E-Commerce Link : Humanizing the Web
Move beyond transactions to experiential shopping
May 2008 By Ken Burke
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I believe the next fundamental shift in e-commerce is to create experiential shopping by humanizing the Web. This means using new techniques, technologies and capabilities to allow people to interact with each other, share ideas, and rate products and services. It even means allowing negative comments about your products and services to appear on your site!
By making the online experience more compelling through real and unfiltered human-to-human interaction, merchants build trust with customers, making them more likely to buy products and services and recommend the brand to others.
The Human Touch
Merchants have to communicate with customers early and often, not only through the transaction cycle, but also through ongoing community building and customer-to-customer communications. There are three primary ways online merchants can create experiential shopping.
1. Promote customer reviews, satisfaction, service and support. The functionality consumers want most on a retail Web site are customer ratings and reviews. According to the 2006 JupiterResearch study, Retail Marketing: Driving Sales Through Consumer-Created Content, 77 percent of online shoppers seek reviews before purchasing. What's more, a 2006 eVOC Insights study reveals 63 percent of online shoppers are more likely to buy from sites with ratings and reviews, and a 2007 ForeSee Results study finds reviews drive 21 percent higher purchase satisfaction and 18 percent higher loyalty.
Customer reviews let buyers rate products according to the criteria that matter most to them, which lends credibility to the site. Reviews may also help boost your search engine rankings, as spiders scan the text as relevant content.
Merchants sometimes balk at the prospect of allowing customers to define the benefits of a product-and to point out the negatives. While it may seem counterintuitive, negative reviews are essential to building credibility. According to a 2007 Forrester Research study of 4,000 reviews for 30 products on Amazon.com, negative reviews comprised just 16 percent of the total and were considered helpful by 50 percent of shoppers.
eBags.com, an online retailer of handbags, luggage, backpacks and travel accessories, not only uses reviews on its site, but also promotes the number of reviews as a major benefit.
When it comes to demonstrating satisfaction, service and support, it's key to reassure shoppers at every step of the purchase process:
• Address security concerns by using third-party certification logos such as VeriSign and HackerSafe, which can help boost conversion as much as 14 percent.
- Remove hurdles surrounding shipping and delivery by clearly posting time frames and costs-starting on the product page.
• Make customer service accessible from every page of the site by placing your toll-free phone number in the global header and prominently displaying links to live support and customer service pages.
Online shoe merchant Zappos.com does a superlative job demonstrating its service-oriented culture. The homepage alone highlights 18 trust elements, 14 of which are posted throughout the site. In addition to messaging about shipping, returns and support contacts, the homepage includes logos for the Better Business Bureau and BizRate.com, along with customer testimonials raving about positive site experiences.
2. Make your site a destination by appealing to people's personal interests with engaging content. By making your site a trusted source for expert information, you will create long-term emotional bonds with your customers.
However, you don't have to come up with all the content yourself. Instead, let your customers-who are, after all, the most knowledgeable experts about your brand-build community by contributing their own ideas, images and tips.
Burpee, a multichannel seed marketer, gives customers center stage on its site by displaying images of their handiwork. Robust customer reviews that list the reviewers' geographic regions, experience levels and garden types humanize product pages, while glossaries and regional plant guides provide further expert content to peruse.
3. Help people connect with each other using blogs, wikis, forums, chat rooms and other social-networking platforms. By placing your brand firmly within the Web 2.0 conversation, you'll become part of the word-of-mouth network-and attract new customers.
Whether you facilitate connections by hosting your own forums or by joining existing social-networking sites such as MySpace will depend on your customers. What kind of communication would benefit them, and are they already congregating somewhere online? It's key to let their behavior dictate the format your community efforts take; if you set up a bulletin board but your core customers prefer Facebook, you may waste resources building a virtual ghost town.
The Eastwood Co., a multichannel marketer of automotive tools and supplies, has created effective community features that cater to its core audience. Forums hosted on its site give auto enthusiasts a place to connect, while a blog chronicling restoration of a classic car provides a venue for sharing expertise and advice.
The Ultimate Goal
By using these three techniques to humanize the Web, online merchants improve the ability of shoppers to find the best product for their specific wants and needs. This is the definition of goal-oriented shopping.
User-contributed content and an emphasis on service put power in the hands of consumers. By reassuring them about common concerns, such as delivery and security, and providing credible content from both internal experts as well as other customers, shoppers can better find their way to relevant products and categories.
Jewelry retailer Helzberg Diamonds puts many of these best practices to work on its site. In addition to providing expert guidance in the form of a "Learning Guide" for the daunting task of selecting the right fine jewelry, it includes a category called "Our customers have spoken" that highlights top-rated items and solicits customer input on the cover of its printed catalog.
In addition to soliciting on-site contributions from shoppers, merchants also can take advantage of their customers' collective input in ways that are more implicit by tailoring the site experience to match their input. New technologies that leverage customer contributions include: 1) Social navigation: Customers' site search keywords and review text determine site navigation; 2) Social search: Customers can see what search terms others used to find items similar to keywords they've entered; and 3) Social merchandising: Shoppers see products using logic such as "Others who viewed this product also bought ..." or "Customers who bought this product also bought ..."
Using these tools, merchants can leverage customer behavior to give shoppers the most relevant experience, guiding them to categories and products in ways that make sense to real people with similar needs.
The Payoff
As transactional capabilities and best practices become commonplace, online retailers must focus on new ways to create a competitive advantage. By allowing customers to interact with each other, share ideas, and rate products and services, online retailers will offer them a more compelling experience and, in the end, reap the benefits of increased sales.
Ken Burke is founder and CEO of MarketLive, an e-commerce technology services provider based in Petaluma, Calif. He can be reached at ken@mmlive.com, or visit www.marketlive.com/sitereview.
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