merchandising

E-commerce is about selling. Online Merchandising is the art and practice of selling online.

This one-day intense course will cover the gamut of online selling – from product selection and presentation, through search, sorting, filtering and promotions, to an introduction of advanced rule-based merchandising. We will also consider product-specific presentation needs and the test-measure-optimise approach to selling.

The day considers selling ‘in the round’: from the promises made to customers through to post-purchase selling. We also place online selling in the context of offline selling (store, catalogue and telephone) as well as within a performance framework, suggesting some KPIs to assess progress.

As e-commerce matures and customers are trained by your competitors to expect more this course supports marketing and commercial professionals in satisfying their customers while also increasing profits. The multichannel, commercial approach will allow participants to communicate the benefits of a whole-business approach to selling online, as well as measuring and sharing the success.

Homepage

The homepage is well laid out and easy to scan, with the majority of the page pointing visitors to different departments and collections, rather than actually displaying any specific products.

The page now has what Jakob Nielsen calls ‘mega drop-down menus’, which display large numbers of product categories and sub-categories:

Larger drop-down menus like this one avoid some of the possible drawbacks of smaller versions, such as accidentally moving the mouse outside of the menu and having it disappear, or having to scroll down a long and narrow list of items.

Part of the thinking behind these menus was to remove mid-category pages to reduce the number of clicks between homepage and product pages, and with these menus customers can go to a more specific category straight away.

Site search / navigation

I tried a quick test on the site search for descriptive searches such as blue shirts, as well as some misspellings, and the results were relevant. Also, filtering and sorting options have been provided to narrow down search results.

In addition, Debenhams had added the option of searching for keywords within categories and sub-categories, though it only provides this option once you get down to the category pages, it may be useful to do this straight from the homepage.

The filtered navigation has been improved as well, with more options, greater ease of adding and removing filters and, crucially, the number of products matching each selection is displayed, which should help shoppers to avoid hitting a dead end when browsing.

I think it still needs some work though, as it can be confusing in some areas. For instance, when I searched for a suit, there are two separate filters for sizes; ‘size’ and ‘larger sizes’, which starts from 40in upwards.

These two options weren’t next to each other on the left hand side, and the chest and waist sizes are all mixed in together, which makes it more difficult to find your size from the list.

Also, having searched for a jacket and trousers in a particular size, I was sent to this product pages, only to find that the combination I had selected was out of stock, meaning that the time spent using the filtering options was wasted.

This seems to be an issue with a number of products on the site, and it could be a cause of customer frustration. If particular sizes are out of stock, it may be best not to display them at all.

Product pages

The product pages do the basics well, giving clear information about delivery charge, a size and measuring guide, a phone number to call if items are out of stock, and a clear call to action. 

Reviews have also been added, though since its gathering reviews itself, it will take some time to build up a decent number on its product pages.

Product images are a mixed bag on the site, and this is something Debenhams will have to improve as it updates its product range. There is only one picture for the suit in the screenshot above, which means I can’t things like the number of vents on the back of the suit jacket, the lining, and so on.

However, for this suit, all these views and more are provided, which shows how it should be done. 

Basket / checkout

The shopping basket icon on each page works well, and should catch the eye more than a simple text link would. However, the shopping basket page could be improved:

While the price and size is summarised, delivery charges are missing, and there is no information on payment methods, or reassurances about server security.

Also, the cross selling options are need some work, especially as so much of the page is devoted to this. While a pair of socks could be a useful purchase to go with a suit, the rest seem bizarre. Having bought a suit, do people really want a Toblerone or some jelly beans as well?

On a more positive note, the checkout process is well-designed, form-filling is easy enough, though it does produce an error when customers enter O instead of zero in their postcodes.

Debenhams provides choices around registration, so that customers can choose to register before they checkout or just go straight ahead, which is a good way to avoid making an obstacle out of registration while still giving customers the option.

The checkout process is almost fully enclosed, with only one link that will remove users from the purchase, and this is clearly labelled. This removes unnecessary distractions from shoppers sat this stage, and enables them to concentrate on the important business of entering card details.

