The Snow Patrol

15 Mar 10

Facebook as a credible e-commerce channel

There has been some discussion in the last few months about e-commerce within Facebook. As the social networking giant appears to be drawing closer to a widespread launch of its guarded Facebook Credits initiative, does this mean that there will be increased momentum amongst online retailers to include commerce directly within their Facebook fan pages?

Facebook Credits themselves raise some interesting questions. It’s no wonder that Facebook have been reasonably cagey about how they are going to work given the outcome of previous attempts at “internet currencies” – Beenz anyone? By working carefully with Facebook app developers and rolling out slowly, they no doubt hope to leverage their enormous user base and develop a successful new revenue channel.

With significant user uptake and with increased familiarity and trust when spending on-site, it could mean that Facebook becomes as viable a channel for retailers as Ebay or Amazon. In fact perhaps more viable – it’s not a bargain-hunter’s first port of call, nor is it a concessionary channel at another, larger retail brand. It’s actually a network of users and potential customers that actively seek out favoured brands for dialogue.

It’s this last point that suggests that right now is a very good time to look at embracing e-commerce within the Facebook platform. Even without the common currency and basket functionality that is likely to accompany the Credits initiative, there seem to be two clear models for offering e-commerce to Facebook users.

Exclusive product

The first method wholly embraces the nature of Facebook’s social platform. Offer a single, time-limited product as an exclusive (or at least a feature) via Facebook. Subscribed users receive an update right on their wall and can share and interact in all the normal ways. Additionally, the product should link through to a “Shop” application tab within the retailer’s Facebook presence and offer an entirely in-site purchase experience. By implementing a secure, super-streamlined checkout process, this becomes an ideal channel for driving one-off impulse purchases.

Targeted range

The second method approaches the retailer’s Facebook user-base as a distinct segment. By offering them a carefully targeted sub-set (and it should be small) of the main product catalogue, the retailer can capture business directly from the social dialogue they have with fans by not only offering product that is directly relevant to the audience, but by offering exclusive incentives. Users can browse and select to purchase multiple products from the range, and then either break out to the retailer’s main site to checkout, or make the most of the trusted association with Facebook and offer checkout in-app as suggested above.

Taking it further

The key thinking here is that selling through Facebook provides the opportunity to convert a distinct customer segement as well as sell directly within the social media context. And it’s far cheaper for most retailers than attempting to build their own social medial platform and then leverage that (however successful that is for major brands like ASOS).

Not only that, but the potential opportunities that Facebook Credits might bring include:

Shared, credit-based currency may mean ability to sell to younger audiences
Shared basket means opportunity to sell across brands or allows for brand partnerships
Facebook-designed checkout allows retailer to leverage users’ trust in the platform and reduces development overheads
The ability to sell using the above throughout the wider social web via Facebook Connect

Of course, retailers need to assess how much of their personality and value they are willing to sacrifice to conform to Facebook’s visual standards – but then most brand communication within the social arena is vocal rather than visual.

Posted by Sam in how are retailers using online communities, marketing, multi-channel, strategy No comments

12 Mar 10

Good e-commerce book: Designing for the Social Web

I’ve just finished reading Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter.

It’s a great book for anyone that wants to build the next Facebook or Flickr. But it’s also really useful for online retailers. Whatever stage you’re at – you might just be gathering product reviews on your website, or perhaps you’re launching a standalone online community site – if it involves any kind of two-way interaction with your customers then this book will help you to focus on what your customers are looking to do on your site, what is driving them to participate, and how you can motivate that participation.

Porter uses a methodology called the AOF method. This stands for:

A – focus on the primary activity (what are people doing on your site) and build on that
O – identify the objects that are needed to achieve the activity
F – choose your feature set. So if the activity is shopping, and your objects are books, then your feature set needs to include read, add to cart, purchase, add to wishlist, share, review, rate, tag, discuss etc etc

He makes the point that we’re all told to ‘know your customer’. But we can’t really know our customers, not unless we follow them round 24 hours a day. Instead we need to focus on what they want to do with our software and make sure we work around that.

See other e-commerce book recommendations

Posted by Sarah C in e-commerce books No comments

11 Mar 10

The iPad will change the face of e-commerce

You can’t fire your browser up these days without the Apple iPhone, and more recently the iPad, being mentioned. In fact it seems hardly a blog or article gets written now without mentioning these devices. I’m going to nail my colours to the mast now – I think that the Apple iPad will be a game-changing device for e-commerce. Maybe not the specific device itself – although if Apple manage to pull off anything like the success of the iPhone it will be important enough – but certainly in what it represents.

