Luxury Websites: If You Don’t Have E-Commerce, Why Not?

Friday, October 28, 2011 by Morgan Woodruff
Many luxury brands have been slow to cultivate their online presence, and even slower to integrate e-commerce capabilities. They seemed to think that the mass appeal and convenience of online shopping would dilute the value and prestige of their brands or that consumers would not be willing to pay big-ticket prices via the Web. This has been proven wrong, as research shows that wealthy people shop online more frequently and spend more per transaction. As of late, many luxury retailers have come around to see the value of the Internet for driving sales, and, even more, the value in allowing customers to transact on an e-commerce site.

According to a recent study by PM Digital, 81% of the luxury websites surveyed now have e-commerce, and the sites with e-commerce get 98% of the traffic that goes to these luxury sites. About a third of this traffic comes from search engines, and there is very little cross traffic, since luxury shoppers are very loyal to their brands. Surprisingly, only a very small amount of luxury brands’ traffic (0.29%) comes from luxury daily deals sites, like Gilt Groupe, ideeli and RueLaLa.

What Makes Luxury E-Commerce Successful?

When selling big-ticket luxury items online, however, it’s not as simple as using a plug-and-play e-commerce solution. Luxury brand customers expect a high-end boutique experience whether in-person or online. Here are some aspects to consider when selling luxury via e-commerce:

  • You need to provide rich product descriptions. The more expensive an item is, the more information the consumer will want you to provide.
  • Offer exceptional customer service, getting as close to what you offer in-store with a personal shopper. On the Web, that translates to online chat.
  • The entire online shopping experience should be like going into one of your boutiques. Craft a strong welcome message on your home page. And then as customers drill down into products, allow them to zoom in on the images or even watch product videos – the goal is for them to handle the product, virtually.
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Today’s E-Commerce Content

Friday, October 21, 2011 by Betsy Miller
Content is king. Sure, this phrase is overused, but that’s because there’s a lot of truth behind it. While much has changed since Bill Gates first said those words in the early days of the Internet, people still want to consume information, and today’s shoppers want to be able to access it quickly and in a number of ways.

For e-commerce sites, content is about creating an engaging brand for consumers. The more you talk to your customers, the more they will interact with your brand and convert.

E-Commerce Content Trends

Here are just a few of the driving content trends for e-commerce today:

  • Over the past year, many e-commerce companies have hired editorial directors from the publishing world. They are being tasked with pulling all of the content together to create that single voice you might expect from a magazine. And in such cases, “voice” extends to visual aspects of the sites as well.
  • Thanks to Google Panda and e-commerce websites’ needs to distinguish themselves, it’s no longer enough to post manufacturers’ product descriptions and images.  By bringing unique information, engaging storytelling, informed search engine optimization and visual panache, one website can beat out another when it comes to closing the sale.
  • User-generated content and community continues to flourish both on e-commerce websites and their social media pages. From online reviews to contests where users post content, e-commerce sites are allowing consumers to help create website content and build the brand. Some e-commerce websites even allow customers to customize their products or choose what goes on sale. Content allows e-commerce shopping to become a participatory and social experience.
E-commerce websites are becoming destinations beyond a place to shop. Those websites that are able to use content to transform their websites into destinations for customers to browse and spend time will continue to thrive. Selling online is not just a numbers game. It’s about offering a service customers want, and content should be at the forefront of that strategy.

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Big-Ticket E-Commerce Should Be Ready for the Holidays

Friday, October 14, 2011 by Betsy Miller
There was a time when some big-ticket retailers didn’t think they could cash in on the holiday shopping season, let alone such e-commerce-fueled events as Cyber Monday. But then again, there was also a time when no one expected anyone to buy anything online and computers filled entire rooms.

Whether it’s a push from e-commerce or the trend that holiday shopping starts earlier and earlier, we’ve found that big-ticket merchants, like furniture stores, which had traditionally been slow over the holidays, have been able to share in some of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday cheer.

At first, we would ask our clients what their plans were for these major dates on retail calendars, and they would often tell us they had nothing special planned. But slowly, we helped them to turn these potentially down days into big sellers with special events. For example, one of our clients began with a special Thanksgiving Day offer. It wouldn’t compete with stores, so what would be the worst that could happen? And it worked!

From exclusive email offers to Black Friday doorbusters and Christmas Day specials, our retail clients have been able to boost their fourth quarter sales. One client now mirrors the types of deals you see in retailers across the country with 12 days of deals leading up to Christmas; the big difference is our retailer is selling bigger ticket items like furniture and appliances as well as some electronics – and all three categories perform well.

