Everything online usability, marketing, and measurement
Craig Smith
Craig Smith is the founder and managing director for Trinity. He oversees all active projects within the firm and his experience in eCommerce dates back over 9 years to when online commerce first gained mainstream adoption. Craig has developed eCommerce deliverables for some of America's most recognized brands and has created planning documentation for many eCommerce business initiatives, including an in-store pickup project and reverse logistics system implementation. Craig has a MBA in eBusiness from Temple University and a BA in marketing from The Pennsylvania State University. He has been quoted discussing eCommerce in numerous publications including Internet Retailer, Apparel Magazine, Practical eCommerce, and theStreet.com. He is also part of the executive forum of Coleman Research Group, an invitation only organization that serves institutional investors with topical expertise. Craig provides eCommerce perspectives and insights into Internet business models.
Homepage: http://www.trinityinsight.com
Posts by Craig Smith
The China eCommerce boom
Establish growth from abroad
Is your eCommerce business multi-national? If it isn’t, you may want to reconsider your options for utilizing new markets to establish an eCommerce revenue stream. Numerous countries are growing at a stronger rate than the U.S. – which is no surprise considering our early adoption patterns.
Brazil is one area to look at. Forrester reports that by 2016, Brazil eCommerce will grow at a rate of 178% – a healthy compound for sure that bodes well for South America commerce. India is growing fast as well, as this fast growing nation was expected to reach 47% growth in 2011 – although a definitive metric has not been released.
The clear cut winner though is China, as growth from 2010 to 2011 was a whopping 66% as reported by International Data Corp.
66% in one year! In the country that is growing GDP at one of the fastest rates on the globe. As eCommerce and marketing executives ponder how to continue improving overall net income – one can not ignore the positive impact that establishing a Chinese eCommerce presence would bring to an innovative brand.
If the current eCommerce platform that you utilize provides the framework for establishing a “mirror” site within an alternative language, getting a roadmap developed for China makes business sense.
Certain challenges will come of course. Translating your content, nailing payment processing, dealing with any government challenges, and establishing a staff and distribution location are some of the potential roadblocks.
Master Baidu - The Google of China
Also your business will need to be on Baidu, the “Google of China”. With 83% market share of search within the world’s most populated country, with the majority of the country yet to go online, the ability to out-execute Chinese national companies from a marketing perspective exists. The key: Getting the right talent. Look to re-locate U.S. based eCommerce directors – assuming they speak Mandarin and are familiar with Chinese merchandising patterns.
If you are interested in discussing Chinese eCommerce opportunities and how to migrate your store within this new market, contact us – or learn more about our eCommerce consulting.
Google Analytics and their comical take on checkout abandonment
At Trinity, we are HUGE proponents of testing and optimizing the checkout process to maximize sales and minimize friction within an eCommerce transaction.
Recently, Google Analytics (Trinity is a certified partner) published a video that provides a comical take on this aspect of online retail.
Worth 3 minutes of your time for sure. Enjoy!
Rethinking Category Page eCommerce Presentations
As eCommerce platforms have evolved over the last 10 years, one thing has stayed fairly constant – the presentation grid used within category and sub-category pages. As a definition for “grid based”, I am referring to the type of product presentation that shows numerous products for a given category, provided in a table format.
These tables vary by retailer in terms of default numbers. Some retailers may have 4 products across and 6 rows vertically before a user has the opportunity to scroll to the next page. Other retailers might have a much more deeper product showing on the page – for example the retailer may present 10 rows of products.
Interestingly enough, in all of my years of working in this sector, I have never seen available research relating to tests within this site aspect. Many of the leading platform providers offer standard default numbers with their category grids, and their clients are likely not pressing hard enough to alter the status quo within their systems.
Limiting cognitive processing within eCommerce
Site usability often relates to human cognitive processing and how this guides user behavior. This question of “what type of merchandising grid size works best” is in direct correlation to this theory.
What we want to know is are users scrolling down the page to fully absorb the offerings for which the retailer is presenting and at what number do they most likely take “browsing” actions.
At Trinity we have recently conducted site tests that changed the number of products presented within a key site aspect in the transactional funnel. Within this test we found that a substantial increase (20%+) in conversion happened when we reduced the number of offerings that were being presented to the user.
What we did within the test is reduce the cognitive overload within the page and assist the user in digesting information. Ultimately this increased the ratio of users who took the desired action and created sales growth.
So where do you begin if you are looking to drive optimization within this site element? First, conduct some user tests that are highly focused on tasks that are realted to finding products on category and sub-category pages.
Observe how users progress through your products. Are they scrolling below the fold? Are they progressing forward to the next page of products? Understand what percentage of your test executed these two site actions.
Ask verbal questions to the respondents after and during the test. Ask questions that focus on the location of products and how easy it was to identify items during the test scenarios. Often the verbal responses that you receive can uncover unthought “nuggets” that are correlated to cognitive overload.
