Merchandise Online StoreBlueport.com

One of the biggest challenges in big-ticket retail is how to provide an ecommerce online shopping experience that approaches the feel of the in-store shopping experience. This is particularly true when you are selling an item like hardwood flooring online, as our client Flooring America knew all too well.

We were determined to improve the ecommerce online shopping experience for their web site, which features thousands of products all represented by a uniform square image of the flooring.  We turned to our merchandising partner Allurent, whose goal is to create the most compelling online shopping experiences with their product Allurent on Demand.

The solution we came up with is the Flooring Explorer, a 5x3 grid of flooring squares that sits at the top of each category page.  Simply mousing over each image gives you the details of each product, including price, and the ability to add the item to your cart. The ability to quickly look at a half dozen products without scrolling helps bring the store experience of dozens of physical swatches to the ecommerce online shopping experience.  

Once live, the analytics around the online shopping widget proved its success. Visitors who used the Flooring Explorer view 8x as many products and added 2x as many to cart. This is an indicator of a successful ecommerce shopping experience.


Copyright 2010, Official Blog of Blueport Commerce

At Blueport, we pride ourselves on being different from other e-commerce companies. We’re more than simply a back-end system that retailers can plug into. We believe that technology and integration only opens your online store. Expertise in managing that store is what drives results.

Blueport's e-commerce services team ensures you get the benefit of our ten years of experience in big-ticket retail when marketing, merchandising and operating your online store. We know the unique aspects of these considered purchases, from imaging to marketing to customer support, and we'll work with you to develop those programs for your e-commerce efforts.

Our mission is to help you capture the e-commerce opportunity as part of an integrated multi-channel strategy. At Blueport Commerce, we're a turnkey solution specialized for big ticket that ensures your transition to e-commerce is easy, worry-free and profitable. By combining the industry's most advanced technology platform for localized, big-ticket retail, dedicated integration services and personalized service packages, Blueport Commerce can port your unique business to a ready and willing online marketplace.

We like to think we’re the complete e-commerce package. Let's talk.

Email marketing can be a big-ticket retailer's best friend. In the first few weeks of the buying cycle, email content that inspires and educates is key. Creating an email marketing sequence that guides a potental customer through the decision-making process, whether they ultimately complete the transaction online or offline, is a valuable ecommerce marketing strategy.

Inspiration:  Similar to the way a customer might visit a bricks and mortar store to check out new or seasonal merchandise, use ‘what's new' content in your email marketing to emphasize new products, top sellers or trends that will inspire the customer to make a purchase.  

Research: Particularly in the case of ‘big ticket' items, once inspired, customers typically set out to do more research before making the purchase.  Use ecommerce email marketing to highlight why your product is better and why the customer should purchase it from you.  The email content here should not be saturated with marketing language, but rather be clever, surprising and creative.

Advice: In using email marketing to make the sale, I often see big-ticket retailers forgetting to use this opportunity to educate the customer and establish a deeper relationship.  Sending an email offering customers ‘how to' tips might not necessarily translate in to an immediate ecommerce purchase, but it will build a longer term relationship that will no doubt contribute to conversion down the road. 

There’s no shortage of e-commerce conventional wisdom - sweeping pronouncements that online is growing at a certain rate. That one tactic works, another doesn’t.   That a multi-channel strategy is increasingly important. 

I love such analysis and opinion – back in the day, as a consultant at McKinsey, I performed and provided my fair share.    However, I will point out the need to dig deeper. What is loosely called “e-commerce” is dramatically different in its application depending on what you are selling. 

A few things to keep in mind as you digest the latest e-commerce wisdom or evaluate a vendor:
 

E-commerce expertise correlates with where money has been made to date, not where it will be made.

Well known e-commerce experts, agencies and technology companies become so because they’ve been doing it for a while and have been well paid for their work. As such, their experience tends to be in those categories that went online early and successfully, yielding enthusiastic clients and customers who could pay.

There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you are also in those categories. If not, think about whether what you are being told makes sense for your business.

One example: It’s been said that 65% of e-commerce keyword searches include a manufacture name and/or model number. Most online agencies build keyword strategies around that fact. And, it works well in those categories that have dominated e-commerce in the past.

