Zoom, Zoom

Anthropologie will double its budget on rich media this year. Why not? Since the apparel and home goods retailer last September greatly improved functionality in zoom, pan, and swatch toggling, Anthropologie has enjoyed a steady increase in online sales, says e-commerce manager Ranjana Sharma.

"Zoom is the key ingredient that gives the visitor enough reason to purchase the product and caters to impulse buying," Sharma says. "By bringing the customer so close to the real product, we are able to close the sale." Combined with an increased selection of products on its site and more product categories, she says the company`s investment in rich media has paid off even though she can`t pinpoint exactly how much she can attribute to the company`s rich media advances.

Not alone

Anthropologie, part of Urban Outfitters Inc., is not alone in expanding its use of rich online media. Although the bottom line is often hard to gauge, retailers are making greater use of the more established forms of rich media technology these days, such as zoom and hot spot zoom, as well as color and pattern swatching.

And many are now working the expense into their regular e-commerce budgets. "We roll it into the cost of the overall production of our site," says Ron Offir, divisional vice president for the Coach.com division of leather goods retailer/manufacturer Coach Inc. "It`s a part of who we are and how our site functions, and we view it as an add-on to our photography expense."

Offir also sees color swatching and zoom as possible return on investment vehicles. "The technology gives us a way to provide the online shopping experience at a relatively low cost," he adds. "It`s also a very powerful marketing channel for our brand and a driver of business to our stores."

Pressure to one-up the competition is causing many retailers to re-think the use of rich media for imagery, color swatching, zoom and rotation, according to Doug Mack, CEO of rich media provider Scene7 Inc. "We have clients coming to us saying `I`m behind. My competitors are doing this. How can I do it better?`" he says.

Wider array

Another reason for the growing interest in rich media is the fact that retailers have mastered many of the basics of online retailing and are now ready to invest in the add-ons. "In 2001 and `02, we didn`t have the 25%-per-quarter growth that we`re currently having because that was an era of retailers getting their infrastructure right, their search going properly, and their online analytics right," Mack says. "Back then, we were evangelizing the benefits of putting rich media on sites."

Even if retailers were employing rich media back then, many were cautious. But today they are expanding rich media`s use. "Our customers are now using rich media for larger quantities of their product photos than they did two to three years ago," says Christophe Cremault, vice president of marketing for rich media company RichFX Inc. "For instance, zoom has a nearly universal adoption now among retailers--it`s become the standard thing most retailers should have."

In spite of the wider embrace of rich media, many retailers and analysts are unable to prove any ROI. But most argue that it stands to reason that rich media promotes sales. "One of the inhibitors to shopping online is you can`t touch the products," says Patti Freeman Evans, a retail analyst with New York-based Jupiter Research. "So the more detail consumers can see, the more likely they are to make purchases online."

The recent proliferation of broadband Internet access among consumers is partly why some retailers only recently began employing zoom and color swatching on their sites. Jupiter Research and Nielsen/NetRatings, among other researchers, report that as of mid year 2004, more than half of American consumers have broadband access.

Better experience

Historically, the concept of rich media had a negative connotation among consumers who equated the expression with long waits on their PCs. "Four years back, `rich media` meant waiting for the files to download and see the `cool` stuff," says Sharma of Anthropologie. "But it has evolved since and now you can have better experiences with the new technology."

For furniture and home goods marketer Ballard Designs, which sells through its three stores and print catalogs, online sales have grown to 35%, prompting the company to sell bigger items online, such as couches, with the help of color and pattern swatching, which it introduced last August when it re-launched its site. Since then, sales of Ballard`s furniture bodies overall have jumped 73% and sales of furniture fabrics (without the actual furniture) have increased 96%, compared to respective gains of 47% and 50% between 2003 and 2004.

Although she can`t attribute the company`s entire sales gain to the new technology, vice president of marketing Kim Hansen says color and fabric swatching has helped. "Its impact is a little hard to measure because we have had a lot of things going on at once," she says.