Conclusion

Debenhams has been active in social media, it has a blog, a Twitter account and a Facebook group with decent numbers of followers/fans, and recently conducted an interesting Twitter experiment, where shop assistants in one store answered customer queries via Twitter,

However, as Trevor Ginn pointed out yesterday in his post on social media for retailers, there is no reference to any of this on the site, not even a blog or Twitter link at the foot of the page.

The site is generally easy to use, and is certainly an improvement on
the previous incarnation, though some further changes here and there would improve it further, and Debenhams does point out that this is not the completed version. 

Debenhams online sales hit £55.1m and visitor
numbers grew
36.8% in the year to August 29, so there is an opportunity here for the
retailer to make the most of this traffic growth with a better
converting site.

Homepage

The homepage is relatively busy, but thanks to the white background and colour scheme, it avoids being too cluttered, and the essential elements; navigation, checkout and baskets links, search box and so on, are all easy to pick out.

Navigation

The colours on the tabs help to make the top navigational links nice and clear, though there is a slight problem with some of the drop-down menus.

On some of them, the cat and dog menus for example, the menus stretch down below the page fold, so users without a mouse wheel (or who don’t use it) will be unable to see the links at the bottom.

Elsewhere, the site search works well, and it is easy to browse through the categories since decent filtering options are provided:

Product pages

The product pages are clear and well laid out, with plenty of blank space which makes the page easier to scan. Also. Reviews have been added to the page, which is always a good move.

Cross-selling options are good, displayed just below the product images, and of the pages I checked, they were relevant to the main item on the page.

The images are decent, and can be zoomed in, though for more expensive or complex products, alternative angles or possibly videos would be a way to improve them.

The only real problem I found was with one or two items that turned out to be unavailable when I attempted to add them to the basket, such as this rabbit hutch:

There are better ways to handle out of stock items than waiting until customers attempt to add them to their basket. In this case, alternative rabbit hutches could have been offered, or users could have been directed to local stores stocking the item.

Basket / Checkout

On the shopping basket page, while the summary of products is clear enough, delivery charges aren’t displayed, so the total amount to pay is still unclear at this point (unless they qualify for the free delivery offer), not something customers would generally expect.

It does say that delivery charges will be revealed on the payment page, but I’m not sure that this is good enough, since there is still plenty of form-filling to be done to get there.

Delivery charges can be a deal breaker, so it makes more sense to be upfront about it, displaying this information clearly on product and basket pages.

Also, I have my doubts about prominent promotional code boxes, and this shopping basket page makes the code entry box very prominent. For me, this box is suggesting to customers (those without codes) that other customers are getting a better deal than them.

This is likely to send customers back to Google to look for voucher codes. Indeed, a recent basket abandonment survey found that 27% of shoppers left the process to search for codes. Whether this 27% will come back again, or will find a better offer from another retailer while on voucher code sites, is debatable.

I have a few ideas of how to deal with the issue of voucher code boxes, such as making the boxes less visible, or providing alternative discount codes next to the box for those that want it. 

A good checkout process should avoid friction for customers wherever possible, and form filling and error messaging is one such area where problems can occur.

During registration, I had to re-enter and confirm my email address, which seems an unnecessary step, as well as doing the same for the password.

There is also a table for entering the names and birth dates of all the pets in the house. While I can see that this is useful to the retailer for marketing purposes, it does make for more work for the customer, especially as it is not made clear that this particular step is optional:

Having forgotten to confirm my email and password, I only received an error message explaining the former, meaning I had to go back and add the password after clicking ‘next’. In fact, there was a third error I was unaware of; I had left a gap between the area code and the rest of my phone number, and this caused a problem.

There are a couple of points here:

• Error messages should be clear and informative, alerting the customer to the input error while providing information on the steps required to fix the problem. In this case, it only highlighted one error at a time, a potential source of frustration for customers.
• Customer errors should be anticipated wherever possible to minimise problems. So, accepting phone numbers with or without the gap between area code and the rest of the number, or gaps between the first and second parts of postcodes can remove sources of friction.

Conclusion

The new Pets at Home website is a massive improvement on the previous incarnation, and generally delivers a good user experience, though there are some easily fixed issues, clearer delivery charges, improved forms etc, which would improve the usability further.