You see your website daily and these respondents may be seeing it for the first time. This new set of eyes is invaluable in understanding how new visitors interact with site elements.
Now you have some primary research relating to your site which is going to help your decision making. The next step is to evaluate your current abilities within your eCommerce system and if you have the ability to change the default grid attributes (the number of rows and columns of products).
Executing this type of experiment within a split test could be difficult depending on the flexibility of your code base. A more realistic approach would be to try an alternative layout on a week per week basis to assess the difference. When considering the KPI’s that are going to be used to identify success, consider the following:
Number of carts started
Number of product page views
Progression ratio of category to sub-category pages
Average dollar value per visit
These four metrics can provide the intelligence and data to see if an alternative default layout for your category page works better for your customers and makes their site experience easier.
Try testing your default merchandising grids and see how the numbers impact performance within your eCommerce store. To learn more about Trinity Insight and our eCommerce optimization services, please contact us online.
eCommerce Geographic Targeting – Use location to drive conversion
As your eCommerce business reaches scale and your physical store operations reach levels of greater than 50 locations, the need to integrate geographical targeting solutions becomes more important to maximizing your multi-channel retail sales.
You can probably decipher what these solutions achieve, but, in a nutshell, geographic targeting allows a website to render dynamic content that is tailored to the web location of a user.
Ultimately the focus of geo-targeting solutions is to create more macro conversions for the business. A macro conversion does not always take place on the website, but rather, may take place within physical store locations and communications with the brand that convert within varied channels.
Over the last 8 years, during the period of true multi-channel retail, we have learned that when customers engage with your brand in multiple channels, their overall value rises dramatically. This is not a new concept.
But building brand loyalty in an age in which consumers are flooded with product and value messaging becomes more and more challenging, but by using geo-targeting, your company can help accelerate transactional progress in creating more location messages within your retail enterprise.
So when can you use geo-targeting?
Are you a multi-channel retailer with hundreds of locations…or just 20? Do you have a product mix that factors into situations for which seasonality affects demand? Do you have a merchandising strategy that takes into location for promotional calendars? All of these questions need to be answered when properly structuring a geographic targeting plan online.
How can a retailer or web business use geo targeting to drive both on-site and in-store conversion?
Use Case #1 Show your physical stores
This is a no-brainer and a project that senior management will likely embrace whole heartedly. This is essentially the dynamic insertion of physical store locations into website templates based upon the geographic location of the user.
Forward thinking retailers put mechanisms in place to render the “3 closest stores” to users, complete with pictures and door to door directions. This is done by integrating solutions that reference user IP addresses to back end databases that match to user zip codes.
Automatically the solution references business rules and current physical locations to decide what to render within a website template. In situations for which a user may not be living close to a store, the system renders “default” creative.
By showing the closest stores, either within a homepage only or global template module, the user now has a clear idea of the closest locations for which he or her can transact with the brand directly, without having to notice or utilize the store locator button or link.
Use Case #2 Create more relevant spotlight promotions
I have talked about this opportunity within this blog in previous posts and I am still surprised that the retail sector seems to be lagging behind other eCommerce sectors with this tactic. Weather and physical location can be great cues to drive more relevant promotions within the first three seconds of a user visit.
Think of these possible scenarios and retailers:
The Home Depot: Do you want to show the same homepage to Florida users versus users in Maine in February?
NFLShop.com: Why would the business not tailor homepage spotlight products to a local team (ex. Jerseys, hats, shirts etc to a hometown team)?
StubHub: Spotlight the local events happening on the homepage that correlate to a physical location
Use Case #3 Use geo-targeting to show your shipping value proposition
Shipping is a key factor when consumers make up their mind of if they want to purchase or not. Large retailers have complex business rules and are limited to certain states for free shipping or even free overnight shipping (which customers love!). Why not be proactive with this messaging to customer segments. Geo targeting can help immensely.
The location of your distribution centers and the corresponding ship rates may lead to having certain states having 3-5 day free shipping versus 1-2 day. This is a BIG difference in the mind of the consumer and if you are not conveying this messaging throughout the user experience then your store is missing a key opportunity.
In this user case, Geo-targeting solutions will again take assessment of the user IP address, map that address to the database of zip codes, and ultimately decipher what type of shipping option, free or otherwise, that corresponds to the user’s location. Embracing this tactic will allow your eCommerce store to be proactive to a key question in the user’s mind and help take shipping out of the equation as a potential roadblock to conversion.
Take a step back and think about your business. Do you have customer scenarios that would be positively impacted by the integration of geographically tailored content or promotions?
Ecommerce businesses are frequently mired in the order management and “blocking and tackling” functions of service and fulfillment. As your store looks to create an innovative gameplan for your 2011 roadmap, take a step back and think about how geo-targeting can enhance your user experience. Doing so can produce great gains, both in the online and physical channel alike.
If you would like more information about Trinity Insight’s eCommerce geo-targeting consulting, please contact us online.