Hitting Winners

Okay people.  The tennis grand slam season has begun…that time of the year when it’s actually cool to wear white from head to toe, strawberries and cream are the “it” dessert, TVs are set to 24 hour tennis in the background to life’s dramas and good times.  When a crowd of people gather to watch a tennis game, they seek intrigue, some good thought-out points with a lot of creative execution.  When the game is exciting, the spectators are willing to stay longer, act livelier, and cheer on louder.  If they don’t get those satisfying points, they either leave the stands or change the channel, and are on to the next game of top players that can get them the excitement they desire.  This means less ticket sales, less advertising money…bottom line, less event revenues.

 Similarly, a good site search works the same way.  Your clients are the spectators.  They want an exciting search, one that will bring them the satisfying points, the products they seek.  Each query they type in, they want an ace, a one click winner.  While they could navigate their way around, hitting the ball back and forth, clicking over here and arriving over there, only to arrive back at the at the baseline, it is so much more efficient when the product is found instantaneously, when the point is won with no hurtles at the net, no tough calls…just a plain and simple winner.  More winners…more revenues.

We all think differently, we all have our own passions.  The human brain’s ticking source is triggered by something unique in each one of us.  With a superior site search, the technology is designed to think like your customer, no matter from where they are coming, taking into account previous search behavior, typed in queries, and, consequently, create concepts for products the customers are telling you they want with the vocabulary and train of thought they are using.

You always want to anticipate a winning match…if not, your business may just be left sulking on the sidelines…Invest in your Site Search and come out a winner

Onsite search converts 50% better

An interesting research was just posted by one of our UK partners – Screen Pages (see also coverage by e-consultancy). They reviewed 39 sites to find out that shoppers using the search box to locate a product are much more likely to buy – 50% more! Furthermore, guided search (which is what we do J) gets much more people to use the search box (and generates much more sales, as the people using the search box buy 50% more)!

We at Celebros are always amazed by the amount of retailers who make huge investments in their site but seem to forget that if users can not find a product, they can not buy it. And the next store is just a click away!

A good real world salesperson excels in pointing customers to the product that really fits them after a few words of conversation. Not necessarily what they say they want but rather what suites them best / is within their budget / is on sale / gives the best value.

A good online store excels in exactly the same way! e-shops should make sure they quickly take the user to the right product page regardless of the interface: navigation menus, promotion ads or the search box. This is exactly what guided search does. Working behind the scenes and building on an intimate knowledge of the product catalog, we find the most relevant offers and help the user reach them through either interface and in one or two clicks!

And a last note – being in the middle of a hard recession, guided search getting 50% more in sales, is a matter of life and death for every site. Simple as that!

Free Site Search Solution for Mercado Customers

As you may have already heard, especially if your online store is serviced by Mercado Software, Mercado has basically closed-up shop, having let go over 100 employees in total.

While a bare-bones staff stayed on, it has now been reported that Omniture will be purchasing certain assets of Mercado.  The deal, however, is not final, and it could take quite some time until operations are fully merged and synchronized, potentially leaving Mercado customers in the lurch, particularly in light of the impending Christmas season.

Recognizing the time-sensitive nature of eTailers’ needs, Celebros is offering Mercado clients the opportunity to benefit from Celebros Salesperson for a free 45-day trial.  Not only is the trial period free of charge, but implementation is quick and painless.

Contact Celebros at sales@celebros.com for more information.

Terms:

* No setup or data migration charge

* MLA will be equal to Mercado’s MLA

* Offer valid through November 30, 2008

Shop.org Annual Summit in Vegas

The last show of the year that will include Celebros attendees (in the US)  is behind us. The Shop.org Annual Summit was hosted at the beautiful Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, NV last week.

While at the show, we got a chance to meet with several existing clients such as Richard Slater from HappyMothers.com and Bobby Lyons from SkinStore.com.

There were several unique inclusions to the show. For example, one-on-one critique sessions were available with industry experts. During the breaks, Fit  for Commerce provided expo hall tours to attendees. Many many attendees then wrapped up the day at the evening network event at the LAX night club.

Better ROI Guaranteed- Pay Attention to What Shoppers Want

Okay, so what does my previous post on Google, Sesame Street and diminishing (or adapting) attention spans have to do with eCommerce?

Well, for starters, I’d say Google’s always a relevant topic. Google is interesting and innovative, and it’s always fun to watch what the big G is up to.