So whether your big-ticket business can benefit from consumers being poised to spend over the holidays or you can take advantage of shoppers looking for great deals and not just gifts, holiday-timed offers can be a gift to your bottom line.

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Why E-Commerce Should Be Fired Up About Kindle Fire

Friday, October 7, 2011 by Betsy Miller
On the first day of preorders, 95,000 units of the Kindle Fire were sold. With the product’s release set for November 15th, this all equals a lot of people sitting on the couch after a filling turkey dinner, thumbing through apps and browsing the web on their shiny new tablets.

The release of the new Kindle Fire just in time for some of the busiest e-commerce shopping days of the year (Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday), could mean some extra business for online retailers.

According to a survey from the Ponemon Institute, 12% of heavy web-using consumers plan to use their tablets for holiday shopping, and a third of them say their e-commerce purchases will exceed their purchases in stores. And retailers also report that purchases from tablets can be as much as 20% larger than average orders from other devices.

Tablets tend to be great for e-commerce for a number of reasons: the screen size, the presentation (much like an old-school catalog) and the portability. With the Kindle Fire comes affordability, relatively speaking, as well.

There are many who think it is the profile of the tablet owner, rather than the tablet itself, that is responsible for more e-commerce conversions. But with the Kindle Fire’s $199 price tag, the demographic of tablet users could shift. Whether their buying habits do remains to be seen.

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5 Tips for Handling Inventory Stock Information on E-Commerce Sites

Friday, September 30, 2011 by Carl Prindle
“I always remember that it costs a lot to get people in a store…and takes very little to convince them not to come back.”

This quote was from a recent Practical Ecommerce article about inventory stock status on e-commerce websites. The consumer who is quoted had a very bad experience shopping online. He tried to purchase the discontinued HP TouchPad once it went on sale for $99 (originally $399).

Like him, many other shoppers went online to make the same purchase, and, like him, many were successful – at least in placing an order and having their credit cards charged. Unfortunately, the stores oversold, and instead of getting their new tablets, these consumers received emails apologizing for unexpected demand and saying that their orders would be cancelled.

It’s remarkable that the massive players mentioned in the article still have this issue, especially selling a fairly simple item that, if in stock, is easy to fulfill. The resulting outrage points to how high consumers’ expectations have become in the area of fulfillment.

Blueport’s focus is meeting these high expectations, even in the toughest logistical categories. When you’re browsing our sites, you’re seeing real-time local inventory. If you order a sofa, you know it’s in stock and when you’ll get it – often as soon as tomorrow and for a very low delivery price. What Amazon has done for UPSable items, we’re doing for sofas, appliances, large electrics and more.

Regardless of what you’re selling online, the article concludes with a few excellent suggestions:
  1. Be up-front about product availability.
  2. Communicate when inventory is low – it might even help you sell the item.
  3. Be clear about any stock disclosure policies you have in place to protect yourself.
  4. Explain who is fulfilling the orders for your product.
  5. And should you a sell a customer an item that is no longer stock, take care of the problem: Let the customer know you are sorry, explain what happened, and then offer a discount toward a future purchase. Do not automatically add the customer to your email list for marketing promotions.

The overarching theme here is to be straightforward with your customers about the merchandise you have on your website. You could potentially miss a sale or two today, but the long-lasting result of creating a trusting relationship between customers and your e-commerce site can be priceless, especially in categories that are difficult to fulfill.


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SEO Won’t Go Away for E-Commerce, But It Will Evolve

Friday, September 23, 2011 by Betsy Miller
The title of a recent E-Commerce Times article, “The Coming Irrelevance of SEO,” did its job and got me to click through. (Of course, I found it by searching Google.) The piece says that online retailers should begin preparing for the future and focus less on search engine optimization for driving sales and instead should harness the power of marketplaces. “Thanks to improvements in trust and safety, as well as predictability enhancements that brands like Amazon and eBay have brought to the space, consumers simply aren't turning to Google to purchase products,” writes the author Brian Horakh, who is also the founder of Zoovy, which is an integrated marketplace e-commerce solution, not that he’s biased. It’s unclear how this is an either/or scenario -- you can have a marketplace presence and promote your goods through SEO.

Not to hold onto the past, or even the present, I believe that SEO will continue to be a valuable tool for e-commerce websites. Purchasing is just the last step in the process. When customers research items, search engines are a premier starting point. We also don’t know what leads to that final visit where the purchase was made. Was the click from a friend’s review the first visit or the ninth? Perhaps the review helped close the sale, but the initial visit to the company’s e-commerce site may have come from a pay-per-click ad or from a link in organic search.

