of color,” says Stephen Mace, CEO of Praxisoft LLC, a Sterling, Va.-based provider of digital color matching software. “To try to network color when it’s first acquired through an image being scanned or photographed by a digital camera you have to bring it through different color gamuts.” A gamut is a device’s range of reproducible colors. “Each device has its own gamut.”

By the time the online image of the red sweater reaches the color monitor, it may look very different to different viewers. The situation is comparable to that of walking into an electronics store and seeing a dozen TVs all tuned to the same channel. All the TV receivers are getting the same signal, but they present it as something slightly different on each screen. For similar reasons, web shoppers may log onto a common web site but see different color shades of the same images.

How different? Color changes on the web are measured in units called delta Es—one dE being equal to one perceptible color shift. When E-Color conducted a baseline study last year with client Bloomingdales.com prior to deploying its technology on Bloomingdale’s site, it looked for what percentage of site visitors needed some level of color correction on their computer screens, and how much. The study found 87% of visitors were viewing monitors that needed significant color correction. On average, getting to an accurate color representation of the product required a change of 16dE. What that means is that the monitors displayed color 16 shades away from the real thing, a degree of variation roughly equal to the difference between, say, red and pink.

Users who don’t have new equipment or upgrades can still download the prompts and install the cookie through links on the web sites of merchants that feature E-Color correction. Once installed, the cookie automatically alerts the server whenever the user calls up any site that uses E-Color technology, and the server dishes up images color-corrected specifically for that monitor.

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“Our technology reads the cookie, which tells us how you see color,” says Peter Bernard, vice president of products and marketing at San Francisco-based E-Color. “So when the server serves up the image of that red sweater, it will actually change some of the color of the image to compensate for the way it knows you’re seeing color. When you’re seeing too much blue on your display, the picture of the sweater will be served to you with a little less blue so it matches what the merchant wants you to see. We’re personalizing color based on how your monitor sees color.”

With a growing crowd of technology and service providers clamoring for e-retailers’ attention, smart web merchants are looking hard at performance metrics before investing with any of them. But with color matching technologies relatively new, there’s little hard data so far to quantify impact, predictive studies aside.

Technology vendors, however, say that though many e-retailers are just beginning to evaluate online color correction, their experience already has turned up at least one surprise. “We’d projected that the overwhelming driver for deployment of this technology on e-retail sites would be product returns caused by colors not meeting customers’ expectations,” says Dave Veilleux, program director of Internet technology at Oakdale, Minn.-based Imation Corp. But in practice, with a half-dozen e-retailers expected to launch Imation’s color correction system on their sites over the next few months, Imation has found something else. “The primary driver,” Veilleux says, “really appears to be that sites are using this technology to differentiate themselves from competitors.”

For the answer, say analysts, web merchants should first look at their merchandise—color means little when you’re selling CDs, but a lot if you’re selling apparel. Next, Internet sellers must dig deep into their customer profiles to determine whether their sites’ issues are those that specific technologies will resolve. “Haphazard technology integration is not the answer,” says Lydia Loizides, an analyst with New York-based Jupiter Communications. “Say you think color is the be-all and end-all to selling more shoes. But you find on further research that sizing is the problem; you’re selling European shoes and U.S. customers need something that enables them to translate the size differences. Having identified what the problem is, you integrate the technology that fixes it.”

Case in point: Bloomingdales.com, New York. “We evaluate technology in terms of the value it adds to the customer’s experience,” says Susan Harvey, senior vice president and managing director of Bloomingdales.com. “We’re not interested in technology for technology’s sake, as a novelty or just to add a new bell or whistle to the site.”

Under those criteria, Bloomingdales.com looked at but passed on virtual modeling technology and offline color swatching systems—but it chose to offer E-Color correction to site visitors starting with the post-holiday season early this year. Now creeping up on nearly a year’s worth of data, Harvey says Bloomingdales.com will look at the technology’s impact on returns, shop-to-buy conversion rates and the shopping patterns of customers who choose to use the color correction service.

The 18-year-old direct marketer launched a web store in 1999 and until adding E-Color technology last June, used no color correction system. It knew from its catalog experience, however, how tricky color representation could be in a print format, and it understood that the web introduced a whole new set of challenges. “On a print piece, you can pump up the image so it’s crisp and clear. But on the web, you can’t afford to have a big file. The fewer colors you use in making the file the smaller it’s going to be and the shorter the download time—but you don’t want it to be at the expense of accurate color,” says Atlas.

Some 10-12% of Venus’ catalog returns are identifiably related to color issues. “So anything we could do to make sure people are seeing our colors properly on the Internet was worth a test,” Atlas adds. The company expects to look at performance metrics before the launch of the next swimwear season in January. Meanwhile, as an early adopter it pays relatively little for the technology—about $2,000 a month in licensing fees plus a monthly fee based on the amount of provider bandwidth it uses.

Though color correction systems aren’t yet in widespread use among e-retailers, analysts already are looking ahead to figure out the likely winners among color technology vendors. “Right now it’s a race for them to secure partnerships with equipment manufacturers and e-business integrators,” Schubert says. “The problem is that there’s probably only going to be room for one major player. If color correction is to become truly ubiquitous, everyone will have to have monitors calibrated to the same settings. I think e-retailers realize that and there’s some trepidation about being first.”