But, say you’re a furniture retailer. 

Most of your prospective customers have no idea who manufactured the sofa they already own, much less the one they are thinking about buying.   Model number? Forget it. Conventional wisdom is out the window - how will your agency react to not being able to rely a favorite approach?
 

Beware sweeping pronouncements and general statistics. Dig for what’s happening in your market.

I’m an e-com stat addict. There are outstanding analysts out there providing the pulse of e-commerce on a regular and accurate basis. That said, it’s important to pull apart e-commerce statistics and trends to find those that apply to what you do. 

Some recent examples:

E-Commerce Growth Statistics

Pundits seem to be in general agreement that in 2009, e-commerce grew or shrank by single digit percentage points. In the face of brick and mortar declines, this is touted as strength – ecommerce holding its own despite significant economic headwinds.

All true – but there’s more to the story. Big ticket online took off in 2009. 

Big ticket (think things that cost more and can’t ship via UPS…consumer durables like furniture, appliances, flooring) is 45% of the US Retail Economy, $550B in annual retail sales.  It’s never done much online – until now.

Consumers are online and big ticket retailers are now meeting them there. Forrester reports customers feeling comfortable buying furniture and appliances online just in the last 18 months. Big ticket players Blueport works with are seeing monstrous comp increases for online sales and even bigger benefits in stores. 

If you happen to be in big ticket markets, this is an opportunity you can’t miss…but easily could, if you just look at broader online growth stats.

E-Commerce by Channel Statistics

Similarly, stats show roughly 45% of e-commerce transacted by Web-only players and catalogers (i.e. pure plays), 15% by manufacturers, and 40% by retailers.

Beneath this stat is a dramatic big ticket vs. small ticket schism in who is winning in e-commerce. 

For traditional (small ticket) e-commerce, pure plays have tremendous cost advantages. With no store costs, they can price low. Their products are well known, approaching commodity status, and the shipping is fast, cheap and risk free. In categories from books to shoes, pure plays are cleaning up.

Not so in big ticket. Here, consumers know less about the product. They want to touch and feel in a store. They look for trusted brands – not only for the product, but for the retailer who can deliver and service it. And, they are highly focused on delivery times and costs. Here, retail chains, with trusted brands, local stores and fast, cheap local delivery have the upper hand. 

Combine these advantages with the growth noted above, and it’s a good time to be going online if you’re a big ticker player. And, if you’re a retailer in these categories, there’s certainly more than 40% of the online marketplace available to you.

The Importance of Cross-Channel Commerce

There’s significant recent buzz about “multi-channel” or “cross-channel” commerce as the next big thing. We couldn’t agree more – with emphasis on the “big”.

For small ticket items, I don’t think cross channel is that important. Anyone think that opening Zappos bricks and mortar stores is on any of the whiteboards at Amazon?

Conversely, in big ticket, cross channel is critical. The key differentiating factors in big ticket online are store based. Big ticket online and offline channels must be synchronized, as consumers move between them constantly. 

This is why we’ve architected our platform to be localized. Big ticket commerce comes down to the local relationship between a consumer, a store, and the inventory in her area. If you’re in big ticket and you’re not reflecting this reality online, you’re missing the point.
 

Balance online conventional wisdom against what you know about your customers. 

Ultimately, e-commerce comes down to a combination of persuading and enabling consumers to buy, using the internet.

Here again, how your consumers do this may not be the same as in “traditional” e-commerce categories.

To grossly over simplify traditional e-commerce shopping, it comes down to finding a product and deciding you like it. After that, the assumption is that UPS takes it from there - you will have your product cheaply, quickly, and some nice brown-shirted gentleman will take it back if things go awry.

As such, most e-commerce wisdom is focused on search and merchandising, helping consumers to find and buy (maybe getting a deal).

These areas are critical (and unique) in big ticket as well, but there’s more to the story – specifically, the part of the story that UPS takes care of in traditional, small ticket e-commerce.

With a sofa or a fridge, more goes into the shopping process than features and price. Customers want to touch and feel in a store. They may want to speak to an expert. They want to know how fast they can get something, and that delivery is as cheap as it can be. They may want financing options. They want to be sure the product can be serviced, and that, worst case it can be returned.