Good SEO Is Good Content

What even Internet experts tend to forget is that good SEO does not have to be a daunting task. Think about your business and your audience. What does your target audience want that you can provide? If you provide quality content that consumers want, then the SEO part falls into place. Sure, you can mix things up a bit and use different phrases to say the same thing, but that is also considered to be good writing. For example, if you are writing about a sofa, you might also refer to it as a couch or seating -- that reads better than using “couch” over and over again, and it’s good SEO.

Creating good content will also help you as social networks grow. Consumers want to share good content -- they’ll link to it from Facebook posts or reference it in their own blogs. And appropriately tagging user-generated content on your e-commerce sites, like reviews, for example, will help users and search engines find them.

Link farms and black hat tricks gave SEO a bad name earlier this year. But as the Google algorithm continues to evolve, so will SEO practices. And as long as you are focused on your audience, your e-commerce site will benefit.

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Keep Your E-Commerce Site on Target and Avoid Outages

Friday, September 16, 2011 by Betsy Miller

When a retailer launches a new line, media coverage is usually more than welcome. But in the case of Target’s new Missoni line, the more than 200 headlines found literally around the world could have had a better message. These reports all focused on how the large retailer’s e-commerce site, which recently switched from an Amazon back-end to one that’s proprietary, crashed under the heavy traffic.

Target was not prepared for the customer demand for this limited-edition designer line, and the e-commerce site was down for approximately 12 hours. The line’s launch – and the site’s crash – was preceded by amped up publicity for the line, leading to starlets discussing their interest in specific items on Twitter before the line was available. Of course, unhappy Target.com shoppers went to Twitter as well when they couldn’t access the website once these items were for sale.

While Target says this specific demand was unprecedented, dwarfing the traffic they get even on Black Friday, it is important for e-commerce websites to be prepared. Knowing the marketing push behind the Missoni line and the interest it was generating in social networks, Target should have taken steps to ensure the website would work as if it were any other day.

At Blueport, when we know one of our clients’ e-commerce sites will be getting extra traffic due to an incredible sale or promotion, we take steps in advance to be sure the websites can handle the onslaught of traffic. For example, when one of our clients ran a Living Social daily deal, our IT Operations department took action so the user experience was not affected in any way.

When your company plans a spectacular event, make sure that the event is as spectacular online as it is offline. And this becomes even more important as the holiday shopping season approaches. Online retailers should take the steps now to be sure their websites will be able to do what they need them to do this holiday season – and that’s selling merchandise.

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Blueport Commerce Is on the Move!

Thursday, September 8, 2011 by Morgan Woodruff
It’s moving week at Blueport Commerce! We will be opening for business at our new offices at 580 Harrison Ave. in Boston’s South End on Monday, September 12th. Everyone here is very excited about this next step in our company’s growth.
 
We spent quite some time finding our new space, all told about 16 months. We wanted a mix of everything: a beautiful space where we could continue to grow, a building that could meet our technical needs, amenities for our staff and an exciting place for clients and partners to visit. After much searching, we found the space. We were able to get all we wanted and more. The time is right, and we’re making the move.
 
These types of changes often get you thinking about your past as much as your future. How did we get here?
 
Remember when people were hesitant to buy anything online? That’s when we started selling furniture on the Web as Furniture.com. We have evolved from a Web portal selling furniture to a technology and services provider for big-ticket retailers who want to sell and brand their hard-to-ship items online. We’ve already extended to markets adjacent to the furniture industry, such as appliances, electronics, flooring, carpet and more. We’ve been helping clients navigate their ways through social networks, daily deals and more. As a business, we have evolved, and now it’s time our office space catches up.
 
The future for Blueport Commerce is forecasted to be even brighter. As the market focuses on local e-commerce (something we’ve done for quite some time), we are poised to continue to be a leader. Come visit us, and see for yourself.

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Shopper Know-How and the Retail Renaissance

Friday, September 2, 2011 by Betsy Miller
Last week, we posted about the retail trend of Online Expectations, Offline Experiences discussed in PSFK’s 2011 Future of Retail report. In this post, we will talk about another major trend they outline in the report: Shopper Know-How.

Shopper Know-How

The retail megatrend of Shopper Know-How stems from the emerging consumer trends related to how people now use mobile technology and social media, as well as how consumers crave/demand relevant location-based information specific to them.

