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Interview in e-commerce turkey.com

John Tomlinson — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Jun.

Interview in e-commerce turkey.com

by John Tomlinson

I was interviewed for the e-commerce turkey.com magazine (May 2013 edition). I haven't seen a translation of the article but for those whose Turkish isn't up to speed, I have pasted the questions they sent and the answers I gave below.

What are the ways to increase the e-commerce website search?

Site search is about people, not technology: the quickest way to make it more effective is to build it around your customers not around your technical platform or your database.

Search is a huge part of the customer experience in most e-commerce sectors (although not all), and poor search – either poor because it doesn't find, or poor because it's hard to use – drives people crazy. You've got a few seconds only, if your search engine is tone-deaf or designed for machines not people, most of your customer will just walk away.

What are the most crucial mistakes generally made in onsite search?

If you go into a real store, and you just pick up an item, pay for it, and leave, you didn't engage much with that store. If you ask for help, suddenly you are engaging on a human level. You could be really disappointed or really pleased depending on how you are treated in that moment – your experience is a lot more extreme.

Search is similar, it's the customer proactively asking for help – they want to find something, they are asking for your help, they need to find the thing – that's the easy bit – but more than that they need a great experience that fits with your brand – the biggest mistake people make is forgetting that and making it only about finding and selling.

Imagine if you asked for help in a store and the person just walked over and handed you it without saying a word: sure, it's efficient, you did find the thing, but what kind of experience is that? Would you engage with that brand, would you become a brand advocate? Would you recommend the store to your social networks? Very unlikely.

How would you evaluate the development of e-commerce industry in Turkey? What are the contributions made by e-commerce conferences and fairs on the industry?

E-commerce in Turkey is like anywhere else, it's jumping ahead and making lots of progress but our customers are way ahead of us. Customer expectations are set by market leaders multiplied by science fiction. The industry needs to get a lot more flexible and a lot quicker in choosing what's worth investing in (and what isn't), and then turning that into reality – old development cycles are just too slow now.

This is exactly why conferences and fairs are so important. Things change so quickly, and no one can do everything, we need to partner with other suppliers and focus our efforts on what our customers value and where we can differentiate – and if we plan properly, a good conference can give us the knowledge, ideas and relationships that are vital to success in the e-commerce industry.

Launch of our new Site Search Best Practice series

Emma Miller — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 05:05:00 GMT

Jun.

Launch of our new Site Search Best Practice series

by Emma Miller

At Colbenson we like to share our expertise in e-commerce site search and so we have created a series of downloadable content called Site Search Best Practice Tips

This is the first in the series!

Top Ten Tips for Mobile Commerce Search

The mobile channel has challenges that affect how we must design the search experience, but it also has advantages. Designing a great mobile search experience isn't just about dealing with the negative, it's about maximizing the potential of the positive side of mobile.

The document is available here in our downloads section, and below via SlideShare.

Expressive Site Search at Zara.com

María Martín — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:45:00 GMT

Jun.

Expressive Site Search at Zara.com

by María Martín

If you need to find it before you can buy it ... then if you could find twice as much, wouldn't you buy twice as much?

We think so!

And we can prove it!

Zara has chosen the innovative search and navigation system SearchBroker Site Search for Zara.com to make the customer experience of finding a lot easier and a whole lot more fun!

SearchBroker speaks your language, knows what you want and what you like and helps you find it. The menu shrinks, the categories expand, it completes your words, intelligently understands things like colour, and makes you a part of this new and fun process.

Our clients put their customers first and they wanted to have the best search engine to help you easily navigate and find all your items in a way that feels comfortable and entertaining.Because we like to "go" shopping. Because when we want something, we want it now! and that even when we have all the time in the world, we love it when someone understands us and tells us: this is what you wanted, right?

Because SearchBroker knows how you speak, the words and phrases that customers use, it learns to understand you. It knows that - at least in the fashion sector - salmon is a colour and leopard a trend and that both can be perfectly combined in a shirt or bag.

Bet you can't wait to try it!

Expressive design in Site Search - my presentations from eCommerce Expo in Istanbul

John Tomlinson — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 06:55:00 GMT

Jun.

Expressive design in Site Search - my presentations from eCommerce Expo in Istanbul

by John Tomlinson

Last week I was honoured to be invited to speak at the eCommerce Expo in Istanbul, Turkey.

It was held at the beautiful Halic Conference Centre, on the warerfront of the Golden Horn, an inlet of the Bosphorus. A stunning location, and a great conference.

My presentation had two parts, the first bit was about steps we can take to make sure our site search builds connections to our customers - this is below in SlideShare:

At the end I launched into the second part of the presentation which expanded on the theme of making the Site Search into an emotional and expressive experience. I cannot include this second part for copyright reasons unfortunately.

If you were at the conference, please let me know what you thought in the comments thread below, and if you'd like any more information as to how we could help make your Site Search more expressive and effective, please Contact Us.

What are your customers?

John Tomlinson — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Jun.

What are your customers?

by John Tomlinson

We asked some of our customers a question:

We asked:

What are your customers?

They shrugged, and said that they didn't understand the question.

OK, this is because it's a stupid question, but look at it like this: so many online retailers have their e-commerce strategies centred around technology and analytics, yet most of the High Street retailers we know, talk about merchandising and the need to understand human behaviour to better maximize their sales.

The High Street deals with customers, yet as soon as they go online they transform into users.

Why is this?

What happens to these poor old High Street customers when they go online and turn into a user? Do they have their irrational human emotions replaced with logical neat little ones and zeros?

The only thing I can see that changes is the interface; from the personal B2C of the store, to a clunky T2C, where T is a technological barrier sitting between the user and the seller.

Treat them like this:

And they become like this:

So what is your customer?

A customer or a user?

When they walked into your physical store they were a customer, so what changed? The customer? Or was it the seller that changed? Many do, they transform from being experts in human behaviour, to being experts in technology and statistics.

This is a big deal.

Daniel Goleman, the Emotional Intelligence guy said this:

[H]ow your employees interact with your customers determines how the customer will feel about your company.

You want your employees to be using their emotional intelligence to get and stay in an upbeat, empathic space, and to relate to your customers from that state ... the most effective employees were adept at emotional intelligence competencies like emotional self-management ... empathy ... and collaboration.

Why doesn't this apply online?

I think it does.

Almost all top tips about instore merchandising are equally applicable - at least in a general sense - to the online experience.

Here are main themes from the science of merchandising:

Understand you customer, who they are, why they shop in your store and how they make purchase decisions.
Create strongly visual environments that use light and colour.
Stimulate more of the senses to engage the customer: music, scents, temperature, taste - whatever is appropriate to create a fully engaging atmosphere that fits with the brand.
Change things around, keep things looking fresh and new. People respond to change and difference, our brains learn to ignore the background, so keep your merchandise in the foreground.
Keep it dynamic by using movement where possible.
Create flows and journeys, visiting a store is an experience.
Creating connections. This is partly between your products to encourage cross-selling, but also about creating connections between the customer and the products: show them how to use it, how it would look in their own home, make it personal.

(Sources below).

This little listis just scratching the surface of merchandising, but they all talk about the importance of treating customers as people, not as users or statistics. It's about understanding them, creating the right environments, engaging their senses, keeping things interesting ... all of this is just as applicable online and it is in-store.

So to answer the question what is your customer?

Your customer is a person.