A shared experience

Where the iPhone is very much a personal computing device – the small form-factor means it’s mainly for your eyes, your ears, your fingers – the iPad, with its larger form factor and it’s clear focus on simplicity and the access of published media, is a truly shareable computer. More than any other device before it, this is the computing analogue of the newspaper, the magazine, the book – but interactive. Hey, have you read this article? Seen this video? Seen these jeans? And then you just toss the iPad to the person across the sofa, or push it past the marmalade at the breakfast table, or scoot over and sit closer to them to share.

No more crowding round the family desktop or laptop. Arguably netbooks offer an alternative, but that’s merely by dint of their tiny size. The hinged form factor is still awkward and the operating systems designed for bigger, less shared experiences. And with multi-touch, anyone sitting around the iPad has an open invite to prod and press what they see to call up the stuff they’re interested in.

I think this means a huge potential step forward for e-commerce. Devices like the iPad will bring shopping to the sofa – where mail order, TV shopping and, in many ways, e-commerce to date have wanted it for years. It’s the comfort zone, the place where shared decisions are made, or snap ones dreamed up. And the interactivity afforded the user will be like never before. View a product full-screen? Tap the photo. Spin it? Drag your finger. Interactive video? Watch, tap, freeze, choose. Refine your search? Pinch and spread your fingers. Not sure which product you prefer? Swipe your way through them full-screen.

With the iPhone (as with Android and the other interactive smartphone platforms) we’re seeing the early bloom of mobile e-commerce, but the appeal of shopping on such a small device is still limited to a keen, savvy few. The iPad is for everybody else.

How it will change things

Whether as iPad app or enhanced website, if e-commerce respects the new conventions that this kind of multi-touch device offer, then the whole shopping experience will become more tactile. Let’s look at what this means in terms of the experience.

Visibility

The iPad sports a big, bright 1024×768 display. While this might not seem so much in the days of 1920×1600 cinematic computer displays, in terms of ultra-portable devices it’s a big deal. Much larger than the equivalent smartphone device, much more accessible than its netbook rivals. Couple this relatively large display with the design conventions that I’m going to outline below, and it becomes clear that this means much more visibility of what matters – content and product.

Simplicity

This is the critical tenet of designing for this kind of device. Less is more in every instance. Apart from beautiful, interesting content, the user should only see the minimum needed to indicate what is interactive. Make more complex interactions discoverable – with a responsive touch interface, it should be easy, and natural to explore activities. This doesn’t mean bury the critical calls to action – in fact, this should give them more room to take centre stage.

Contextuality

An elegant, simple UI with naturally discoverable interactions will be intrinsically contextual. The users actions will have clear results right where they are working. In many places, this will seem obvious – pinch-to-zoom the product images, or flick to scroll through them. These interactions will still need to be carefully crafted – how do we make complex product variance selection simple and intuitive?

Tactility

Part of the need for simple, contextual interaction is the method of input. The touch interface raises some significant considerations.

The finger as a pointer is big and inaccurate, but faster and more dexterous. This means that we need simple, contextual UI just so that the user can prod it easily. But it also means that they can very quickly indeed move to other parts of the UI. In a well designed touch interface, this means that having a few prods on a few different parts of the screen is considerably less frustrating that the equivalent mouse-click-mouse-click on a standard UI.

The finger is the main interaction device on the iPad

The finger means direct manipulation. With a cleverly designed interface, users will feel closer to interacting with an actual product than ever before. In e-commerce terms this can’t be understated – while they won’t actually feel the grain of a material, the hand-held form factor, the direct interaction, the speed of response should all lead to a far stronger emotional association.

This also lends itself to presenting other aspects of the interface as analogous to the real world. Building in design metaphors that can further enhance the physicality of the interaction will make the user’s experience far more engaging.

Opportunities

In the same way that designing for mobile (be it iPhone or not) requires clear-sighted simplification of the e-commerce experience, so too will designing and developing for the iPad and equivalent devices. However, it brings with it a whole new set of interaction opportunities that online shopping will directly benefit from. By focusing on clarity, tactility and immediacy, retailers will be engaging with a new audience. The only question is when will there be enough of them using these devices to make it worthwhile jumping in the deep end?

Posted by Sam in strategy, user experience & design 3 comments

10 Mar 10

Email of the Week – Firebox

This week’s email of the week comes from Firebox, who have very kindly reminded all their email subscribers that Mother’s Day is coming up, plus they’ve given us a plethora of gift ideas.

