E-Commerce Link : Humanizing the Web
Move beyond transactions to experiential shopping
May 2008 By Ken Burke
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- 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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