Web-based companies look to new technologies and new business models to grow.
Even a year after a troubling recession, the Web still thrives as a…
Multi-channel and pure-play e-tailers constantly struggle to make the online shopping experience more personal. Most companies use solutions to address returning visitors by name, and deliver personalized merchandise recommendations based on prior purchases or click-stream analysis.
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Paco Underhill, CEO of Envirosell and a renowned scholar of consumer culture, has a message for retailers: It’s no longer the early 20th century.
Too many retailers, he said in a recent interview with this blog, treat shoppers like they did back in the early boom days of department stores, before technology enabled consumers to easily compare prices and products elsewhere. Many retailers, he said, treat mall shopping and online shopping as entirely different things — as if their customers don’t actually do both.
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Hold up certain bottles of the sports drink Muscle Milk to a webcam, and something strange happens. Shaquille O’Neal suddenly pops out of the bottle on your computer screen, like some kind of virtual genie. The 7-foot basketball star, who now appears only a few inches tall, stands firmly on the bottle cap, even when you move the bottle around. It’s not a hologram — it’s all happening on the screen, but it looks as if tiny Shaq is right in front of you, cracking jokes and interacting with animations that pop up around him. At one point, he even jams on an animated electric guitar before appearing to dive back into the bottle with a splash.
More time spent shopping, good signage and a flow that encourages exploration all can help boost sales online, as well as in stores, says a new report.
With more consumers shopping online, as well as in bricks-and-mortar stores, it’s important for retailers to provide a consistent shopping experience, says a new report from retail consulting firm Envirosell and online recommendations technology vendor RichRelevance Inc. And many of the principles that apply to stores can be applied to the web as well, the report says.
The majority of consumers surveyed at bricks-and-mortar locations of Macy’s, The Gap, Best Buy and the Apple Store said they use the retailers’ web sites to help make their in-store purchase:
• 88% said they had shopped that retailer’s web site
• 75% said visiting the brand’s web site helps them to shop in-store
• 85% compared prices online
• 44% visited a competitor’s web site
• 26% will visit the retailer’s web site to continue shopping after leaving the store