  • On my block deals: This capitalizes on the success of Groupon, Living Social, etc. and combines combining deals with geolocation technology (something Groupon has already ventured into with Groupon Now). Consumers enjoy both the novelty of such alerts as well as the practicality of having time, location and need converge.
  • Social currency: There is value in consumers’ social influence. Some brands have already seen success by offering deals or special treatments based on social influence. Others have even offered discounts and products for Tweets.  In the social space, retailers will need to look beyond cultivating a stream of people to merely push deals out to and should work on creating a community of brand advocates, whose organic marketing voices are stronger than the retailers’ own. Pay with a Tweet – social media sharing as currency, too.
  • What’s in-store: Making real-time local inventory data available to consumers leads to local discovery. Consumers will be able to find the products they want nearby. By putting this information in the consumers hands, you will be able to attract new customers as people will go to new places to get what they want.
As you can see, technology is fueling a retail renaissance. Here at Blueport, we’re enjoying being a part of it!

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Online Expectations, Offline Experience

Friday, August 26, 2011 by Betsy Miller
PSFK, the self-proclaimed “go-to resource for new ideas and inspiration for creative professionals,” recently released its 2011 Future of Retail report, which explores the new trends driving the industry. This year, the focus is on the use of technology and how it will revitalize retail stores, both on and offline.

The study outlines three emerging megatrends:
  1. Online Expectations, Offline Experience
  2. Shopper Know-How
  3. Refined Retail Cartography
Let’s take a look at the first one here:

Online Expectations, Offline Experience

For this megatrend, PSFK identified three smaller trends:

  • Digitally empowered staff: We’ve posted on this blog about the power of the iPad for retail. This trend is all about giving staff access to additional product information and real-time inventory – information we think are important components of an item’s product page on any e-commerce website. Having this information right at salespeople’s fingertips will allow them to spend more time selling and assisting customers by locating or ordering items.
  • In-stories: In-stories give customers access to additional product information in an entertaining manner. Including QR codes in your bricks-and-mortar store could allow customers to conduct the additional research on products that you want them to. Why not allow them to access your e-commerce site’s user reviews?
  • Scanned shoppers: This trend is all about interactive technology entering the store to help customers make purchasing decisions, such as what they should make for dinner or what size to get a specific shirt in. We’ve seen some of these types of tools exist on stores’ websites. Customers crave this interactivity everywhere.
  • Gesture-based browsing: Gesture-based browsing allows customers to interact with a display via non-contact movement (think Kinect). Such displays will pull customers into the store and the shopping experience. In addition to providing an entertaining experience, it also gives the store information on how the consumer navigates through the display and what the consumer ultimately chooses.
We find all of these trends very exciting. We already know that multichannel retailing allows customers to shop when and how they want to. This new melding of technology and retail will help retailers create a tighter branding experience between their bricks-and-mortar stores and their online e-commerce presence. Both online and offline will be able to more easily benefit from each other, and that gives the biggest benefits to the customer.

In a future blog post, we’ll take a closer look at more of the underlying trends from this report.

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The Economy May Be Looking Down, But E-Commerce Sales Keep Looking Up

Friday, August 19, 2011 by Betsy Miller
According to comScore’s State of the US Online Retail Economy in Q2 2011, despite an increased consumer perception that the economy is getting worse, Q2 e-commerce spending was up 14% YOY. Here are some interesting findings from the recent report:

Online Shopping

E-commerce sales growth is growing at double the rate of total retail sales growth, indicating that consumers are shifting from shopping in-store to buying online. The number of online shoppers increased 16% YOY for Q2 – there are now 170 million people shopping online.

Big-ticket items like furniture, appliances and equipment have shown moderate growth of 5% to 9% YOY for Q2.

Cutting Back on Spending

Because of their economic concerns, consumers are looking to save. They are now switching brands, shopping only when items are on sale, looking for deals online and going to different retailers in order to spend less.

Get Smart About Smartphones

The number of consumers using their smartphones to browse retail content in some form is now at 78 million. 22% of smartphone owners say they have made purchases via their smartphones, 50% have used their phones to find nearby stores and 40% have used their smartphones while in a store. The top reasons for using the smartphone in-store? To compare prices or to compare an item to other items not available in the store. 36% of consumers who abandon in-store purchases after using their smartphones end up buying online instead.

Social Media Matters

Overall, retailers not taking full advantage of the opportunity social media presents. For example, retail ads only make up 15.4% of the display ads on social networking sites.