Perhaps the eagerness to get the site launched in time for Christmas means that there is still some work to be done to improve the site.

Also, since Pets at Home has a network of 200+ stores, the introduction of a reserve and collect service would make perfect sense, as other retailers like Halfords and Argos can testify,  though this is something which is likely to follow this revamp.

According to The Telegraph, Jonathan Miller told the Monaco Media Forum on Friday that News Corp. doesn’t need Google:

“The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more
often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the
least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact [of not having
content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can
survive without it.”

That’s not what Google says. The Telegraph quotes a Google spokesperson earlier this week:

“Google News and web search are
a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about
100,000 clicks every minute.”

Specifically for The Wall Street Journal, Google plays a big role. According to Hitwise, Google
and Google news are the top traffic providers for WSJ.com, accounting for over 25%
of WSJ.com’s traffic. 

Miller is right that many of thosee readers are new users. Hitwise estimates that 44% of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are “new” users who haven’t visited the domain in the last 30 days.

But over half are not. And News Corp. could potentially choke off subscribers and potential subscribers with this plan. When they stop seeing Journal search results, readers might stop seeing the benefit of paying for access.

News Corp. is hoping that other news outlets will come together on this plan. That is evident by how long it’s taking. Removing items from Google search is not the kind of thing that takes months. It’s a simple code formatting issue. But News Corp. needs other media companies to sign on, or a deal with another search engine, to ensure the plan works. Miller continued:

“We
will lead. There is a pent up need for this. There has to be a resolution
for the free versus pay debate otherwise we cannot afford to pay for things
like news bureaus in Kabul.”

If media outlets banded together with another search engine like Bing, they could potential give users access without Google.

But that is a bet that they could easily lose. Things may have gotten dire enough at enough media companies that they can band together to avoid Google. And despite its various strengths, Google would be a less efficient search engine if it didn’t return the most thorough news headlines.

A lot of factors have to fall in line for that to work, though. For starters, blogs and other news gathering services aren’t likely to go off Google any time soon. And readers may not go searching for the original source of content if they get close enough through Google, meaning that this plan could leave media companies even worse off than they are now.

As much as publishers hate Google, cutting off search results could do more harm than good.

Image: AP/Mark J. Terrill

According to ClickZ, Google is starting to get scared about the progress that Microsoft has made with Bing over the last few months. That’s why Google is suddenly hiring a director of Marketing, Media and Platforms and a  Head of Marketing, Americas.

A source tells ClickZ:

“Google continues to be successful, but they have a strong competitor for the first time from the launch of Bing and the combination of Yahoo and Microsoft.”

But the numbers don’t quite add up. Bing has gained ground on search, but Google has increased its dominance of the market. Google handled 71% of all U.S. Internet searches in the four weeks ending October 3, while Yahoo! and Bing accounted for 16.38% and 8.96% respectively, according to Hitwise. And ComScore said last week that Bing increase of .1% in September came out of Yahoo’s pocket. Yahoo fell half a percent to 18.8% of the search market compared to Google’s increase from 64.6% to 64.9%, according to ComScore.

Rather than spending its dollars to increase Google’s notoriety in
search, it’s more likely that the search giant is trying to increase awareness in
its other divisions. The company needs to show consumers and
businesses that currently use Microsoft Office products, purchase display
advertising and care about social media that they will prefer Google’s products — like Google apps, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Google Wave.

Higher ups at Google have an ingrained disdain of advertising and marketing (as ClickZ’ source puts it: “Larry, Sergey, and Eric don’t
really believe in advertising and marketing.”) But when it comes to some of Google’s newer products, there are established players in those areas, and consumers are not accustomed to dealing with Google.

Google once made headlines for not allowing any advertising on its home
page, but the company has been buying up space to promote its services — and adding all kinds of new inventory since the recession started. A few security concerns — from email lockouts to high profile
account breakins like the one Twitter suffered from this year — have
made some wary about the reliability of cloud based apps, and it makes sense that the company would continue to ratchet up its marketing efforts. 

That’s not to say that Google is backing off of its search business. Eric Schmidt recently assured investors that the company will remain focused on search,
saying “We want to get to the perfect search engine.” But advertising
some of the company’s other products may be a neccessity if it wants to compete in other areas.

