Rethinking Category Page eCommerce Presentations

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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.

Competitive Intelligence and SEO

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Competitive SEO IntelligenceFor search engine marketers, it’s very easy to get engulfed in our day to day tasks to improve our search rankings. Many factors come into play when performing SEO including:  varied on-page optimization practices, editorial outreach, and social media creation and curation. However, the most effective search marketers understand that while it is extremely important to constantly monitor their own actions, they must also carefully monitor the competition to identify “ranking cues” for a given marketplace.

The purpose of this article is to dive into exactly how we can go about getting a “leg-up” on the competition by beating them at their own game. For the purposes of this article, we will assume the role of a prominent eCommerce company which retails electronics. We’ll call this company “Standard Electronics.”

So, as the sole internal SEO guru, you finally sit down at your computer to start the competitive research process. The first thing that you’re going to want to do is identify who your competitors are.  You may already have quite a bit of this information from your initial SEO Plan (if you have one), but you’re going to want to do some more research as well.

The first and most obvious way is to search for your keywords on a search engine (preferably Google). Your top competitors are going to be on the first and second SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) for any given keyword and may differ for certain keywords. For example, as Standard Electronics, your competitors may be different for “Televisions” than for “Laptops.” While you may have many more direct and indirect competitors, the competitors on the first two (or three) SERPS are going to be more invested in SEO than competitors lower on the totem.

You will probably want to do this every time you target new keywords or once per quarter (or half) depending on your type of business. Once you’ve identified your competitors, you’re going to leverage web-based tools to use in order to do research and analysis. There are many tools out there, so it is to your advantage to do good research into the specifics.

Here are the types of tools that you’re going to want to use:

A tool for backlink mining
Crucial for identifying link targets.  SEOMoz has a great tool called Open Site Explorer. This is limited for free users.

A tool for automating rank checking
These are not an exact science, but they will certainly save you time on checking for multiple keywords.

A tool for keyword research
Google’s tool or wordtracker both work well for naming conventions

A tool for analyzing on-page SEO
Most for a fee, but these tools will help you in crafting metadata

In order to get further insight into the data, you should export each of the tools results into an excel document.  How you format the document is up to you, but it is effective to utilize the tab based layout in Excel for segmenting by keyphrase or by competitor. When sorting and analyzing link data, you will want to pay close attention to link anchor text.  This will help gain insight into what keywords your competitors are optimizing for and targeting.  You will also want to sort by authority and relevance, basically the pagerank and site age factors.

After sorting, you will want to then analyze the data to make some sense of it and get a better picture of your competitor’s link profiles. What types of sites are linking to your competitor? Are they all forums or directories, or are they receiving links from blogs and news sites? Are the sites of high authority and relevance? Maybe your competitor has a lot of links from its distributors, or is highly involved in forums or social media. Do they have a lot of no-follow links or are the links all passing link juice? Do they have a great company blog which they link to pages deep within their site? How about their metadata? Are the title tags and meta-descriptions well written and properly applied? These are some of the many questions that you want to ask yourself when looking over competitor data.

The final step is to act on the findings. Do you see your client obtaining links from writing great original content?  If so, then take a similar strategy.   You may want to consider starting a company blog. Is there a large community based around your products?   You may want to consider starting a support forum where people can interact and you can establish your company as a thought leader and community supporter. Maybe it’s time to determine some new keywords that your competition is targeting. Or maybe it’s time to update all of your on-page SEO. If you see your competitor is doing well with social media, you may strongly want to consider this as a new area of focus to incorporate into your SEO (you’ll probably want to do this anyway).

Competitive research is part science and part art. There are many important steps that you simply cannot ignore, but creativity highly comes into play when interpreting raw data.  It is always good to involve other members of your team where possible. Maybe your marketing or sales department has some information on competitors you may have missed in your research. Maybe they have relationships where you can obtain links that are highly valued that your competitor may not have. This is an ongoing process that should be evaluated and kept current. By integrating competitive intelligence into your SEO gameplan, preferably on a quarterly basis, your business will be stronger positioned within the highly competitive organic search market.

eCommerce Geographic Targeting – Use location to drive conversion

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ecommerce-geo-targetingAs 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.

Video Games and eCommerce

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I must admit, I’m a bit of a kid at heart as it relates to playing video games.  Being a child who grew up in the 80′s, I was immersed with Nintendo and Sega and fascinated by spending hours trying complete Super Mario 3 or Ninja Gaiden.

We get older and with age comes Super_Mario_Bros_1280x960responsibilites.  Time becomes scarce.  I have less time to play video games but try to bust out the XBOX once a week for a little R&R.  My interests these days lie in sports games and within a new sports game release I observed the intersection of eCommerce integrated within the online gaming experience.

When playing FIFA 10 (a killer soccer game) within the menu of the game there is the ability to go to the FIFA store.  When there, users have the ability to use stored payment options to purchase additional gaming components among other things.  It makes a ton of sense to personalize the store based upon user preferences and with the millions of consumers who use video games daily, this can be an interesting channel to watch in the years to come.

Lets say I am a Liverpool fan.  For those in the U.S., Liverpool is a popular football (not soccer in Europe) team that has a devoted following in the Premier league of England.  When configuring the game upon my first play, I select Liverpool as my favorite team.  Imagine the possibilities and potential revenue share potential that can take place.

Within the store, I could be presented with Liverpool apparel, memorabilia, ticket offers, and other items that passionate fans love to buy.  Essentially, it could operate as an affiliate marketing relationship, but instead of the publisher getting paid by the retailer, the video game company, in this case Electronic Arts, would get paid a revenue share from the retailer or wholesaler that ships the item.

This becomes simplistic because payment info (Credit card data) is already stored within most user accounts.  Online gaming has led to users purchasing subscriptions etc online and most users have their info stored. This leads to an easier transaction and higher conversion rates.

Video games and eCommerce is an emerging channel and one that should be watched.  Take a minute and think about your assortment and target demographic.  Maybe this opportunity is closer than you think.

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