If you are looking to expand your social media presence, comScore offers insight on Facebook: Once consumers like a page, they are very unlikely to return to that page. Facebook users spend the majority of their time on the newsfeed, so what and how you post will account for much of their interactions with your brand. Fans and their Facebook friends who are exposed to your brand on Facebook via advertising and status posts have a much higher brand engagement, which includes visiting your e-commerce website.

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Scenes from the Summit: Pacific Crest 2011

Friday, August 12, 2011 by Morgan Woodruff
The Pacific Crest Global Technology Leadership Forum for 2011 was again held in glorious Vail, Colorado. Blueport's third year at this event kicked off on Sunday with an investment-banker-driven, 7-mile run from the town (8,150 ft.) up to nearly the summit (11,428 ft.). What were they thinking? This was followed by a cocktail reception that night for the private and public companies attending. At this early stage in the conference, it was impossible to wrap your head around the event yet: It was a Sunday night and you were working with half the oxygen you’re used to. You spoke with tons of contacts, but there was no mention of the technology, localized e-commerce, social and mobile buzzwords that would be unavoidable in the remaining days.

The sun crested over the mountains at 5:29 a.m. and breakfast began at 6. Pacific Cresters fluttered around, effectively lining up 48 hours of ducks. You had to caffeine it up -- you needed it.

The summit had three modules --  two unique. At most tech summits, you end up in a room with Google or Gilt listening to egos roar as Sergey or Susan talk about how killer things are in ecommerce, search, social commerce and more. At Pacific Crest, these more generic types of corporate briefings were done throughout the two days and you slot them in as best you can. But most of the fun comes from the two more unique tracks of this conference: One portion is the roundtable discussions where industry focus meets opinion. Our CEO, Carl sat on the Internet Digital Media panel this year with Don the Tool King and the CEO of Beyond the Rack. The discussion is led by bankers and analysts who cover the e-commerce space. This year, logistics and inventory (Do you job it out? CAPEX it?) was among the hotter topics. Our market validation vis-a-vis panel discussions with these high-caliber attendees is flattering. When someone who runs a $17 billion fund nods in agreement -- well, nothing is quite like it.

This year, I spent most of my time differently than in the past. I focused on briefing investors interested in e-commerce platforms and, hopefully, Blueport.

Meetings were 25 minutes each (with 5 minutes for travel time to the next meeting lovingly factored in -- very 503, you know 917 wouldn't do that). They’re like those goofy Hollywood junket interviews for movie premieres. I did my best to not pull a Christian Bale, while sitting in a hotel room stripped of its beds (because THAT would be awkward), saying roughly the same thing over and over, changing it slightly for the audience and its reactions. They went something like this:

Them: Are you profitable?
Us: What's your average check size?
Them: Year-over-year growth?
Us: What are you looking for in your next portfolio company? 
Them: We typically would invest $25 to $50 million, but we did a round with Facebook at $200.
Us: OK, we want $5. Can we make that work?

Before you can imagine, there's a knock on the door. It's over and on to the next. It's a blast, and it’s exactly what I love about my career; that it's not a job or work per se, but it's fun. I'm insanely lucky. Events like this remind me of that.

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5 Ways for Online Retailers to Be a Little Fab

Friday, August 5, 2011 by Betsy Miller
Fab.com is one of the latest fabulous e-commerce stories: Originally launched by entrepreneur Jason Goldberg as Fabulis, a social networking site for gay men, the company was then revamped and renamed to be the design flash sales site it is today. And by the time it reached its sixth week, the company was already turning a profit, had 400,000 users, and received $8M in Series A funding. Investors in Fab.com include Menlo Ventures, The Washington Post Company, SoftTech VC and Ashton Kutcher.

But with so many flash sales sites out there in the e-commerce game, why is Fab.com such a success? Here are five reasons why we’ve become fans of Fab.com.
 
Do What You Know and Are Passionate About

According to this piece from VentureBeat, Goldberg and cofounder/chief creative officer Bradford Shane Shellhammer settled on the formula that is now Fab.com because of their backgrounds in building websites and design, respectively. The result is a beautiful, well-built website that brings its customers a wide array of items all brought together because of their unique design sensibilities.

Products = Content

While we’ve been seeing many e-commerce sites bring an editorial spin to their product pages -- Gilt Groupe has been poaching a number of folks from the magazine world to work on its sites -- for example, you get a sense that Fab.com treats the items it sells like content to be consumed that way. And as members, we tend to look forward to their emails much like we’d look to a magazine to tell us about the newest trends and neatest gadgets. The difference is now, I can easily buy what they show me.