What’s great about this email is the way it balances customer engagement with product ideas that will result in sales. For example:

They’ve fitted 15 relevant products into the e-mail
At the bottom there’s a Say It Again Sam summary of all the products they’ve shown you
The product descriptions have a really engaging tone – “is your mum horticulturally challenged?” – so that it’s actually fun to read

I also really like that they have ’Buy It’ buttons next to each product – it’s a really strong call to action. I only wish it had taken me straight through to my basket page with the item already added, however. When I clicked on Buy It I was only taken to the product page and it took me a minute to work out that the item wasn’t in my basket.

In terms of customer engagement, the e-mail is also really impressive:

There’s a link to a Facebook competition called ‘Sorry Mum’ where people can say ’sorry mum for ruining your chances with Frank’ etc.
There’s a puzzle, with the answer to last week’s question
They show the winners of the best photo and video product reviews
There’s a link to their blog and some photos of them enjoying Pancake Day

Overall this was a fun and engaging email. And thanks Firebox for reminding me it’s Mother’s Day!

Posted by emma g in email of the week No comments

09 Mar 10

Are apps needed for e-commerce on the iPhone?

When the iPhone launched back in 2007, one of the TV adverts boasted about its web browser capabilities. It wouldn’t be a stripped down version of the internet, or a “kinda sorta looks like the internet”, but instead a user would be able to access the web in all its glory.

As an iPhone user, I know that this is true for news and other content-heavy sites. But how about the websites where functionality and user experience are far more important – like an online store? Do retailers need to build a dedicated app to get people to shop using their iPhone?

It should in fact be possible to create a good shopping experience without using an app at all. I decided to review a couple of ecommerce sites that I discovered were iPhone optimised, just by landing on their home pages. They may also display well on other smart phones but I only had an iPhone handy at the time.

Amazon – I started by visiting amazon.co.uk, naturally thinking this would set the benchmark. A link to their iPhone app is immediately present - I suspect many people tap this link before even browsing the site. The simple fact is by the time you’ve found and downloaded the app, you probably could have made a purchase on the mobile site (assuming you know what you’re looking for).

Amazon iPhone screenshot

Pros:

Prominent search boxes
Carousels of product recommendations
Clear navigation in the footer
Clear link to the full site, should you need/prefer it

Cons:

Only features parent category browsing of top sellers (the iPhone app doesn’t even offer that).
Too may taps required (I don’t want to have to tap on “go” after selecting an item in a drop down).

Comet – I was a little suprised that out of the many sites I visited, Comet was one that had decided to optimise for iPhone. I was very suprised at just how good it was – until I tried to checkout and realised you couldn’t actually buy anything online, even if you tried to view the full site.

Comet iPhone screenshot

Pros

Excellent landing page takes you straight to a clear list of departments
Clear category list and product pages with refinement/sort options
All the product information you need on one page

Cons

Can’t purchase anything online, collect from store only
Impossible to navigate the full site without being redirected back to the mobile site again

Conclusion – Despite being slightly disappointed, firstly by the browsing limitations on the Amazon store and then by the fact that I cannot actually buy anything from the Comet online store via iPhone, the user experience on both sites was good. Although apps can offer slick animations and transitions, they will eventually clutter your menu and you can’t multitask like you can with Safari. Some apps do not even save the contents of your basket after quitting.

There are some exciting developments such as jQTouch, which means you can get more of an app-like experience from the web, including the use of swipe detection. I think combining this kind of technology with an iPhone optimised site that has all the features of Amazon and Comet would provide an experience that could easily rival most apps.

Posted by Daniel B in user experience & design 3 comments

07 Mar 10

E-mail marketing metrics – useful report

If you’re involved in e-mail marketing in any way, then the latest E-mail Marketing Metrics report from Silverpop is well worth a read.

It lists the averages for the key e-mail marketing metrics – open rates, click-through rates etc – while also looking at how they differ in the US, the UK and Germany. The averages for the UK were:

Unique open rate – 22.5%
Gross open rate – 38.3%
Opens per opener – 1.57
Click-through rate – 4.8%
Click to open – 19.2%
Clicks per clicker – 1.37
Bounce rate – 3.6%
Unsubscribe – 0.18%
Complaints – 0.05%

The international analysis only shows a small difference in response rates, as you can see in the example table below. UK audiences tend to respond more to e-mail marketing than in the US, but German open rates and click-through rates tend to be higher than they are in the UK:

Silverpop Open Rates

Posted by Sarah C in marketing No comments

01 Mar 10

Is e-commerce with Javascript turned off too hard?

Earlier today, over at Econsultancy, Matthew Curry talked about e-commerce platforms getting it wrong with their dependence on Javascript.

I do find it quite surprising how widespread the practice of building Javascript-dependent e-commerce sites is now. As a UX designer, I love all the new bells and whistles we’re able to roll out on sites these days, just using native browser technologies. But bells and whistles shouldn’t come at the expense of a functional base. At Snow Valley, one of our goals is to ensure our base platform is usable and transactional in the absence of Javascript.

