10 essential features of online retail that you’ve probably never noticed (but use every day)
We often discuss the routes in to online stores, but here are a few features that many online stores now have that help them maximise the value of each visit that you make to their store. Chances are, you've used most of these every time you shop but have never noticed.
Products are in the right places
Ok, so of course you would expect to find
this dress under "Home / Women's / Clothing / Tailoring" section of the Ted Baker website. It's a tailored dress – it’s under the “tailoring” section. But have you considered how it got there? The truth is, getting a product into the right place on a website is harder than it looks. A lot of product categorisation is manual, and as such it isn't always done accurately or consistently. As an example, the same dress is that it isn't in the "Home / Women's / Clothing / Dresses" section - regardless of whether that's technical constraint or poor online merchandising, it could have a huge impact on sales. Good product categorisation often means putting the product in more than one place. For example,
this coffee exists in the "Father's Day", "Food and Drink" and "NSFW" categories.
One product = one URL
Products may appear in more than one location according to the catalogue hierarchy. But for SEO, the product really needs to only appear under a single URL, so search engines know they're the same thing. The result is a URL in a format along these lines
http://www.johnlewis.com/microsoft-xbox-one-console/p775568 where the textual description is an arbitrary value that can be specified by the online merchandisers in order to maximise their SEO results. Handy hint: the important value is the ID, not the text – and you can usually substitute the text for anything you want. On some sites, this gives you an unmissable opportunity to write your own URLs – for example, http://www.johnlewis.com/can-someone-buy-this-for-jo/p775568
Each site has its own search engine – and it needs to be good.
When you say search, everyone says "Google". But product search on retail sites is a different thing altogether. Whether you're looking at a standard platform integration or a ground-up self-build, the site will certainly use a 3rd-party search engine. The big players at the moment seem to be Endeca and Solr.
One of the big decisions that an online retailer will have to make is what information goes into your search engine, and how often is it refreshed? More information means search indexing takes longer – this makes it more difficult or costly to update the index frequently so if your information changes frequently it’s usually better to retrieve this post-search. Refreshing the search index more often means caches are invalidated more often, which will slow down how quickly those impatient online shoppers can wait for their search results.
Search engines also control facets (filters)
The checkbox-list down the left hand side of the page that allows you to narrow your results is usually built by the search engine too. Working out what list of options to show you is not necessarily a simple task, and in most cases you need to select a top-level category in order to be shown the full list of facets. Under the hood, this often results in the search being run again but with the appropriate conditions applied, which is why it can sometimes feel like the facets don’t respond quite as quickly as you would expect. This is one of the big influencing factors in what information you put in your search index – it’s much more difficult to filter on information that’s not been indexed.
Ratings and reviews
Reviews are usually provided by a third party. Moderating the comments to weed out inappropriate content is a task that most online retailers are happy to leave to someone else. BazaarVoice, Reevoo and Feefo are examples of companies who provide this service. Reviews can have a huge impact on conversion as shoppers look for validation and reassurance that they’re not doing something ridiculous – product owners call this “social proof”.
Upsell and cross-sell options
As you browse the site, there’s a good chance the retailer is sending information about what products you look at, and what you go on to buy, to another 3rd party. Companies such as Certona and RichRelevance do some pretty sophisticated analysis on what these customer journeys are, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t get a few odd results every now and again. For example, this holdall on johnlewis.com tries to cross-sell you makeup....
What other people are buying or looking at
Similar to reviews and upsell/cross-sell suggestions, a lot of this is about tapping into our sheep-like mentality need for social proof in order to provide a little bit of a nudge, or simply some reassurance that there are other people who are doing the same as you. Whether it’s easyjet.com letting you know that there are only three tickets left at this price, or hotels.com telling you that other people are viewing the same hotel at the same time, this is all about letting you know that you’re not alone out there.
Remind you what you’ve been looking at
Everyone finds those adverts that follow you around the web kind of creepy, yes? And yet sites keep on doing it. But even without creepy third-party advertising, sites do well to remind you about the things you had been looking at. For example, I’d totally forgotten that I was looking at planning poker cards until I went to the amazon.com homepage and saw this:
One-part spooky web-stalking, one part helpful reminder. Thanks, Amazon - thamazon.
Have an affiliate programme
Affiliate sellers sellers such as amightygirl.com can generate a healthy income for sites like these, who may receive up to 10% of the sales they drive through to Amazon with their affiliate marketing programme. The example I showed there is clear and up-front about their relationship with Amazon. Other sites might not be so obvious. Affiliate programmes are a big topic in themselves so all I'm going to do here is mention that they exist!
Coming soon? Tailored sites just for you
One of the features that the biggest ecommerce platforms like to shout about is their ability to create “targeters”, which is the ability for a site to carry out some decision-making based on what it knows about the person who’s browsing. A basic example might be showing women’s clothing as the hero panel on the homepage if the site knows you are female (either based on your signed-in profile, or by your previous browsing history). Another example might be to show high-chairs if they know you bought a cot six months ago. In theory, these applications are really open-ended… e.g. default products from low to high if you’re always buying the cheap stuff, show blue tops before red in the sort order if your purchase history suggests that that’s what you always buy, automatically show more results per page if you’re on a fast internet connection. In practice, I haven’t seen as much of this as I would have expected – so if you’ve got some examples, please share!