And on a practical level, which eTailer doesn’t have an Adwords account? Doesn’t spend resources on SEO techniques to get to the top of Google’s organic listings? Google is infinitely relevant to online retailers.

As for diminishing attention spans, being able to recognize the different ways humans adapt to absorbing and interpreting information is key for retailers who want to succeed.

When building an online store, you have to think about how shoppers think AND act, both in the physical and virtual domain. You can start with self-inquiry. How do I notice an item in a bricks-and-mortar store? What draws my attention? What makes me more likely to buy?

Now, online, how do I recreate that level of interest, interaction and engagement? What more can I give my customers in a virtual world?

Sure in a mall, there’s the risk that shoppers can physically transport themselves from store to store if they don’t find what they want or are unhappy with the service, but this requires some actual effort.

Online it’s super easy to leave a store. Another store is just a click away. There is almost no investment required for an individual to jump from store to store (the person does not have to physically move, does not have to say no to an inquiring salesperson, feel personally bad about not making a purchase, etc.). That’s why you need to keep your online shop interesting, engaging and easy-to-navigate.

Force shoppers to pay attention to your wares by making them easy to find. Allow spontaneous purchases with one-click shopping. Keep your site fresh and relevant. Adjust with the times, seasons and your inventory. Incorporate interactivity into your site.

In short, make your online store the kind of place you’d like to be. Or as the title says, pay attention to what shoppers want.

Google, Sesame Street and the Laws of the Diminishing Attention Span

Phew that’s a mouthful. But if I was doing my phD, that would be the title of my dissertation (no one go stealing that!).

The diminishing attention span is one of the staples of the wax-nostalgic set of those believing there was once some form of true stability in this world. Ah, when I was young, “x” was so much better.

Let’s be at least a little realistic here.

Prices have always seemed high to us mere mortals. Children always seem to be getting more spoiled, more cheeky and more self-entitled.  And when exactly was there affordable housing in a major city center?

Now we’re getting to my point here, the “evils” of the world have always existed, in some relative form.  In other words, as far back as memory goes (and that’s not far if we believe the very question) haven’t attention spans always been shrinking or drifting?

Whether or not Sesame Street has had a (negative) effect on children’s attention span and their ability to learn (rather than be entertained), has been debated by parents, educators and the self-diagnosed ADD for years. Instead of simply learning the alphabet, seated straight spined at desk, children now learned their ABC’s from singing and dancing Muppets. How children, and therefore adults learned began to change, and not everyone was sure (or continues to be sure) that this was a good thing.

So, now here’s the real point, is Google (being almost the generic name for search engines) the Sesame Street of this generation?  As Nicholas Carr in his article in The Atlantic on Google and the diminishing attention span asks “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Carr, once an avid reader, laments his diminishing ability to concentrate or read long passages.

“Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

The culprit? Not aging, but the changing ways in which we learn. Thanks to, the Internet, and the Internet’s best-friend, Google.  He continues:

“I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet…. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.”

With the easy access to information, that in itself contains further hyper-linked information, all just a click away, our minds (and eyes) tend to wander, perhaps in the very fashion of a meandering, tangential conversation. We can now only read in spinets. The quest for educational entertainment (or entertaining education) has simply moved to today’s media forum – from television to the Internet, from grade school to office cubicle.

Is it all that early childhood television watching that made us so impressionable? Is that why we need a singing alphabet to learn to read and a search engine to help us forget that we once knew how? Or is it simply a matter of things simply changing.

 

Selling Virtually Nothing for Literally A Lot

How brilliant are the facebook virtual gifts?

Not only do they sell the absolute most random “things”, but they’re all only $1. Who doesn’t think $1’s worth a bit of a laugh at least? It’s the perfect impulse buy.

And apparently, it’s darned lucrative. The gift application is estimated to bring in between $28,500,000 and $43,500,000 in revenues to facebook per year. And since it requires no physical inventory and no actual shipping, it’s pretty much all profit.

But as in any online search and/or shopping scenario, somethings always stay true. As I recently read on CNET News:

“The vast majority of Facebook gifts are bought from the first screen of gifts in the directory–almost 80 percent of the total sales come from the group of the first 20 gifts. This points to the self-reinforcing nature of popularity (the crowdiness of crowds rather than the wisdom of crowds) when popularity data is made public.”

The first sentence is obviously true in any search engine. People tend not to click past the first page of google query results, for example, or purchase items “hidden” further in a store’s online inventory.

Re the attraction of “the crowdiness of crowds” vs. “the wisdom of crowds,” well that’s a philosohpy of its own.