Sources:

Top tips for visual merchandising on Visual Merchandiser, Visual Merchandising
Visual merchandising experts reveal top tips for 2013 on Whisky Bravo Charlie
A Merchandising Top Ten List - Best Practices Made Simple by Ali Levy on Snowsports Industries
Top 12 Visual Merchandising Ideas by Rick Segel
Online Merchandising Tips by Lauren Freedman on Marketing Sherpa
Top tips for store merchandising from Shopworks
More Than 20 Tips That Move Inventory on Profits Plus

The evolution of online sales toward empathy and emotions

Ángel Maldonado — Wed, 29 May 2013 05:05:00 GMT

May.

The evolution of online sales toward empathy and emotions

by Ángel Maldonado

Charles Darwin is best known for his work "On the Origin of Species" (1859) and not for "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" (1872) - but it is in this less well-known book where Darwin analyzed the wealth of expressions and gestures in the animal kingdom and the expressive and gestural nature of humans.

It is this extraordinary ability to express our emotions and reactions through a unique set of universally-understood gestures and expressions that distinguishes us from other animals.

Today in the digital world, we frustrate and limit all of our rich and varied expressive ability. This is why we see the proliferation of emoticons and images in mobile messaging apps and social networks such as Whatsapp, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

However, when we have to buy online we are painfully dumb and feel misunderstood in what becomes a stressful and unpleasant experience while buying or purchasing goods or services online. At Colbenson, we believe that first and foremost, online shopping should be a pleasant process, from the first search for a product to the last click when completing the transaction.

Our favorite brands and products, our favourite restaurants or the famous people we most identify with, these are not our favorites just because of the list of attributes they have, but more for the way they make us feel, the way they interact with our emotions.

Users, buyers, visitors, or customers as we like to call them, are all people, people who make decisions based on emotions and yet when we have to buy online our emotional nature is ignored and that means that it becomes a negative and frustrating experience.

Fortunately this is changing.

The online shopping experience is, as Darwin would put it, evolving.

Online stores are trying to build empathy into the experience, using small elements of expression, designing components that respond to our actions, creating a more human and enjoyable experience.

Our product, SearchBroker Site Search (see the search in online shops such as zara.com, mango.com or casadellibro.com) can understand the context of the words the customer uses based on analysis of social data, and then reacts to the customer's choices with expressive movement, simple changes that help to turn a cold technical process into something more expressive, and therefore more human.

For example there is a huge variety of types of trousers that customers search for, yet they tend to simply search the word "trousers" without clarifying if they want shorts, skinny or clip.

Our new algorithms (called empathic) analyze social media conversations, understanding what product URLs are being shared, and then predicts what kind of trousers are more likely to be interesting at that moment in time. This emulates a process of empathy that can happen in a physical store, if we talk to the sales staff, they will have this empathy and contextual understanding and will be better able to help us.

Similarly we are gradually seeing expressive design elements on more and more websites, where for example, a search box expands when clicked, a menu extends progressively rather suddenly appearing, a button to add to the cart or "buy" moves at the same time and with the same rate as the cart indicating a correlation and a visual effect that provides us with a clear feeling about what is happening. Each user action is linked to an online reaction that is designed to be human and expressive.

The future of online store design is a humanized future, a future where design is about the emotions of users, a future where the software has to empathize with what ultimately makes us people, which is nothing but our emotional nature.

Contact us if you want to discuss how to build expressive design into your customer search experience, or how hour empathetic search approach can help drive up your online conversion rates.

What makes a successful Site Search

Ángel Maldonado — Mon, 27 May 2013 05:05:00 GMT

May.

What makes a successful Site Search

by Ángel Maldonado

If your idea of success is taking your ecommerce business to the top, then that's exactly the kind of attitude you need to have a successful Site Search.

Some would tell you that you need to think technology first; that you need a highly efficient Auto-Complete feature, Parametric Refinement, Spellcheck, Highlight-Context Summaries, results ordered by popularity/clicks, campaign management, cross-selling features, etc.

If you are global or are planning on becoming so, then some will tell you that you need multi-language technology, non-semantic dependencies, multi-bite handling, etc.

If you are keen on site performance some will tell you that speed is key regardless of volume, and rich Auto-Completes must respond within 100ms, complex query filters must run instantly and Near Real Time analytics is a must.

Well, we agree. All those aspects obviously have to be there, by default, that's the minumum standard you'd expect with a professional e-commerce search, no need to argue with that. To achieve the highest ratios of findability and conversion through Site Search you need to find the perfect combination of all those rational technical aspects.

However, succeeding with excellence takes a lot more than just that.

Success is imagination, out-the-box thinking, counter-intuitive paths to innovation, creativity, proactive reasoning that together will make your online store a different and unique experience for your customers. Differentiation is the strategy.

You choose ...

You can have a standard Site Search product that has the same features expressed in the same way as your competitors who mostly sell the same products, or you can have a unique, smooth, cool and joyful findability experience designed for people.

A successful Site Search is all about bottom-up features and front engineering design, it's about understanding how your audience and market express themselves through the only place on your online store where they can say speak freely and be proactive: the Search Box.

An exceptional Site Search is about understanding your customers and their motivations when searching. Above all it's about working with their emotional responses, not in spite of them. It's about touching on what makes them people, their capacity to express and be responsive to expressions.

Check out our latest developments on places like waeplus.com, zara.com (currently in Spanish and Chinese only) or lavinia.fr

SearchBroker: Site Search designed for People.

The future of Site Search is neither Site nor Search. The future is Empathy

Ángel Maldonado — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:02:00 GMT

May.

The future of Site Search is neither Site nor Search. The future is Empathy

by Ángel Maldonado

I'm just coming back from Ecommerce Expo in Manchester and I could not be happier and more excited. The ecommerce Market is massive and the value and differentiation that SearchBroker delivers is phenomenal.

Every Expo we attend we get more and more Ecommerce managers, digital strategist, online marketing managers and the like popping by our stand committed to finding a solution to accumulated frustrations due to poor Site Search systems and solutions, no matter what their underlying technology is.

Buying online is still as today for most online stores a real pain, customers struggle. When we decide that we have to do our shopping online we go through a moment of stress. And I say that is wrong. We have to aim for a fun and joyful buying experience, we have to deliver our products online smoothly and nicely, we have to be cool.

When it comes to Site Search, the pain and the struggle are common feelings. Then online stores managers attempt to improve by feature and that is…."I should have an Auto-Complete function in here"…"I should have Parametrics and Highlight there"…And that reasoning, that conventional, intuitive thinking is just what you should not do. Ever.

Let's forget about all the rational aspects, all the technical features, all the possible things that one can do on Site Search and lets just think that we are dealing with PEOPLE, people just like you and me, people that are defined by the fundamental fact of being emotional, being empathetic beings that make decisions based on emotions and emotions only, people that like things not just because what these things are but because the way these things interact with their emotions, let's design a finding process that is conceived to work with our emotional and expressive nature and then turn a cold and frustrating Site Search experience into an Emotionally intelligent and Empathetic process.

That is what our Empathy Project is all about (on its functional side of things) and that is the future of Site Search, simply said the future is connecting People with Products with Empathetic means such as expressive and motion design.

Check out the things we are doing on places like Zara (as of today Monday 20th May on Spanish and Chinese versions only, coming in the next few days worldwide), WAE+ or Lavinia (in French).

The future is bright if we focus on designing for what makes us people.

All the photos here on Flickr.

eCommerce Expo Turkey: we're going to Istanbul!