A Fostered Sense of Community

Since Fab.com’s origin was as a social networking site, you would expect some innovation here. But the way the initial phase of Fab.com has integrated social community has been in a very clean, modern way. Goldberg has the Betashop blog, where he gives an insider’s look at the company. There is also a Fab blog, which features products, and an Inspiration wall where members can post pictures. To close the loop, Fab.com includes quotes about the collection from members of the Fab.com or the designers, giving a little more context as to what the collection is and why it is for sale on the website. For customers, this gives real personality to the products.

Constantly New Inventory

Of course the inventory and products on a daily deals site will change more frequently than on a conventional e-commerce site. But the items on Fab.com aren’t just new to Fab – they are new to the consumers. The products are curated in such a way that there is a real sense of novel and innovation with each new sale on the site. This is also what keeps customers coming back – Goldberg has cited repeat buyers as a contributor to the success.

Consumer Love Is the Best Marketing

To date, Fab.com has not had a major marketing push. It appears that much of their resources have been spent on getting the right products presented in the right way. This stellar combination has made way for a strong word-of-mouth campaign as subscribers spread the Fab.com love. Are there ways you could improve your own products, customer experience and customer service to foster positive word-of-mouth from your existing customers?

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Can Groupon Work for Big-Ticket Items?

Friday, July 29, 2011 by Betsy Miller
Earlier this month, when Groupon’s first big-ticket deal for $199 for $500 toward a new car at a Detroit area dealership failed, it didn’t only make for amusing headlines (“Groupon Hits the Skids,” for example). It also got people asking whether the daily deal model can work for big-ticket items.

As a company that provides the technology and services to help its clients localize big-ticket retail online, Blueport Commerce takes the stance that daily deals can work for big-ticket items if executed correctly. The Groupon car deal was not.

Why Conventional Daily Deals Work

Daily deals are so popular, because they are great deals. Groupon’s subscribers expect a significant discount on the goods or service being sold. Half off a dinner? Wonderful, and I’ve been meaning to try new places!

So far, successful daily deals have been somewhat simple and often for items subscribers were likely to spend money on anyway. Salon services at 70% off? Well, I do need a haircut anyway.

Lastly, the offer is usually concrete. I will pay X and get Y. Any variables in what I spend beyond what I paid for the Groupon are easily in my control.

So What Was Wrong with the Automotive Offer?

The offer was to buy $500 that could then be used toward a new car. A quick look at the dealer’s website has cars starting around $16,000. So someone who bought the deal is only getting at most a few percent off his final purchase. 

Among the things that makes daily deals so successful is the easy spontaneity of it all. You only have a short amount of time to choose this deal, and then it’s gone. But it takes people some time to research a purchase like a car.

A recent article from The Atlantic, points out that one issue with this deal is that car price is negotiable. The piece quotes Ben Edelman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School as telling Reuters: “This voucher is for a very small portion of the cost of a car or lease, so it’s basically an agreement to buy or lease a car from LaFontaine. That’s poor negotiating because the dealer could take advantage f that by offering the same car for more money. They (Groupon) need to fix that before this part of the model can take off.”

The Big-Ticket Daily Deal Challenge

Many folks are saying that daily deals won’t work for big-ticket items. Perhaps these are the same people who years ago told us that consumers would not buy furniture online. But people do buy furniture and other big-ticket items online, so eventually daily deals in this arena could take off.

Our client The RoomPlace actually did a successful daily deal with LivingSocial not too long ago. The offer was $150 worth of furniture for $75. This worked because even though the offer was for big-ticket items like furniture, consumers could choose from a large price range and could choose whether they purchase something solely for the face value of the deal or use it toward a larger purchase.

Big-ticket retailers can look to daily deal sites, or create their own, in order to drum up business. For great results, they need to turn their big-ticket deal into something that is concrete for users. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

  • Be sure that a consumer could leave your store or website with an item or service for the value of the deal.
  • Consider offering a specific item at a steep discount rather than following the voucher model.
  • Once the consumer cashes in on the deal, be sure you do what you can to keep in touch, such as offering an at-register email sign-up or customer survey.
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What Retailers Can Learn from Netflix’s Big Multichannel Mistake

Friday, July 22, 2011 by Betsy Miller
Last week, Netflix announced a change in its subscription plans and their cost structure. The news was met by anger from many of its customers. In an Econsultancy blog post, Patricio Robles summed up the misstep: “At the end of the day, Netflix is making the same mistake many publishers are: It's hoping to charge consumers by the channel. Want to watch movies on DVD? You have to pay for that. Want to stream movies over the Internet? You have to pay for that separately.”

