Searching Up Close and Personal

In our last entry we discussed the holiday shopper that needs some guidance with their general search entries through helpful navigation tools and an open-minded merchandising tool.  Today, we shall delve into the searches of those customers that want to give their search more direction with the use of abundant description as part of their query.

At the extreme level, you could get a search query that reads “11” red and white chimney stocking”.  Here, 11”,  red, white, and chimney are all adjectives that describe the stocking, also known as attributes of the product.  They are all being typed into the search box.   Clearly this customer is not fooling around and wants to see and buy this stocking, aka, get in and get out, without having to navigate his way around.  

 A good site-search tool should automatically read the adjectives that have been typed in and associate them with the corresponding attributes that filter out the appropriate products.  Pulling up stockings other than those of chimney Christmas stockings would deter the buyer from his purchase, just causing him more unnecessary navigation which he tried so hard to avoid by typing in all those adjectives.  Or even worse, the search getting confused by the abundance of adjectives and not offering any products at all.  Now, the search correctly reads the size attribute, 11”, the color attribute, red and white, and the use attribute, chimney.  A site-search that is not properly programmed to read the query details and filter out the correct products according to the designated product attributes risks losing customers. 

But wait!  As you know, just ‘cause it is now December 26^th, does not mean your shoppers are near done.   They are out and online for their after-holiday blow out sales…and search therefore accordingly.  As part of their typed in queries, they often will include the words “sale,” “discount,” “clearance” to add onto the title of the product for which they are searching.  Therefore, these words must be recognized through the site-search and included in your thematic categorizations. 

If we delve further into the sales category, we see that another advantage to having a good site-search tool is being able to differentiate regular sale items from holiday sale items.  You are able to zero in your customers to the relevant products, special motivational prices they like to see, attractive holiday UI…it’s the whole package. 

So, as we mentioned in our last Christmas blog, get creative with your site-search and start thinking like your customers, the ways in which they could possibly search for your products.  It can only expand your range of customers and increase your sales.

Interesting times!

Well, Google (through Google Commerce Search) became a direct competitor in our neighborhood. Welcome

Rather than talking a whole lot on how the Google product is a “1.0” and pointing out all its limitations (like some of our fellow bloggers have done), I’d like to say something else – our customers are smart, and so is Google.

Nobody expects a “1.0” to provide the same coverage as do products that are out there 5, 6, 8 or more years. However, a newcomer has the advantage of bringing a new point of view and learning from other people’s mistakes. This is why we at Celebros are not quick to judge but rather look to learn.

For clients looking to make an immediate investment the choice is clear. Our products and services provide a complete answer to your needs and are proven through numerous deployments. In the longer run however – clients are looking at Google’s doings with interest and so are we!

‘Tis the Season to Be Social

Two months till black Friday, three months till Christmas morning, that time of year when shoppers are in the giving spirit, throwing caution to the wind, and pushing their credit card limits to the max…or at least that is the goal.   And they certainly do not like going at it alone.

This Christmas is about Social Shopping. The e-tail world has been introduced to a new level of social interaction amongst customers. The wind blowing from social nets is hitting online stores, calling for online retailers to incorporate a social dimension to their online search!  Trust us, we’re not making this stuff up.

The results are in.  An E-tailing Group study reveals that 67% of online shoppers buy more when friends give a nod.  Customers enjoy getting approval on their purchases and knowing what’s popular.  A shopper searching today doesn’t want yesterday’s style—she wants what’s hot right now. With Social Shopping technology, you can help out your customers figure out what to buy and help out your business by knowing what to stock.  Even Santa needs a little help every now and then… Some tools that were introduced this year help retailers do just that – make shopping a social experience:

• Social Search Cloud provides customers with a cloud of popular searches, products, and brands of choice, revealing the community taste  immediately as you enter the online store.
• Social Sort, gives customers the ability to arrange search results by social feedback, including top sellers, ratings, reviews, popularity, and more.
• Share with Friends permits customers to refer products they find to their friends via e-mail and social networks. Shoppers sitting miles away can now shop together and exchange impressions at the click of a mouse.

Customers no longer feel they are shopping alone and gain confidence with their product choices, making that extra click to the checkout page. 

On the retailer side, advanced reporting lets the retailer get a head start on analyzing product popularity and identifying trend leaders, essentially  reading shopper vibes and voicing shopper buzz as it forms!

Of course, it goes without saying, none of the optimum online search essentials should be left behind.  As we noted in a previous blog of ours last year (155 Sleeps Away – Get Ready to Sell) there is a list of basic action items that an etailer should consider in the months leading to the Christmas season.  Just to jog your memory a bit, some of the mentioned items in the link above include sprucing up your UI, adding an auto complete solution to your search box,  suggesting cross-sell items based on your customers’ product choices, and adding more refinement options to further zero in your customers on the products they seek.  If your customers can’t find the products you are stocking, they cannot purchase them.

Lastly, it is important to remember, as mentioned in Latitude blog, that the success of online Christmas shopping will impact shoppers activity and likeliness to come back to your site.  So if you follow the checklist above and let Santa be social, you are in for a good new year of repeat business

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.

 

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.

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.

The Ultimate Purchase

Retailers have websites for numerous reasons.

Some stores exist only online. Others are in addition to their brick-and-mortars parent company.

Online stores, of all types, should ideally be built to sell. Products should be presented clearly, the site should be searchable, checkout should be painless.

The selling of products is a measurable matrix. You can see how many of each product was sold, how much revenue was generated, the conversion rate, average order size. Bottom-line sales, in other words, are easy to assess based on statistics.

But, as all retailers know, there is more to sales than exactly what is sold. Brand awareness, customer experience, the more esoteric dimensions, are also important.

In fact, as it turns out, particularly so in the world of online shopping.

A recent Neilson Online Study found that 80% buy from a store whose site they previously visited. That is a HUGE conversion rate.

The online/offline connection is especially driven by the fact that nowadays, many consumers do initial research on the web. They may ultimately make a purchase in a bricks-and-mortar store, but it is very likely that the final purchase will be based on information gathered online.

So aside from the fact that you want to be straight-up selling online, if you are indeed a multi-channel retailer, you may want to make sure that your web portal is as informative as possible, providing potential customers with all the types of information they desire, prior to making a purchase.

This includes up-to-date inventory, good product descriptions, interactivity and customer feedback functionality.

Your website is at minimal, another face to your business, if not your business in its entirety.