Emma Miller — Tue, 14 May 2013 07:58:00 GMT

May.

eCommerce Expo Turkey: we're going to Istanbul!

by Emma Miller

We have been invited to speak at the eCommerce Expo in Turkey later this month!

The event takes place at Halic Congress Center (Pera Building) in Istanbul on Friday 31st May 31st.

Making connections: how your site search can drive your sales or drive your customer away.

This session is about the important role that your onsite search plays in the customer experience: about how it can drive up your conversion rates and sales, or how it can drive your customers away and onto the websites of your competitors.

To get site search right, it needs to be customer-centric. It can't be just a technical process, a cold transaction that fails to engage; it needs to be a fully-integrated part of the customer experience.

In this session John Tomlinson, COO of onsite search experts Colbenson, will show you how to turn your search engine into a customer-centric sales engine, and how to avoid the mistakes that drive your customers away.

See here for the full programme.

See here for more information on our Events page.

How to turn your offline business into an online success

John Tomlinson — Thu, 09 May 2013 05:04:00 GMT

May.

How to turn your offline business into an online success

by John Tomlinson

There are zillions of articles and blog posts with top tips for businesses wishing to succeed online, so I thought I'd add one more.

I'm imagining the audience for this to be businesses that are not historically or culturally online organisations - businesses that have succeeded in the non-digital world for years - but who know that they need to understand how to capture the value of the internet for their sector, or they'll get left way behind.

I'm also focussing in this post on the more strategic aspects. In a future post I'll talk more about the detail.

First, the good news. It's not too late.

Yet.

Most businesses are still not very good at this whole online thing, but that is changing fast ...

Building an online strategy

Identify your niche

Most offline businesses have a legacy customer base that means that they probably don't often think too much about how to define their niche and maximize its potential. Online is different, competition comes from all directions and in most cases it's a buyer's market where supply vastly outstrips demand (see here for our post about The Best Online Shopping Experiences: Customer 3.0 and How To Succes With Customer 3.0).

This means that it's much more important to define exactly what you do and who your target customers are, so much so that your customers know that you are of interest to them.

Goecart say:

The average time spent by an Internet user on a web page is a mere 46 seconds. Within these 46 seconds an online business needs to attract the customer, make a compelling proposition and close the deal.

(Source)

On the internet, it's not about location, and it's not just about price. On the Internet, differentiation is vital and this must be built around a well-understood customer segment.

(See here for our post about How You Can Win With Niche Marketing and Is Niche Marketing Right For You?)

Take is seriously

Going online means working differently - it may mean challenging all corners of your business, from the supply-chain to the revenue model, from marketing to customer service ... this whole going online thing needs to be treated as a separate change management project.

It will depend on the size of your operation, your niche and just how much of your business activity you want to stick online, but this project could range from something as simple as a flat webpage with your phone number, email and opening times that you can rattle off in an afternoon, to a whole new way of doing business that entirely transforms your organisation.

The point is that it needs to be managed as a coherent single change management project.

Differentiate

Don't just replicate your offline business online; most of the time that will be missing the whole point of the internet, or worse, you'll be in danger of being boring.

Do a thorough external analysis. Look at your customers, observe their behaviour and listen to them, what are they expecting? Look at your competitors, not just in your local market but globally, what are they doing? Look at the wider sector, what are people doing there? Look at your suppliers, what are they doing? Are there substitute products or services that are grabbing the customer's attention?

Emma Hughes of bertieandjack.co.uk says:

Above all, we live by 'Know your customer. Live, breathe your target audience.' We ask them questions, make conversation, understand what they like/don't like and react to this where appropriate.

The good news is that being online makes this easier. Blabus, in this Washington Post article, says:

integrating tools like Google Analytics and Facebook, I get great insight into who my customers are, what they want and where they are shopping from, giving me greater visibility into how I market my products.

Sometimes the opportunities of being online won't be obvious, Rebecca of TheHandmadeEmporium.com, says

Using the internet, we have revolutionised how we are seen and advertise to our customers. It has also let us ... network with talented people from across the UK. Before, we would only see people locally using our shop space, but the internet has opened us up to anyone ... The internet has enabled us to source fantastic gifts, take orders and payments online at the click of a button, post them out incredibly fast all across the world and pass on the savings to our customers.

And as GoeCart say:

Be different (but not vague) in order to create a positive appeal in the minds of your customers for achieving esuccess.

The key is defining the right kind of online presence that allows you to differentiate yourself and is aligned to your sector's KPIs.

Focus

The pace of change is far faster online than offline, and there are new tools, ideas, fads and failures every two minutes. It's important to focus on what will add value in your particular sector, and not try to do everything.

This means not just deciding what to do, but also deciding what not to do.

For example, you may not need to bother with Instagram or Pinterest, or even Facebook, but if you are a visually creative B2C company, these channels will be fundamental. If you're selling building materials to the construction trade, you may be better off creating a mobile app so onsite workers can order extra supplies as and when they need them.

The key here is to choose the right channels and tools for your business, don't be distracted with shiny new stuff of questionable value.

Coordinate

Your customers will jump across all of your channels, so it's essential that they offer a holistic customer experience and feel joined-up.

You can start with a simple website to which you incrementally add functionality and make channel-responsive (i.e. for tablets and mobiles), but ensure that the whole thing hangs together, including social media channels.

Measure

Just like any other project and any other business expense, ensure you set objectives and measure how the whole thing is performing.

This is not as easy as it sounds.

It's not always easy to understand exactly what revenue came from which activity. The customer often has multiple touchpoints in their journey, and even if the final sale is, for example, on the website, this doesn't mean they didn't come into your physical store to try things on for size, check out your site via their mobile and hear about an offer via Twitter ...

Also, there is the issue of one channel "cannabilising" another, but this is the wrong way to look at channel cannablisation. As Stephen Sumner said at the eCommerce NG event in Leeds last month:

It's not cannibalisation, it's customer retention.

In other words, you should view customers that jump from one of your channels to another as customers retained, customers that might have jumped to a competitor.

This all means that measurement must be customer-centric, not technology-centric.

Don't sit still

Things change so fast that it's vital to keep challenging what you're doing and how you're doing it. This doesn't mean major overhauls, it means continuous customer-centric improvement informed by thorough external analysis.

To borrow again from GoeCart:

To err is human, but failing to cover yourself and allowing your competitors to exploit your loopholes, is suicidal ...

and (although true of everything, not just online business):

Always have an unbiased assessment of your online business and be prepared to spot your mistakes.

In a future post I will collate more detailed advice about online success, in the meantime here's a few links to some of the better articles I've seen:

The best one is GoeCart's 10 Tips for Online Business Success
Newshub: Taking your business online
BT: Digitising your business
Entrepreneur: Various resources on building an online business
Washington Post article: Small business owners share their top tips for taking a company online
From the blog of Dragos Roua: a bit out of date, but 77 Business Tips For An Online Entrepreneur has some great advice
Less useful, but still interesting is from Forbes: Barbara Corcoran's Top 12 Tips For Small-Business Owners

Next stop Manchester: eCommerce Expo

Emma Miller — Tue, 07 May 2013 05:05:00 GMT

May.

Next stop Manchester: eCommerce Expo

by Emma Miller

Only 8 days till we next get let out, this time in Manchester for the eCommerce Expo being held at the lovely Manchester Central exhbition space!