This forces customers to choose between the two methods, which, from the pricing, Netflix proposes are equal. But with the discrepancy in the number of titles available in the DVD library versus the streaming library, consumers disagree and are enraged.

This is another case, where the retailer is seeing the business differently than the consumers who ultimately foot the bill. And in this economy, consumers will not pay for something unless they see the value – no matter how loyal they have been to the company until now.

Your customers expect a consistent experience with your brand, no matter how they are accessing it, whether in person, on your e-commerce site, or even elsewhere on the Web, like your Facebook page or Twitter account. And your customers expect you to be available in these different venues so they can interact with your brand on their own terms. At Blueport, we work with our clients to be sure the messages customers see online are what they would see in-store, from consistent local pricing to real-time availability.

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When It Comes to the Newest Technology, Set Objectives First

Friday, July 15, 2011 by Betsy Miller
Everyone wants to be involved with the newest technology, right? Retailers and consumers alike want to play on the newest playground with the newest equipment, along with the coolest, most influential kids, whether that means Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr today, Google+ tomorrow and who knows what next week. But before an e-commerce company jumps on the latest technology bandwagon, people need to stop and think about the website’s strategy and what is right for the overall business. That’s just what David Rogers, author of The Network Is Your Customer: 5 Strategies to Thrive in a Digital Age, wrote in a BNET blog post.

It’s almost as if the technology itself becomes bigger than its function. Brands tend to jump in so quickly that Google was compelled to post a YouTube video asking businesses to hold off on creating Google+ profiles until the business version is released.

While we at Blueport understand that brands do need to get out there and dip their feet in new technologies, strategy should come into play first. We work with our clients to help them determine their objectives before taking action. We don’t just help them administer Facebook contests, but we ask them why they want to have a Facebook contest – what is the real goal for the company? Then, based on our clients’ objectives, we offer suggestions that make the most sense for their brands and that will deliver the best return on investment.

New technology presents a new frontier, even for companies that already have an e-commerce presence. It helps to create a digital strategy to guide you in this unmarked territory.

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Online Advertising: Now Delivering Local
Shoppers -- Is Your Website Ready for Them?

Friday, July 8, 2011 by Carl Prindle
According to a recent eMarketer article, 90% of national ad agencies have clients asking for geographically targeted online ad campaigns.  Daily deal sites, like Groupon, and mobile check-in sites, like foursquare, are hot because they can deliver local shoppers.

Seventy-five percent of survey respondents said location was key in helping national brands reach their target audiences, and more than 50% said the ROI on geographically targeted ads is higher.  It makes sense -- if you’re looking to buy a new sofa in Chicago, would you be drawn to an ad about stylish sofas or one about stylish sofas in Chicago? 

Local advertising brings what the consumer is looking for that much closer.  Local means you can see it in a store; maybe get a local deal; and get it quickly and cheaply (and even get service if you have to).

But is your ecommerce platform ready for local shopping?  Very few are.

Local Commerce Makes Good on Local Advertising

Remember the early days of ecommerce, which promised to “Amazon” everything?  Stores were to become obsolete, and as a result, most ecommerce platforms were built as national channels, designed to bypass local stores entirely.

That’s a real problem for most bricks-and-mortar retailers.  The promise of a local ad falls flat when a customer clicks to a homogenized, national website.

To monetize local ads, you need to provide your customers a complete location-based experience that delivers on the ad’s local promise.  A landing page isn’t enough -- you need to deliver local online shopping.

At Blueport Commerce, we enable local online shopping experiences for our clients. Blueport’s clients present localized content to their shoppers based on location, including merchandise trends, selection and availability, in-store inventory and pick up, local pricing and deals, fast, cheap local delivery, and even “About Us” pages, managed by stores, and that can speak to a local store’s place in a community.

It’s seamless cross-channel shopping between online and a local store, and it dramatically improves the already impressive ROI of local online advertising.

Your customers are ready for a complete local commerce experience -- are you?

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Consistency Is Key in This Multichannel Retail World

Friday, July 1, 2011 by Betsy Miller
We’ve all read the news – most likely on a tablet or e-reader of choice – that brick-and-mortar bookstores are closing left and right as their electronic counterparts comparably flourish. But recently, I needed a book.