Hansen characterizes Ballard`s investment in rich media as "significant." She notes that there wasn`t initially a "slam dunk" increase in additional sales to cover the company`s added expense in zoom and color swatching. "But we think it will pay itself back in a relatively short time--just not immediately," she adds.

Ballard, part of Cornerstone Brands Inc., offers some 55 furniture bodies in 60 fabrics.

Hansen says zoom has been particularly helpful in selling furniture or fabrics with a distressed look. "People can see distressed finishes in a catalog to some degree, but not with the clarity of what the finishes will really look like," Hansen says. "So we wanted to make sure customers really wanted distressed finishes to reduce returns."

Additionally, she says, "Ballard is all about decorating but the catalog hasn`t come through as strongly as we`d have liked. With this technology, we`re able to give the furniture and fabrics their proper show in a way they can be sold on the web."

In addition to making it easier for customers to order furniture online, Ballard`s use of color swatching has helped call center reps assist customers better. This has effectively channeled more orders online while reducing the amount of time reps spend on the phone with customers. What`s more, rich media advancements have made it possible for customers to place their own custom furniture orders online; previously, they had to call in custom orders. Now, more than 30% of custom orders are being placed online and call center talk time has been greatly reduced.

Early adopter

Unlike some recent converts, Coach was an early adaptor of rich media. Three years ago, Coach started using spot zoom on such portions of its bags as snaps, stitching, and buckles. The primary benefit, the company believes, is that customers have been able to experience online the in-store shopping experience. Offir notes, however, that he can`t quantify how much the advancements have helped online sales.

"We don`t know rich media`s total impact on sales," Offir says, "but we do feel our catalog is such a great marketing vehicle that this technology has allowed us a way to provide a comparable online experience at a relatively low cost." Offir won`t reveal Coach`s actual investment in rich media, but considers it "reasonable."

No picking and choosing

Coach has successfully given customers greater detail of its bags through the use of spot zoom in conjunction with color and pattern swatching, Offir says. Unlike larger retailers, such as Neiman Marcus, which offer tens of thousands of SKUs online, Coach offers 300 to 400 styles and three colors per style, resulting in 900 to 1,200 SKUs, Offir says. "So we can afford to treat each product online with care and display each to the best of our ability," he says. "We don`t have to pick and choose--we can afford color swatching and spot zoom across all our products." Coach likes the interactive experience so well that it recently launched a Try This Bag On feature for handbags (see box).

Coach hasn`t had to do anything on its end, insofar as increasing bandwidth is concerned, to accommodate rich media. "We were delighted when in the middle of 2003 RichFX launched its zoom technology off a nonproprietary piece of software," Offir says. "Users at first had to download a flash player, but RichFX made a flash software program that virtually everybody has on their browsers. So consumers no longer need to download any software they might not be familiar with."

IRCE 2008 Conference Multi-Media CD-ROM

Unlike other evolving technologies whose costs go down as their popularity increases, rich media`s cost has stayed stable, vendors say. "In the early days of the rich media market, vendors would sell their services at a loss," says Scene7`s Mack. "But now the industry is being run by solid long-term businesses, so pricing has been pretty consistent the past couple of years."

That`s not to say, however, that rich media implementation costs the same today as it did four years ago. "The actual cost of something like spot zoom hasn`t gone down--the labor involved with setting it up for each photo has," Cremault says. Vendors say a retailer can spend from a few thousand dollars to a few hundred thousand dollars, depending on how many products they choose to apply the various technologies to.

Partnerships

Many retailers work closely with either RichFX or Scene7. Retailers say that by partnering with their vendors, they`ve cut costs because the vendors leverage the infrastructure they`ve built for other retailers. "Scene7 shares its image production system, so we get the benefit of using images in its combined network," says Sharma of Anthropologie. "We didn`t have to pay for extra bandwidth since we`re part of Scene7`s hosted environment." Scene7, in turn, partners with Akamai Technologies Inc., a network that delivers content. This way, instead of having the vendor`s servers serve every single image to every single end-user, the end-user`s computer actually requests images from Akamai, which has servers all over the world.