It's great to be up north, it's a totally different atmosphere than the London shows. We're really looking forward to demo-ing SearchBroker Site Search on our stand and doing our presentation on how expressive design in the search experience can make a real impact on bottom line performance.

Our stand is 315, right by the cafe area, next to the eCommerce Theatre.

Our presentation is in the eCommerce Theatre at 10am, and is entitled "Customer engagement and findability: how to make your site search into an emotional shopping experience".

For more information, see our eCommerce Expo (Manchester) page in the Events section of the site.

My presentation at Internet World: Expressive elements in Findability that match Emotions

Ángel Maldonado — Thu, 02 May 2013 05:05:00 GMT

May.

My presentation at Internet World: Expressive elements in Findability that match Emotions

by Ángel Maldonado

It was a lot of fun to present at Internet World, the first time we've been to this show!

I am thankful to Internet World for having selected our seminar, and especially delighted with the audience and how relevant and interesting this idea of adding expression and emotion to the process of finding products online turns out to be.

We have spent over 10 years working on information retrieval projects, Site Search, Enterprise Search and Findability and throughout all of these projects we have come across highly complex technical challenges, formats, encodings, performances, architectures and all other rational challenges of building a great search engine.

However, we have realized after all these years and experiences, that all of those technical aspects, as critical as they are, don't make the big difference, and our fundamental goal of providing excellence does not depend on them.

All those rational aspects obscure the fact that when we develop a Site Search system, we develop it for people, people just like you and me, real human beings, and what defines us as people is the fact that we are driven by emotions.

So we realized that emotions are not given their deserved role at the centre of the experience design, they are pushed to the back and we continue to experience highly frustrating "inhuman" interfaces that force us to go through horrible experiences seemingly designed to stress us out, things like results pages that we struggle to understand, tone-deaf search engines that don't seem to listen to us ... this all drives us crazy and we get really annoyed when buying online. Sure, those systems are technically sound and efficient, but when it comes to dealing with human emotions, those systems fail.

At SearchBroker we have come to realize that, and that is the reason why our interfaces are what we call "expressive", meaning that they show elements of expression and motion that are fun to use, just tiny elements of smoothness, icons rather than words, logos rather than strings of texts, little reactions that respond to clicks and a joyful findability experience that the person who uses it feels its cool, fun and something to remember because it's not just about the product itself, it's about the experience of finding it and how that interacts with our emotions.

We are human because we are expressive and we respond to emotions, we are the animal with by far the richest catalogue of expressions and body language. Spoken language just came on top of this expressive and responsive ability.

A desktop is certainly a cold environment where the lack of sensual stimulation makes the process of interaction very challenging, but not impossible. Let's add some elements of expression, motion, contraction of menus, expansion of search boxes, re-arrangements of results with smoothness, gradual changes of color around clicks, same space data replacements, icons, emoticons, and any design element that match our capacity to respond to them as people.

Our favorite restaurant, place, product, device, website, people, are our favorites not because of what they are but because of the way they interact with our emotions, how they make us feel and that, when it comes to desktop and mobile, happens with empathy and expression.

That is what our Empathy Project is all about - making site search more human, emotional and engaging.

When we've got this right with our customers, we've seen onsite findability jump up.

This is the foundation of conversion, but it's also the foundation of building long-term relationships with your customers so they not only buy today, they come back tomorrow and recommend the site to their friends.

Contact me if you want to chat about how to make your online customer search experience into an expressive and human experience.

(See all the photos here)

Feedback and photos from eCommerce NG

John Tomlinson — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 06:05:00 GMT

Apr.

Feedback and photos from eCommerce NG

by John Tomlinson

The risk you take when you host an event in a gallery is the theme of the exhibition might not fit neatly with the event you're holding.

Fortunately, not even the guy with the gun to his head could detract from what was a really successful event.

Maximize the potential of mobile commerce

Many thanks to all those who attended the "Maximize the potential of mobile commerce" event, congratulations to the winner of the fabulous prize, and thanks to everyone for all your feedback.

The headline feedback numbers were very positive about the quality of the content of the event, with everyone Agreeing or Strongly Agreeing with the four quality measures.

The photos from the day are available here on Flickr (more will be added later from the White Cloth Gallery's own photographer).

The presentations are available here on SlideShare.

Excellence and innovation in eCommerce

Over the coming weeks we will be improving the eCommerce NG sections of the website as we work toward developing future events.

Ideas we have for upcoming events include:

How can eCommerce capture the power of play
Maximize the potential of social commerce
Turning eCommerce into green commerce
Designing the right customer search experience

Let us know what you think - is this the kind of thing you'd be interested in? Do you have other ideas for events?

If you would like to be on the mailing list for future eCommerce NG events, please Contact Us.

SearchBroker powers the new product search on Lavinia.fr

Borja Santaolalla — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 06:29:00 GMT

Apr.

SearchBroker powers the new product search on Lavinia.fr

by Borja Santaolalla

We are pleased to announce that Lavinia, one of the leading wine retailers in Europe, has selected SearchBroker Site Search to be their site search engine, powering content findability in three different languages and countries (France, Switzerland and Spain).

SearchBroker will measure, adapt and respond to customer intentions in an empathetic way, empowering the online customer to make it easy for them to find what they're looking for.

Designed on customer behaviour and wine search patterns, SearchBroker adds powerful search and product recommendation features in order to make buying wine an enjoyable experience.

The search box will intelligently recognise the name of a region, Bodega or type of varietal, and suggest the best-fit product for the customer. SearchBroker has been trained like a corporate salesperson, using a dynamic ranking feature that learns by considering variables such as monthly sales, stock availability, and social rating for product recommendation. Search will constantly adapt to customer expectations and behave like a true sommelier!

SearchBroker takes Site Search to a new level by integrating products and user behaviours in an empathetic, friendly and adaptive way, becoming the live hub that reduces the distance between buyers and products.

You can go and see it live in http://www.lavinia.fr

Raise your glasses, cheers!

Top Ten Tips for Mobile Commerce Search

John Tomlinson — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 05:36:00 GMT

Apr.

Top Ten Tips for Mobile Commerce Search

by John Tomlinson

Mobile commerce is growing fast.

Not just for making purchase decisions, but for research, recommendations and social influence too.

Customer expectations are way ahead of what most e-Commerce providers are doing, and their patience wears thin with sites that aren't suited to the mobile interface or have horribly slow and clunky search tools that are great for the desktop, but that grind to a halt on a mobile.

The smartphone mobile channel has three main challenges that affect how we must design the search experience:

The small screen: the "above the fold" problem is even more acute with so little space on the screen to display what the customer is looking for.
Touch-screen controls: we don't have precision clicking, buttons and controls need to be the size of fingertips.
Bandwidth: most smartphone web access is via a mobile signal which can be painfully slow.

But the mobile channel also has some advantages. Most of all it is free of the physical constraints of other channels, and this means it has opportunities that other channels cannot offer.