As do many shoppers, I began with online research. I went straight to a major book retailers’ website and located the title. I was disappointed that I could no longer order the book online for in-store pickup or even find out if my local store had the book in stock. But I could locate the closest store, which took some doing in light of the above-mentioned closings.

In-store, the item was priced 30% more than on the retailer’s website. The manager explained it was for the convenience of coming into the store, and no, it’s not confusing, because the company gets the money either way. I left unlikely to buy from the store or the e-commerce site again.

A Seamless Experience Between Online and In-Store

Of all the retail categories to know the right way to sell in a multichannel retail environment, you would expect books to have it mastered. After all, e-commerce began with bookselling.

Seeing where the book retailer got it wrong, while we here at Blueport are able to get it right as we help our retailers sell big-ticket items online, reminded me of just how new e-commerce and getting different retail channels to work together is.

But consumers are ready, and delivering a consistent experience between all of your retail channels is a must, particularly for considered purchases like furniture and appliances. This is why we tie into our retailers’ existing systems to show their customers consistent local pricing, real-time availability and a way to see the items in a store or to order online. We allow our retailers to give their customers control, so they can get the information they need, whenever and however they want it.

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New Insights on How Consumers Research Products and Shop Online

Friday, June 24, 2011 by Betsy Miller
We’ve already written about today’s smarter consumers, but a new study from PowerReviews, a Blueport Commerce partner, and the e-tailing group takes a closer look at how today’s sophisticated online shoppers use a variety of tools to research items before buying.

Of the 1,000 consumers surveyed, 70% research their purchases for at least a day before taking action. A ZippyCart piece also covering this survey offers this insight: “one reason for this longer-term research…could be the fact that most online purchases are for bigger-ticket items (TVs, other consumer electronics, etc.).”

Unsurprisingly, most of those surveyed said they begin their online shopping either at a search engine or a major retailer’s website. And 90% said product reviews had the biggest impact on their decision to buy.

At this point, only a third of respondents use social media sites, like Facebook, for researching products and instead look to them to find deals. But consumers are using their mobile phones to search for product ratings and reviews from within physical stores.

How Does This Change Your E-Commerce Business?

While these insights may not change how you run your e-commerce store, it does give you a few things to continue to focus on or try out. Including:

  • Retargeting advertising: If consumers are spending more time online researching, retargeting allows you to keep your brand in front of them during their time online.
  • Search engine optimization: SEO comes down to content creation. Be sure you have unique, helpful content on your product pages and consider branching out and creating content to help users buy your products. These tactics will aid consumers in their research and you in your search engine rankings.
  • Product ratings and reviews: This is just another form of content, which will help with SEO and informing your customers. And even better, since ratings and reviews come from their peers, consumers trust them.
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Get Your E-Commerce Website Ready for Daily Deals

Friday, June 17, 2011 by Betsy Miller
Groupon has more than 83 million subscribers; LivingSocial more than 28 million. According to Bloomberg, 480 companies are competing in the daily deals space – including everyone from Google and Facebook, which have recently tossed their hats in the ring, to niche sites like the socially conscious Roozt.com or the kosher-inclined Jewpon.com.

With the potential traffic that could come from offering a daily deal, retailers that are considering teaming up with one of these sites need to be sure their own e-commerce websites can handle the load.

A Daily Deal Case Study

Our client The RoomPlace offered a daily deal through LivingSocial: $150 worth of furniture at 50% off. The site activity the day the deal ran was considerable:
  • 67% increase in website traffic
  • 65% increase in bandwidth used
  • 75% increase in calls for content.
Foreseeing the increase in site usage, we made sure all product and site changes that we usually update daily were completed before the daily deal email was sent. We worked with Akamai to increase the regular cache time to 48 hours. This ensured our regular customers would have a seamless site experience and that the influx of new traffic from the daily deal would be able to get to and see the site pages quickly. As a backup, our operations team set up additional hot standby servers.

Our operations team closely monitored live site usage throughout the day the deal went out – just in case. Thanks to the precautions taken, the additional traffic had no effect on site speed, nor was there any downtime.

“Planning ahead, both from a technical and a business perspective was essential,” says Kathryn Kerrigan, e-commerce manager for The RoomPlace. “Thanks to forethought and site stability, we were able to accommodate and convert numerous new customers.”

No matter what kind of business you run, a daily deal offer will drive a lot of new customers to your website. These new customers want to know what their getting whether or not they plan to use the deal online. Beyond the window dressing, be sure your website is technically ready so new customers will get a great first impression and come back for more.

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