If these are questions your consumer is likely to ask, be sure to push beyond UPS-based ecom conventional wisdom. If you’re a retailer, you’ve got some of the best possible answers to these questions – be sure your online presence takes full advantage (see localization above).

*             *             *

As consumers look to buy more products online, and e-commerce pushes beyond the simple, UPSable products that were the first wave of e-commerce, the importance of disaggregating e-commerce increases. The opportunities online have changed. E-commerce conventional wisdom soon will too.

• Merchandising products that are challenging to sell online because they are expensive, unbranded, not well understood or highly customizable
• Managing shipping requirements and costs for products that have complex delivery requirements that can't be met by standard parcel services
• Integrating franchise or co-op models where brand, product offering and distribution is controlled locally by independent dealers
• Greater emphasis on cross-channel shopping

• Localization
• Custom System Integration
• Online Merchandising
• Online Marketing
• E-Commerce
• Order Tracking
• Franchise/Co-op Extranet
• Store Intranet
• CRM & Email Marketing
• Inventory Management

• Products:  Synchronize your ecommerce store products with your store systems daily, updating SKUs, relationships between items and detailed product information. This is particularly vital for the big-ticket category.
• Regional Pricing:  Update pricing daily, including regional sale and regional pricing if applicable to ensure a seamless Web-to-store experience.
• Store Info:  Update locations and contact information regularly.
• Find Stores with an Item:   Allow customers to look up nearby stores that actually display a product based on store inventory levels.
• Reviews:  Allow customers to see consumer reviews of products, and other user-generated content from shoppers in their region.
• Cross-selling and Recommendations:  Provide customers with personalized, localized recommendations for merchandise based on preference data of other customers in their area.

While the talk is often about what new technologies can enhance your ecommerce store, the nuts and bolts of any shopping experience lies with merchandising. Just like in your physical stores, selling the right item at the right price is key.

But when you're a multichannel operation, doing that successfully online can be a challenge. Customers want the multichannel commerce experience to be seamless and consistent – and Blueport Commerce can help you meet their expectations, without a lot of extra work.

For the past decade, Blueport Commerce has helped big-ticket retailers like you integrate their online store into their merchandising vision with the following strategies.

Using your existing data: Blueport Commerce's Product Sync updates your online catalog from your existing systems. Once it's in there, our Online Merchandising component allows you to augment that data  for presentation in your ecommerce store, such as adding rich imagery and additional product information. And our Catalog Services division will help you develop the elements you need to display your catalog in its most engaging form, including providing image support, refining product information and copywriting. And all this information is kept current because we sync nightly, importing new individual items as well as packages, thus retaining critical relationships between items. 

Making it easy to merchandise the ecommerce store: Through our Online Merchandising system, additional relationships can be introduced such as cross-sells or upsells, or configure new money-saving packages. Feature your bestsellers, new items or use your ecommerce store to sell items that you don't have the floor space to display in stores. Best of all, by analyzing your retail sales online, we can tell you precisely which products and merchandising approaches people like best.

Pricing Management Tools: To start, our Price Sync updates pricing on your site nightly based on your systems, making baseline pricing the same online as it is in your stores. But then our Online Merchandising system allows you precise pricing control, including the ability to modify pricing locally. We can even scan your inventory for odds and ends and add them to an online clearance center automatically.

Merchandisers, we're here to help you manage your ecommerce store – learn more by contacting us.

 

• Product Search – Allow customers to browse for your ecommerce catalog using several types of searches, including keyword, category, advanced and style searches.
• Bestsellers – All customers to view your best-selling and highlighted products.
• Rich Product Presentation - Provide multiple, zoomable product images, flash animations, and detailed product features for your merchandise.
• Regional Pricing – Provide customers with retail prices for their area, ensuring a seamless web-to-store experience.
• Find Store with Item – Allow customers to lookup nearby stores displaying a product based on store inventory levels.
• Reviews – Allow customers to see consumer reviews of products, and other user-generated content.
• Cross-selling and Recommendations – Provide customers with personalized, automated recommendations for merchandise based on preference data of other customers in their area.