Here are our top ten tips for designing your mobile channel search:

Start with the customer: Watch how your customers use the search function, look at the words and phrases they use - including the mistakes they make. Understanding their behaviour is even more important in mobile than in other channels.
Visible search box. Mobile users often expect to have to search within a site to find the right content, so make it easy to find the search box, even when they have scrolled down the front page content. If necessary, have multiple search boxes.
Based on your customer analytics, pick just a few top searches to have already loaded into the code of the main page. This means your AutoComplete will be able to offer those suggestions as soon as the customer types without you having to perform a search. This greatly speeds up the experience.
Use the customer analytics to understand the common mistakes and shortcuts, these are even more common on mobiles! Make sure you have these associated with the right content. Customer patience is much thinner on the mobile channel!
Simple AutoComplete. Don't overcomplicate how the autocomplete function works. In general, linking to content rather than search results is preferred, but often on mobile this isn't the case. The extra step of having to see a search results page can be the better option as it keeps the user more in control of their experience.
Chunky controls. Touch screen means that interfaces need to work with fingers not mouse clicks. Simple and clear controls make the user experience smoother, and keep different functions apart to minimize people pressing the wrong button.
Simple results pages. What you need to include will vary by sector, but in general, keep things as simple as you can and strip out unnecessary images and functionality.
Always learn. Make sure your search engine is a learning engine, always adjusting the content and suggestions it displays according to user behaviour. Search is dynamic, because it's driven by customers, so your system must be able to learn, adapt and predict what your customers are going to do next.
Make it easy to share via social media. The mobile channels are the most effective for recommendations and social sharing, so make it easy for people to share what they find with their social networks.
Look for the mobile advantage. Mobile is not stuck to one location, this means there are loads of opportunities to innovate: searches like "is there a store near me?" can be really effective, or "shoes like these" using the camera to search for shoes of a similar style.

Mobile is a great challenge but an even greater opportunity, and with customers often way ahead of retailers, the pressure is on to get an effective channel that delivers for customers.

Goodbye Google Reader

John Tomlinson — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Apr.

Goodbye Google Reader

by John Tomlinson

Google's clunky RSS feed aggregator is going to be switched off in July as the search giants look to focus on doing less stuff better.

People are not happy.

There have been petitions with thousands of signatures trying to fight the demise of what is little more than a simple list of articles with barely any other useful functionality.

I will miss it – but only because I use it, not because it's actually any good. With the sheer quantity of content on the internet, having curation tools is going to become increasingly part of the way we engage with the web – and this is why I think Google are wrong to abandon Reader.

Their reasoning is sensible:

as a company we're pouring all of our energy into fewer products

(Source)

But I think Reader should have fallen on the other side of the line. It's rubbish, yes, but it needn't be.

What I want is:

A way to filter the web into distinct areas of interest that don't get in each other's way.
A way to pick the quality wheat from the all-too-abundant rubbishy chaff.
A way to explore and discover new and similar content.
… but not to feel overwhelmed by too much quantity.
To be exposed to intelligent content that I don't agree with – I want the internet to broaden my horizons, not reinforce what I think anyway.
A way to interact through sharing, comments or whatever.
An experience that makes me feel empowered not restricted.

It's this last one that might be the biggest challenge.

Using Google+, for example, I feel like I'm wearing boxing gloves and blinkers. It all feels so clumsy, like I'm being shoved into blind corners I didn't want to go in. I feel anything but empowered.

The biggest challenge of search

It's not an easy balance to strike: curate but not control, expose but not overwhelm ... but this is exactly the challenge of search - how do you get the the right stuff in front of the customer? This means decided not only what to show, but also what not to show.

You'd think that this challenge would be meat and drink to Google.

One day someone will get that sort of interface right, and then clunky nonsense like Google Reader will be a thing of the past.

Meteor Electrical choose SearchBroker Site Search DataStation!

Emma Miller — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 05:05:00 GMT

Apr.

Meteor Electrical choose SearchBroker Site Search DataStation!

by Emma Miller

We're pleased to announce that leading online electrical retailer Meteor Electrical have chosen SearchBroker Site Search for their online store.

Meteor Electrical are based in Northern Ireland, and have been around in the electrical goods trade for many years. Their focus on innovation and excellence chimes perfectly with our own brand values and so we are really looking forward to working with them over the next few weeks to implement SearchBroker's DataStation. This is an analytics suite that lets you take control of the site search engine and understand how it performs and how your customers engage and interact with your site. This is an essential prerequisite for devising the right customer search experience for the business.

Eoin Conway , Operations Manager at Meteor Electrical, said "We are always looking for innovative ways to build on our great customer service and trademark reliability, and investing in site search is an essential part of that"

Each ecommerce sub-sector has its own challenges and different ways that customers will engage with the site. Typically in the electrical goods sector, people search for categories like "TV" or "Printer" and then want to refine by brand names or particular sub-categories - the search engine needs to know this in order to offer the right results and the right functionality.

"This means we have to design the customer journey based on how the customers search", says Conway, "We have to show we understand them and we want the search experience to exceed their expectations as much as any other part of our service"

Angel Maldonado, CEO of SearchBroker, agrees: "The challenge of getting search right isn't just technical, it's emotional. It's about customers, real people, and how they want to make connections to your site content. You can't just download a few lines of code and expect a great customer experience to pop out!"

And it doesn't stop there.

Maldonado adds "the end of the customer journey isn't a sale, it's a relationship. We want the customer to enjoy the search process, and go away wanting to come back and wanting to recommend the site to their friends and their social network"

That's the interesting part about site search. It's not just repetitive copy-pasting of code, it's working together with online businesses that want to create great customer experiences. We're really looking forward to doing just that with Meteor Electrical.

For more information on implementing SearchBroker DataStation in your business, please Contact Us.

Interview: Customers don't tend to shop via mobile because of the poor user experience

John Tomlinson — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Apr.

Interview: Customers don't tend to shop via mobile because of the poor user experience

by John Tomlinson

This is the third and final interview with the presenters at the Maximize the Potential of Mobile Commerce event in Leeds this week (Friday April 19th - see here for more details).

In this interview we discuss the role of mobile commerce with Andrew Lee, Director of Reevoo, leading social commerce providers. Andrew offers a different perspective as mobile is the most social of all e-commerce channels and its potential is perhaps greatest in the sphere of social influence and recommendations is perhaps.

Previous interview:

Maximize the potential of mobile commerce

What makes mobile different from other e-commerce channels?

The main difference of the mobile channel is that it relies in its ubiquitousness.

Through a mobile device a customer can access an e-commerce site at anytime on the go, while on the bus, in the office or even at home.

As stated in a research by The Future Company "the ‘e' in ecommerce no longer means electronic, it means everywhere" and with the advent of Internet-enabled mobile devices this is becoming a reality.

Mobile is becoming more and more important in e-commerce, but it's often the least engaging channel for customers. How are retailers going to address this challenge?

People use their mobile devices for many different purposes: to play, to work, be informed, to engage with friends. They don't tend to shop via mobile mainly because of the poor user experience.

For some businesses being on a mobile platform means simply adapting the website content to a smaller screen rather then finding a way to engage with their customer to give them new and compelling content.

For other retailers a mobile device is a different channel, that might have some overlaps with the existing ones, but that has its own peculiarities.

Needless to say the latter is in the best position to succeed. A great example is the QR-code store created by Tesco in Korea where people can shop via mobile while in the subway station.

Tesco's 2D Homeplus supermarket on Seoul subway

Tablet and smartphones are two sub-channels of what gets "mobile commerce", in what was do these differ?

The first and foremost difference between the two is their size. Interestingly, though, we recently saw a race from manufacturer towards large screen smartphone after years of miniaturization and, at the same time, smaller tablets were launched in order to make them more portable.

It is hard to say if they will eventually converge. In the recent years we saw new form factor succeed in the market and still we have not seen the end of the device innovation.

Undoubtedly tablets created a new mobile sub-channel with lots of opportunities still to be taken.

What mistakes do you see most often in mobile commerce?