It’s quite likely that facebook virtual gifts do not feature dynamic adjustment to reflect shoppers’ actual purchases. It’s more likely, certainly for the homepage gift offering, that the recommended “product” is one suggested internally by the big brains behind facebook. So this would of course support the crowdiness theory.

On the other hand, google, as far as we know, is more wisdom based, with a fine tuning of display results between links, clicks and relevance.

Either way, it turns out, it’s good to be on top.

Shopping Cart Abandonment – Online and Off

I’m constantly reading about the phenomenon of shopping cart abandonment in online shopping.

It is a very big problem. One that is addressed, analyzed, discussed and analyzed some more.

How do we get apparently interested shoppers, who came to our site, searched for products, added them to a shopping cart and then proceeded to leave without product “in hand” to follow through to purchase?

Shoppers tend to get lost along the way online, apparently. They have a sudden change of heart, they don’t trust the credit card system on the site, they’re frustrated by a slow loading page, an unsightly graphic, or perhaps the phone just rang.

Online retailers, and the support and analysis industries that serve them, try to come up with different answers and strategies to save the sale.

One that I like, is the ability to save my shopping cart. That is “visit” the store, choose my desired merchandise and then, think about it a little more, without having to start all over again. Kind of like bricks and mortar shopping, when you’re able to put things on hold for a day or two (do stores still let you do that these days?).

Anyhow, it turns out shopping cart abandonment is not the exclusive domain of the net.

“ “Canadian consumers are abandoning their shopping carts, delaying purchases and leaving stores, public transit stops and restaurants in significant numbers,” marketing research firm, Maritz Research Canada, said in releasing the results of an online poll of more than 1,300 adult Canadians.

“A whopping 86 per cent of participants polled admitted to walking out of a store frustrated with having waited too long for service,” said Maritz, which advises companies on how to improve their performance.”

Many of these disgruntled shoppers leave mid-purchase.  That is, somewhere along the checkout process. (You can read the full story on The Globe and Mail).

So, while one form of retail is certainly not looking to emulate the lackings of the other, it is reassuring to know that abandonment happens everywhere.

And when a shopper abandons, for example a supermarket shopping cart online, at least the ice cream doesn’t melt from being discarded in the aisle.

The Exact Science of Merchandising

Okay, well obviously there’s no EXACT science to merchandising, but what science really is precise?

As any retailer knows, merchandising is a never-ending, fine-tuning affair that can make all the difference in your bottom-line.

A recent NRF posting gave some great advice, that rang true.

Basically it can be summarized as such:

hindsight + recent trends + strategy and planning + timely (re)actions = merchandising success

The key is being aware of all these elements at once, and once you’ve got a handle on the “situation”, continue to persevere.

Yesterday’s treasure is so often today’s trash. People’s wants (and perceived wants) change quickly, and since people are your consumer base….

You are not a mind-reader, so you may not be able to accurately predict every detail of demand, no matter how much you plan. But if people don’t quite purchase as you’d predicted, don’t be proud, be flexible. Make changes to your promotions, and if possible actual inventory, on a regular, per need basis.

If you are not equipped to handle all this activity on your own, or simply don’t want to, there is help out there. I’ve always been an advocate of paying for services others can do better.

Bring Me More Traffic

A message we’ve long since repeated is this: shoppers cannot buy what they cannot find.

Site search & navigation is the way to locate products once shoppers have already arrived on your website.

The problem, as all online retailers know, is getting people to your site in the first place: shoppers cannot buy from stores they cannot find.

An interesting article I came upon in Internet Retailing had this to say about online retailers and the quest for more traffic:

“While they understand how to manage and bid on pay-per-click keywords, they fall behind informational and other non-retail sites when it comes to natural search results.”

The article goes on to say:

“Appearing in natural search results is key to a web site’s success. Several studies have shown that consumers’ eyes jump over paid results and go direct to natural. For instance, on Google, one study showed consumers preferring natural results 3 to 1.”

In addition, besides the issue of reliability, SEO, SEM, and PPC costs keep rising. That doesn’t mean you should abandon them, but other avenues need to be explored.

In other words, while in all likelihood it is worthwhile to continue investing in these efforts, it is also advisable to build your natural search rankings.

Additional relevant content, including topical articles are a good addition to any site. The more pages, the more content (particularly dynamic), the more Google spiders will crawl your site. You will also want to increase the number of links to your site and individual products.