Paid search is the best indicator of upcoming marketing strength, because it is bought in near real time. And two digital agencies have released aggregate client search-spending data from the third quarter in anticipation of Google’s earnings announcement this week, that show search is likely to be strong this holiday season. 

Among SearchIgnite clients, which include Office Depot, Avis and E-Trade, search spending was up 10% from the second quarter. At Efficient Frontier, with clients that include Bankrate, BabyCenter.com and CapitalOne, search spending was up 5%. In addition, Citibank analyst Mark Mahaney estimated a 10%
growth in search spending since the second quarter for Performics and Covario.

The biggest winner so far on this front is Bing, which is growing marketshare, despite still being a small player in the search market with only about 6% of search spending in the third quarter. (In comparison, Google and Yahoo have 70% and 17% of the market respectively.)

But Bing has managed to position itself as a place where advertising performs. With an ad spend of $100 million, Microsoft has been heavily marketing its new “decision engine,” and  the users that do use Bing have proven to be very receptive to advertising. 

SearchIgnite has spending on Bing up 15% from the same period last year
and Efficient Frontier puts spending on the search engine up 20%.

Bing also taps into the theory reiterated recently by comScore that
only a small percentage of web users account for most of the ad clicks
online (ComScore estimates that 8% of Internet users are making 85% of all clicks). With that in mind, marketing a “decision engine” toward people who click on ads could make ads placed in front of that demographic more valuable.

And so far, Microsoft is seeing returns. During the second quarter, Microsoft’s click share increased to 4.8%, from 4.1%. Efficient Frontier noted that Bing had its
most significant growth in finance and travel. Travel in particular is a category that has been weak this year, but Microsoft’s share of spending there jumped to 6.3% from 4.4% during the second quarter.

However, Bing is not the only one with a light on the horizon this holiday season. AdAge reports that many retailers have reserved a chunk of marketing money for the fourth quarter, and growth in search bodes well for other marketing sectors. 

Because search is effectively real time marketing, it shows growth sooner than other areas, especially in times when brands are holding onto their budget dollars until the last minute.

From AdAge:

“My observation is that most retailers have pulled money out to save
for fourth quarter, knowing that would be when consumer spending would
increase,” said Catherine Fox-Simpson, a partner in the retail and
consumer-product practice at BDO Seidman. She added that during the
back-to-school season, for example, “a lot of retailers sat on the
sidelines.”

But while analysts and observers might question whether Adobe is paying too much for Omniture, the acquisition makes a lot of sense. Adobe’s Q3 earnings showed continued weakness in the company’s primary market as the recession trimmed demand for Creative Suite 4. All told, revenue declined 29% year-over-year in the third quarter, although Adobe was able to beat analyst expectations slightly.

But Adobe’s future growth may not be as dependent upon software sales. How does Omniture fit in to Adobe’s plans? Narayen explained:

Adobe’s Creative Suite products and Flash platform help customers create and
deliver engaging experiences. The addition of Omniture’s online marketing suite
will help customers measure, analyze and optimize the impact and value of those
experiences.

It’s a smart move for Adobe and one that may mean more to the company’s future than many expect. Tom Sullivan, who writes a blog called No Turn on Red, has some insightful comments that speak to this:

First, realize that Omniture is not just an analytics company. Sure, that may be what they are known for – but they have many components of their software suite that work seamlessly with each other. Omniture also does merchandising, recommendations, website testing, and site survey – all tasks that are analytic driven. Many of these components are used by e-commerce retailers and I know several retailers that love their packages.

Second, realize that Adobe has already stepped into the e-commerce world when they acquired Scene7 in 2007. Scene7 is a fantastic solution for managing images for retailers. (I’m not rehashing some Adobe marketing, I’m speaking as a developer who’s used Scene7 – I really like this software). Scene7 is now used by many, many retailers around the world to dynamically serve their images.

Sullivan predicts that by the end of 2010, there will be a “major acquisition by Adobe of an e-commerce platform“. To him, going after the e-commerce market head on is a no-brainer for Adobe.

While I won’t make any bold predictions of my own, I agree with the general belief that Adobe is no longer just a vendor of expensive software. It does have significant opportunities in other markets and through some strategic acquisitions over the years has positioned itself to take advantage of them. If it does, watch out.