As I said before, for many businesses mobile e-Commerce is simply their current shopping website adapted to mobile devices rather than a distinct shopping channel with purposely designed content and applications.

They need to think carefully about what is the "mobile journey" of the consumer, from start to purchase, make it engaging and simple at the same time. And they need to test the user experience on multiple devices, with different screen sizes and operating systems.

Customer expectations are increasingly ahead of the pack in e-commerce, what can retailers do to get out in front?

Businesses need to create a unified customer experience whether the purchase journey starts: online, offline, in store or via a mobile device. Thanks to this omni-channel approach they can engage with customers at multiple touchpoints and create new selling opportunities, while maximizing ROI.

What do you see as the biggest challenge is mobile commerce for 2013 and beyond?

One of the main problems will be the extreme fragmentation of the mobile market: dumb phones vs smartphones, Android in its different releases against iOS, screens from 3,5" up to 10".

This will require retailer to pay an even greater attention to their customers and to their mobile behavior.

Hear Andrew speak at the Maximize the Potential of Mobile Commerce event. There are a few places left, available first come, first served. Contact us to reserve a place.

How to make your site search into an emotional shopping experience

Emma Miller — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 07:19:00 GMT

Apr.

How to make your site search into an emotional shopping experience

by Emma Miller

The busy Spring Expo season continues with Internet World in London in April!

We have been invited to speak on Thursday 25th April at 14:15 in the eCommerce World section of the show.

We'll be talking about how site search is an integral part of the online customer experience, especially on the mobile smartphone and tablet channels.

When people search, it's a higher level of engagement because it's proactive. They are inputting their own words into the website and personalising their experience. This means that it's a great opportunity but also a great risk. It's like when you ask for help in a store instead of just looking yourself, suddenly how you feel about that store is tied up with how you are treated at that moment - a great response, and you're satisfaction levels soar, a poor response and they plummet.

Site search is the same - and SearchBroker is about trying to give the customer a great human experience that will increase their brand loyalty, improve conversion and encourage the customer to create positive influence through their social network.

Here's the blurb:

Customer engagement and findability: how to make your site search into an emotional shopping experience

Whether you call them people, customers, or consumers, they are all emotional and impulse driven. This talk uses real-world case studies to show how to make the online "shopping" process a human experience designed to lead your customers to your products and get them to become loyal satisfied customers.

(Here's the link)

About the presentation, Angel said "The main challenge for ecommerce going forward is how to make the customer journey into something that's engaging and enjoyable, something emotional and human", and with the expontential rise in mobile channels, this is especially challenging, "the mobile channels are getting more and more important, and it's not just about converting a transactional sale, it's about creating a relationship with a loyal customer".

You can register for the event here.

Interview: mobile channel is the game-changing opportunity to disrupt the market

John Tomlinson — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 06:45:00 GMT

Apr.

Interview: mobile channel is the game-changing opportunity to disrupt the market

by John Tomlinson

This is the second in our series of interviews with the presenters at the Maximize the Potential of Mobile Commerce event (April 19th in Leeds, see here for more details).

In this interview we discuss mobile commerce with the UK's leading Professor of Retail Innovation, Professor Cathy Barnes.

Click here for the previous interview with experienced ecommerce expert Stephen Sumner.

Maximize the potential of mobile commerce

What makes mobile different from other e-commerce channels?

The difference about mobile is the sense of place, and I mean this in an almost architectural sense. Mobile means you can access this retail channel anywhere, anytime and therefore you can be in all sorts of places and psychological states. You could be in a competitor store, in the actual physical store, on the beach in the Maldives (assuming they have WiFi), and you could be in a rush, or frustrated, or really positive and happy ... all of this means that there is a lot more opportunity open to the mobile channel because it doesn't have the constraints of the other channels.

Also, mobile could become the channel integrator. Because it's almost a hybrid between online and in-store, I can actually see mobile being the main way of actually integrating the real and virtual channels.

How we do this is a whole different matter, but conceptually it's the halfway point between the two.

Mobile is becoming more and more important in e-commerce, but it's often the least engaging channel for customers. How are retailers going to address this challenge?

I'm not sure I fully accept the premise of the question; mobile might be the least engaging now, but it needn't be.

At the moment mobile is seen as just another way to access content - so you get just a different, smaller, version of the website. Most retailers don't think about mobile as a way of enhancing the in-store environment.

Mobile, in my view, should be about enhancing both experiences.

One way of doing this is by using mobile for augmented reality, this is where the customer sees the real world through the mobile camera and they can see additional computer generated content. There are some great examples of this already, although very few. They tend to be gimmicky, but they're innovative and interesting nonetheless.

If we can harness some of the playfulness that mobile can give us, or even just use it to connect up other channels, then that's how mobile is going to become the key retail channel.

Mobile is not just about configuring your website and making it smaller.

Tablet and smartphones are two sub-channels of what gets "mobile commerce", in what was do these differ?

The only real difference between them at the moment is size - and tablets are getting smaller and phones are getting bigger.

I think in the future we'll either have a small phone and a large tablet, or there will be the single convergence option. Which we choose will depend on what you want to use it for.

Most likely both will still exist for different users, I don't think convergence is inevitable, especially as the tablet is also being pulled toward the laptop space.

This move toward the laptop space is important. If we end up with tablets that dock into keyboards as the non-desktop alternative then suddenly us laptop users are part of mobile commerce too - this gives the channel a whole new growth area.

Customer expectations are increasingly ahead of the pack in e-commerce, what can retailers do to get out in front?

It's a big generalisation, but retailers are not very good at looking at what their customers are doing.

They're good at looking at what their customers are buying, but I think they need to get outside of their comfort zones and look beyond their sector and beyond the UK. For example, some innovations in the Far East are doing some really interesting things with mobile, and in the US there are whole shopping malls that have a single mobile channel and are adding a game-layer to encourage footfall into stores through play.

Retailers need to look outside their current spheres of reference, and look at worldwide mobile commerce trends, and look at the ethnography of how we, as customers, use our mobiles: don't ask customers what they think, watch what they do.

What do you see as the biggest challenge is mobile commerce for 2013 and beyond?

In addition to a lot of what I've said above, I'd also add that the internal business structure of the organisation needs to treat mobile as a separate channel and not as just an add-on to online - and really mean it, not just pay lip-service to the idea.

In my opinion, only then will they really maximize the potential that mobile has to disrupt the ecommerce and retail markets.

For more information on Professor Cathy Barnes and the eCommerceNG event where she will be speaking, see here - to reserve a place, please Contact Us but please be aware that although the event is free, spaces are limited and will be given on a first come, first served basis.

Spare4Appliances choose SearchBroker Site Search for their online store

Emma Miller — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 06:34:00 GMT

Apr.

Spare4Appliances choose SearchBroker Site Search for their online store

by Emma Miller

There are some online retailers that really rely on having a great search engine, and Spares4Applicances is one of those.

We're happy to announce that we will be working with them over the next few weeks as they implement SearchBroker's DataStation. This is a customer-centric analytics service that helps online businesses understand how their customers are interacting with their site, giving them the customer-centric data to help inform the process of devising the right findability strategy for their business.

Spares4Appliances

Spares4Appliances, or S4A for short, specialise in providing the largest stock of spare parts for domestic appliances in the UK, backed up by an "excellent support service to help customers identify the parts they need".