Anthropologie is using Scene7`s Infinite Imaging Network hosted ASP solution to create and deploy all imagery and online catalogs for its web site. As a result, the retailer has improved production cost and time up to threefold without straining Anthropologie`s in-house technical resources or requiring additional capital investments.

In addition to working closely with their vendors, retailers have learned that they must nevertheless proceed with caution. When Ballard last year introduced color swatching for its leather products, for example, sales decreased at first, Hansen says. "The problem was that we changed graphics to accommodate the color change technology," she says. "We initially replaced color swatches for the item with a button to click through to the color change option. Removing the swatches from the first place the item was viewed diminished sales. So we redesigned the button so it represented all the colors available and sales have since come back."

Ballard and other retailers are also cautious about exploring more advanced forms of rich media, such as video and animation. For most retailers, video "has yet to be proven for its ability to drive sales," says Freeman Evans of Jupiter Research. "And although most retailers have product photos they can repurpose for zoom or panning, they don`t have video to repurpose."

There`s a limit

Hansen says that most newer rich media technologies, such as animation and video aren`t as important as color swatching and zoom. Likewise, Sharma of Anthropologie says she has no interest in the more advanced rich media, such as animation and video, for its web site. But like Coach, which has used some animation in its customer- requested e-mails for nearly two years, she believes animation will make sense for personalized e-mails to Anthropologie`s core customers, which it plans to do this year. "Now that we have the system in place with Scene7, it can offer us the capability to do better personalized customer e-mail," Sharma says.

Although few mainstream retailers want to make the plunge into video or animation on their web sites now, some other marketers are leading the way. In addition to a number of automobile manufacturers, TV home shopping marketer QVC uses video on its site that`s not repurposed from its mainline TV sales pitches.

Rather than video, a next logical step at least for Ballard is the silhouetting of product photos so the furniture can be "virtually" arranged in customers` rooms, Hansen says. "If you know your room size, you`ll be able to arrange the furniture online in your room before you buy it," she explains.

Consumers would be able to create a template of their rooms, mark off where their doors and windows are, and use scaled images of Ballard`s furniture that they would be able to drag onto their digital pictures on Ballard`s site. "We`ve had discussions with RichFX about this," Hansen says. l

Paul Miller is a Somers, N.Y.-based freelance business writer.

Coach`s `virtual` dressing room

Although it`s been seven years since Lands` End introduced its My Virtual Model feature, few retailers have duplicated the apparel cataloger`s online virtual dressing room. But in spring 2004, handbag retailer/manufacturer Coach Inc. launched a virtual dressing room of its own called "Try This Bag On."

Although Coach.com divisional vice president Ron Offir won`t reveal how much the feature has helped drive online sales, he says, "It has become one of the more popular features on our handbag web pages." What`s more, he adds, "We feel good enough about it to continue to reinvest in it."

On its site, Coach has created a silhouette of its bags, giving shoppers the ability to indicate how tall they are and place the bag in a model`s hands, sized to scale. "It gives her a better sense of scale," Offir says. "A lot of shoppers don`t get a good sense of dimensions--they can`t visualize online or in print catalogs how low a bag will hang on their hands or shoulders. This function allows them to virtually try the bag on for a minimal expense to us."

Using proprietary software designed by web development firm Organic, Coach brainstormed the idea internally as part of "our constantly striving to replicate the in-store environment online," Offir says. "This gives shoppers the opportunity to understand where a bag would hit them on their body."

What`s more, many Coach bags come in small, medium or large sizes. So the feature "helps show how a style of a product sizes up, allowing shoppers to compare, say, small to medium versions of our bags," Offir says.

Offir says that Coach plans to continually update the bag scalers so customers can try on the latest bags on the site. "Because we`ll have roughly the same number of handbag styles every year, I expect our costs will remain relatively flat," he says. "But we feel very strongly that it has improved the customer experience on our site and helped sales."

Paul Miller is a Somers, N.Y.-based freelance business writer.