The common criticism here is that the cost of “extra” effort involved is not realistic and offers little ROI. I would say that if a platform is built using traditional Get/Post forms and the like, the extra cost of bolting on a layer of Javascript fanciness is relatively small, and certainly much less than trying to retrofit a degraded solution once you’ve gone too far down the rabbit-hole of inaccessible Javascript development.

At Snow Valley, we’re well aware of the challenges that come with trying to deliver cutting-edge shopping experiences while maintaining accessibility. I’m glad that the latest version of our MUSE platform allows us to build sites that are fully usable and transactional in the absence of Javascript. Of course, for the majority of Javascript-enabled visitors to these sites, the user experience is enhanced using Javascript/AJAX techniques, allowing retailers to maximise the use of limited screen real estate with animated slideshows and product carousels, enabling customers to add to basket without leaving or reloading the page, as well as a host of other features. Route One’s new website is a great example of these features in action.

Route One screenshot

Posted by Henry in user experience & design 4 comments

26 Feb 10

Karen Millen – ‘add to fitting room’ as important as ‘add to basket’

After commending www.karenmillen.com on their use of “view on a model” without the need to actually click anything, I was interested to see on visiting the website yesterday that they have taken a further step forward. Enter the Karen Millen online “Fitting Room”.

This feature has been available (but fairly hidden) on the site for some time, and at last it has been given the centre stage it deserves; no less than alongside the add to bag button within the product listing pages.

The fitting room itself is, frankly pretty good. Try a skirt, top and jacket to see how they have taken some fairly simple tech to layer up the clothes and provide you with the full outfit.

I look forward to seeing more of this thinking, especially in the accessories and jewellery arena, when the size / length of a piece can be so important.

Posted by Sarah L in features, user experience & design No comments

25 Feb 10

Free delivery as a temporary promotion – how many retailers use it?

When it comes to free delivery, there are basically three routes that an online retailer can take:

Free delivery on everything as standard
Free delivery if the order is over a certain value threshold
Free delivery as a short-term promotional offer

In our 2010 Online Retail Delivery Report, we noted that only 13% of the retailers had free delivery as standard. And as I mentioned here last week, only 39% of retailers have free delivery over a certain order value threshold.

Today, I’m looking at free delivery as a promotion. We placed orders with 137 retailers back in autumn 2009, and 121 of those had a delivery charge. Of those 121, only 31 (26%) used free delivery as a temporary promotion in their e-mail marketing to us between September/October and February.

I’m not a fan of free delivery as a promotion – I’m sure that customers must see it and think ‘I’m going to wait for free delivery next time I want to buy something from that site’. But I was interested to see that 10 of the 26 retailers that used free delivery as a promotion had only used it once in the 5 month period between October and February. And their reasons for using it seem to be quite considered:

Marks & Spencer used it during the post strike, presumably to encourage customers that were concerned about things taking too long to arrive:

Lipsy used it as an incentive for visiting their new website:

Oasis offered free Saturday delivery before Valentine’s Day (which was on a Sunday):

Hackett used it once before Christmas – River Island, Jessops, Savile Row Co, and Arsenal FC also did this:

I still feel strongly that ‘free over a certain order value’ is the best approach for retailers when it comes to free delivery, and I’m still sure that sporadic free delivery on everything can cause more harm than good. But I do admire the retailers listed above for using it in a measured, non-short term way.

Posted by Sarah C in delivery 1 comment

18 Feb 10

Content Strategy for the Web – very useful new book

I’ve just finished reading Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson. It’s an excellent read for anyone that is involved in managing a website of any kind.

Content is a fundamental part of any website. It sounds obvious but as Halvorson points out, all too often the content is the last thing to arrive when websites are being planned and built. Sites get signed off with ‘lorem ipsum’ in the placeholder text, then they look very different when the genuine content appears. That’s when all sorts of problems arise.

Content is particularly challenging for e-commerce managers. We’re balancing information on products, customer service, marketing, and merchandising, as well as user generated content and social media. This makes it even more important for e-commerce teams to have clear content strategies in place.

Content Strategy for the Web explains what a content strategy is and why you need one. It then gives practical advice on how to carry out a content audit and analysis, how to develop a strategy, and how to create, manage and maintain that content going forwards.

It’s the perfect book if you’re about to do a major rebuild of your website, or even if you’re just thinking of setting up a blog. But it’s worth a read even if you’re not planning a new site, just to help you understand the stages in the content management process and the skills that are needed within your team.

Posted by Sarah C in e-commerce books, user experience & design 1 comment

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