"Helping our customers find what they need, and giving them the confidence that they have found just the right part is an essential link in our value chain", say Brian Cresswell, Sales Director at S4A, "A top of the range search engine is central to delivering on that strategy".

That's the challenge with selling products like spare parts.

It's not just about finding a part in the database, it's about offering the right technical support so that the customer feels confident they're getting the part they need. This is easier if they already know the make, model and serial number, but this isn't always the case.

This means that search at S4A isn't just about linking customer search queries with database keywords, it's about designing a customer journey that echoes the values of the organisation and that not only helps get the sale today, but helps build the relationship with the customer so that they come back tomorrow and recommend the site to others.

"I love working with sites like S4A", says Angel Maldonado, CEO of SearchBroker, "you never know whether the customer knows the part and just wants to jump straight to it, or if they're feeling lost and need a great experience to help them feel right about making the purchase".

For more information on implementing SearchBroker DataStation in your business, please Contact Us.

Interview: the mobile commerce challenge for online retailers

John Tomlinson — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 06:28:00 GMT

Apr.

Interview: the mobile commerce challenge for online retailers

by John Tomlinson

In preparation for the eCommerce NG event "Maximize the Potential of Mobile Commerce" in Leeds on April 19th, we are running a series of interviews with the three event presenters.

For more information on the event, and to reserve a place (it is free, and there are a few places left, but will be filled on first comes, first served basis), please Contact Us.

Today is the turn of Stephen Sumner, Multi-Channel Sales and Marketing Director at Moda in Pelle.

What makes mobile different from other e-commerce channels?

We live in an increasingly mobile-connected world, people of all ages, gender and backgrounds are now connected by some kind of mobile device which has been driven by affordability.

The so called developing (BRIC) countries are connected to the web by mobile devices more than the traditional desktop - as devices (and prices) have developed, technology allows us to keep in touch whenever and wherever we are. As a result it is now becoming an embedded part of our 'normal' routine. For example how many times do you check your mobile device for e-mail or Facebook, or Twitter in relation to your desktop?

I don't know anyone who has the same anxiety attack when you can't access a desktop as the one we get when we can't find our phone.

Mobile is becoming more and more important in e-commerce, but it's often the least engaging channel for customers. How are retailers going to address this challenge?

I'm not sure retailers or platform providers really understand where mobile is going. There seems to be an attitude from retailers and platform providers that is akin to website development some 10-12 years ago, like we know we should have one but not sure why and how we manage it, and of course it's only another technical requirement.

In my experience you need to take a very serious look at how you are going to manage and operate a strategic commercial marketing approach to mobile channels. This means having dedicated time and resource to understand the journey, experience and related marketing challenges different mobile devices deliver.

At the moment I think there is a level of consumer tolerance that will quickly deteriorate as certain players start to get things resolved. Our recent venture into Apps and mobile was one of the biggest learning curves I have been through for some time, we got loads wrong because we didn't really think about what our objectives were, what was needed to support it from a resource, technical and operational perspective. We fell into the classic trap of thinking it was about the technology, something I have preached the opposite about for some 15 years - and still made the mistake!

Tablet and smartphones are two sub-channels of what gets "mobile commerce", in what was do these differ?

Size always matters - well it does with viewing devices.

You have to think how your content will display on each device and review accordingly. Take a look at your desktop traffic stats to see what key devices people are using to access your brand. Our top 'mobile' device is the iPad or tablet, with the iPhone coming second and Android coming way down the list, this device mix might differ for your customer or market.

ALWAYS think 'user experience' and test with this in mind. This goes for all forms of marketing communication onto mobile including e-mail. Somewhere out there is a business or person about to make another fortune by developing the right messaging medium for all mobile devices, e-mail is the current default but it is far too cumbersome for mobile platforms.

Have you got any examples of mobile commerce done particularly well or particularly poorly?

I see lots of companies doing some really good stuff with mobile, however most of them are focused purely on the buying experience; they tend to be product and functional led in format. I haven't seen any really good cross/upsell functionality yet.

This isn't wrong as we need to 'get the sale', however mobile by definition allows the user more 'quiet time' to engage with your brand - this is different than 'down time' when people are setting time aside to do specific things. So, working on 'brand engagement' content is valuable as it allows more room for the user to take a closer look at the brand.

Retailers need to look at ways to invest in non-product related content. 'Sticky content' has long been seen as a distraction on desktops, but on mobile devices people are happier to dwell on this content whilst on trains, tubes, buses, airplanes etc and if you get it right they are also very happy to 'share' your content with their peer group.

Customer expectations are increasingly ahead of the pack in e-commerce, what can retailers do to get out in front?

Recognising that mobile is here and is already overtaking what is now laughably called 'traditional desktop viewing' is of paramount importance.

Develop an internal 'mobile stakeholder' team to own the journey and experience, think about it as if this was your very first website being launched. If the day job of your team is taken up solely with desktop marketing then your mobile user will get a desktop experience.

We have to understand that good engagement with your brand is more than just a buying journey - commercial sales are the goal and conversion metric, but you have to engage above a product journey - not at the expense of, but in support of.

As we constantly wrestle with improving desktop usability, CRM, customer service and delivery options we need to become 'mobile savvy' and employ the same thinking to mobile devices.

What do you see as the biggest challenge is mobile commerce for 2013 and beyond?

Some major retailers are only just waking up to the fact that eCommerce is not only a viable channel, but has now proven to be the disruptive game-changer that the more agile niche 'pure play' retailers and mail order companies recognised many years ago. That said, it also affords some of these 'late adopters' the ability to lead these changes.

Technology enabled via web enabled mobile devices combined with savvy related marketing thinking will transform the customer visit to 'the store'. Web enabled devices are already starting to leverage and harness the power of CRM affording a more personalised experience regardless of the channel or device format. Just take a look at how many retailers are experimenting using tablets or a kiosk in-store today.

The difficulty lies with the way business has adapted internally to deal with the eCommerce challenges presented over the last decade. Internal eCommerce and related support teams are organised to service a desktop channel. As a result mobile is still perceived as an 'add on' rather than key brand engagement and commercial channels in their own right - as long as they are seen as subset channels to desktop then the mindset will remain as such.

Finally, we have recently been running a beauty parade of eCommerce providers. Not one of them positioned mobile as an integral part of the platform offer, it was always presented as an 'optional extra' - and these are the engines that drive our commerce channels!

To see Stephen speak at the "Maximize the Potential of Mobile Commerce", get in touch to reserve a place. First come, first served!

Mobile commerce: it's all about the apps

John Tomlinson — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 08:05:00 GMT

Mar.

Mobile commerce: it's all about the apps

by John Tomlinson

Do you remember the old days when not all businesses had websites?

Back in the late 90s, I would search around for a business I knew existed and then would sit in stunned silence, staring open-mouthed at the screen, barely able to speak, as Google (or maybe it was AltaVista back then) showed the chilling truth that the business was not online!

There was no quicker way to destroy my confidence in a company than it not having a proper website.

They didn't have websites because they decided they didn't need them. They took an internal business-centric view and failed to spot that customer expectations had changed.

Adobe's report on the tablet and mobile channels ("2013 Digital Publishing Report: Retail Apps & Buying Habits") sounds eerily similar, revealing that customer expectations are again shooting ahead of what retailers (in this case) are offering.

The report compares the experience of customers on the tablet and mobile channels. With iPads getting smaller, and Samsungs getting bigger, how long these remain as two separate channels is debatable - but for now, the distinction is important. Not because one is a telephone and the other a tablet computer, but because the customer experience varies greatly depending on connectivity, processing power and screen size.