In the meantime, let the M&A (and chess games) continue.

The AP says that Microsoft worked with shopping sites and other companies to pull in the pictures and descriptions necessary to make the features work.

Retail items lend themselves more easily to this kind of search, and Microsoft is smart to drill down on niches where there is room for improvement on search. Google’s current visual — and shopping — results leave much to be desired.

Says CNET:

 ”Tt
makes business sense to pour resources into popular searches.
Optimizing for the short snout pays. That’s the model that made
About.com worth $410 million to The New York Times in 2005. And that’s
what entrepreneur and TechCrunch50 co-host Jason Calacanis is aiming
for with his curated directory, Mahalo.”

By visualizing the process of shopping for popular retail items,
Microsoft can simplify the process and attract shoppers looking to make purchases — which could subsequently increase the value of its search terms.

Visual Search is by no means complete at launch. Aside from there being only a handful of topics filled with info for searching, the feature requires the SilverLight browser plug-in download. And it’s also only available in the US at launch. 

But the latest Nielsen data says Bing gained 22% month-over-month in
August, bringing it to 10.7% of all U.S. searches. It remains to be seen if users get frustrated with the sparse info available on this feature, but this is exactly the kind of experimentation necessary for Bing to grow its marketshare.

According to The New York Times:

“We did some more research to see how people process large amounts of
information,” saidStefan Weitz, a director in Microsoft’s Bing group. Mr. Weitz said users were able to go through thumbnail images much
faster than through snippets of text.

That’s especially useful when looking for new products. And if Microsoft can quickly turn out more thorough iterations of this product, visual search could be very good for business.

Can spam. Spam is the bane of Twitter and the problem is only getting worse. Spammers are getting more sophisticated and Twitter seems almost helpless to stop them. While Twitter spam may not be enough to repel Twitter’s ‘power‘ users, I think the spam problem is a real problem for more casual users.

Secure itself. Security issues continue to plague Twitter and unfortunately, most of them are its own doing. Some of the most serious Twitter security threats, for instance, are a result of Twitter’s engineers not applying basic best practices for dealing with user input. If Twitter is to avoid becoming the biggest threat to the internet since Jessica Biel, it will have to deal with its security shortcomings ASAP.

Launch a business model. Twitter isn’t exactly young anymore. It launched in 2006 and has gone through three rounds of funding. At this stage of the game, Twitter needs to start doing something — anything — to make money. While many entrepreneurs prefer to err on the side of ‘getting it right the first time‘, the reality is that most startups develop a successful business model through an iterative process.

In Twitter’s case, getting something out there sooner than later is especially important because most of the value being built around Twitter is being built by third parties (developers, consultants, etc.). The most successful are quickly establishing themselves by filling voids that Twitter is capable of filling itself. If Twitter doesn’t get moving, it may find itself with leftovers.
 
Innovate. There’s a lot to love about Twitter’s open API; in my opinion it’s actually one of the reasons Twitter is so popular. But there’s a problem: third party developers are currently responsible for much of the innovation on Twitter. From desktop clients to brand management solutions, the really interesting Twitter applications aren’t being built by Twitter.

That’s okay, to a certain extent. No company can do everything by itself and there are lots of things being built around Twitter that one would never expect Twitter to develop internally. But if all the innovation on Twitter is the work of others, Twitter will eventually lose out.

Give up on search. I expect I’ll take some flak for this but I’m going to say it: getting value out of consumer search is going to be as easy as herding cats. Therefore, Twitter should dismiss the notion that it’s going to build a valuable consumer search product anytime soon, which is what so many have suggested it do. Note that this is not to say that Twitter isn’t amassing some valuable data. The problem is that it’s amassing even more worthless data. One need only look at the trending topics that fill up the Twitter homepage to realize this.

Twitter is on top of the world right now. It’s one of the most talked-about (or ‘hyped‘) consumer internet startups out there. And it deserves a lot of the attention it receives. From customer service to SEO, Twitter is making an impact. But as with most hot startups, it faces significant challenges. An inability or unwillingness to recognize them and to take action to solve them could lead to fail.