The main finding of the report is the importance of retailers adapting "to meet the rising expectations for specialized mobile shopping experiences"

It goes on to say that ...

tablet users (55%) are almost twice as likely as smartphone users (28%) to use their device to purchase products and services.

This backs up other research projects we've reported on which emphasise the smartphone is less about transactional sales and more about researching and social influence (here, here, and here for example) , and that tablet conversion is higher than mobile or desktop:

Device Shopping Performance (desktop / tablet / mobile)

Conversion rates: 2.3% / 2.5% / 0.8%
Order size: $102 / $123 / $80

(Source)

They go on:

Across both mobile platforms ...

I said that! Already mobile is becoming the umbrella word for the two sub-channels of tablet and smartphone.

... the use of retail apps will increase by approximately 15% in 2013 – more than half of all mobile shoppers are likely to make a purchase using a shopping app in the next year (56% of smartphone shoppers and 60% of tablet shoppers).

(Source)

So, not only do the mobile channels continue to grow in importance (for example, see this post Mobile commerce set to grow by 1758% in next decade!) but also customers are demanding the kind of better experience that only an app can deliver.

Read the rest of the report here.

Mobile commerce has changed customer expectations - are you ready for that?

Emma Miller — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:43:00 GMT

Mar.

Mobile commerce has changed customer expectations - are you ready for that?

by Emma Miller

Jack rushes into the store. He know what he wants, he saw it online. He spent hours researching different fashion websites and found just the jacket he was looking for, now he wants to try it on before he makes the final decision.

He impatiently tries to find his way around the store, it isn't organised the same way as the website. He's got a picture of the jacket he wants on his phone, and as an influential Digital Diva, he's ready to post to Facebook about the purchase and tweet it to his followers.

He can't find the jacket anywhere. The shop assistant is suspicious, she sees him using his mobile phone and is worried that he's showrooming, using the store just to check stuff out but then buying it cheaper online. She wanders over and asks him if she can help.

"Have you got this jacket" he asks, but she doesn't recognise it, they don't stock it in the store, only online, and she's never seen it before.

Jack tries to find it on the store's ecommerce site, but it's no good on the mobile channel - using it is frustratingly slow and he feels blinkered not empowered by the experience.

He leaves, angrily talking about the experience with his social network ...

How often does this happen to you?

Do your most influential customers say bad things about your store online?

It happens more than we think. Customer behaviours have changed, and so have their expectations. They expect a good instore experience to be joined-up to the online store and strongly supported by the mobile channel.

The mobile channel is the most challenging. With serious limits on speed, processing power and screen size, mobile commerce is one of the most challenging areas of e-commerce - but with the omnipresence of smartphones, especially amongst the most influential shoppers, it's also one of the most important.

(See here for Mobile Commerce set to grow by 1758% in next decade!)

If you don't think your mobile channel is as good as it needs to be, contact us about getting a place on our m-commerce event: "Maximize the potential of mobile commerce" on April 19th in Leeds.

See here for more details.

Is your mobile commerce channel as good as it needs to be?

John Tomlinson — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 08:05:00 GMT

Mar.

Is your mobile commerce channel as good as it needs to be?

by John Tomlinson

We'd like to offically announce a free eCommerce masterclass event called "Maximize the Potential of Mobile Commerce"

The event will take place on the morning of 19th April at the White Cloth Gallery in Leeds.

Attendance is free, but places are very limited, so please let us know if you, or someone else in your organisation, would be interested in attending.

Event Format

Our objective is to make these events as useful and valuable as possible, and ensure that you get new and different insight and useful actionable advice that you can implement in your own business.

The format of the event is three presentations:

An industry-leading expert giving new insight: Professor Cathy Barnes, Professor of Retail Innovation and Head of the Faraday Centre for Retail Excellence.
A warts and all real-world case-study with practical advice and lessons learnt: Stephen Sumner, Multi-Channel Sales & Marketing Director at Moda in Pelle.
A third presentation looking at the issue from a different point of view: Richard Anson, founder of leading social commerce platform Reevoo.
A question and answer "round table" session to allow everyone the opportunity to participate and maximize the value of their attendance.

There's also coffee, don't worry.

For more information on the event, and on Professor Barnes, Stephen Sumner and Richard Anson, please click here.

For more general information about eCommerce NG, please click here.

If you would like to attend please contact us.

Live blog from IRX 2013!

John Tomlinson — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 09:56:00 GMT

Mar.

Live blog from IRX 2013!

by John Tomlinson

We're at IRX in Brmingham, and we'll be live blogging today and tomorrow. Check back throughout the day for updates.

Latest updates are showing first.

Thursday 21st March 14:16

It's suddenly got busy again, I thought it was winding down ... I love this stand from Sage Pay, dressing their people in white coats is a great touch ...

Thursday 21st March 12:41

I'm not a big fan of poporn as a rule, but it seems to be working for New Voice Media ...

Thursday 21st March 10:57

I don't know if a scale model of a brontosaurus beats a pile of cardboard boxes ...

but a bar serving draught premium lager does ...

Thursday 21st March 10:39

All the fancy expensive things people do to make their stands stand out, sometimes all you need is a pile of cardboard boxes:

Thursday 21st March 10:18

Last night's exhibitor drinks was actually really good fun. I am not the most sociable person in the world, but even I enjoyed myself.

Looking forward to today - I hope I get some time to walk about and see what's going on. Usually the second day is easier because all the little snags are sorted out. For the sake of needing to include something visual in this post, I will try to find the best stand and post a photo of it.

Wednesday 20th Match 16:41

I never eat properly at these events. I end up stuffing my face with free stuff then feeling sick for the rest of the day. You'd think I'd have grown out of such behaviour at my age. I also have a cold, so have been spending the day politely sniffing and sneezing and trying not to put people off. I think I got away with it.

Exhibitor drinks at 5pm in the main networking bar. I really just want to go back to my hotel, but I guess I'll try to be sociable for a short time.

Wednesday 20th March:15:33

A good first day so far, very tiring, but lots of really interesting people coming to the stand and a real recognition of the importance of search to the e-commerce world.

Hopefully also a few attendees to the eCommerce NG event on mobile commerce next month!

Wednesday 20th March:13:53

Unfortunately I haven't been able to make any of the seminars this morning, I had hoped to track the SoLoMo conference which had some really interesting speakers lined up, but the the stand has been really busy and I haven't been able to get away (apart from to have lunch obviously).

We almost didn't bring the TV, but I'm glad we did. We have it set up to the laptop so demos of SearchBroker and client sites can easily be seen - it works really well, much better than crowding round a laptop.

In between visitors we throw on the Search & Broker video ...

Wednesday 20th March:11:54

This live blogging is more difficult than I realised it would be, I hadn't factored in the slow internet connection.

Starting to liven up now, and get a lot busier. The queue for the coffee at the Paypal bar is lengthening.

Been having some really interesting conversations about site search requirements. This is the great thing about talking to people at this sort of event, trying to engage people on a subject that might seem a bit dry and boring at first, but really isn't, because it's about people. You have to start by understanding how your customer engages with your site and then design the customer experience accordingly.

Wednesday 20th March: 9:59

We're set up and going. I drove down this morning from Leeds. It was snowing when I left at 6am but I impressively lasted as far as Woolley Edge before I had a coffee. A little disappointed with the lack of healthy breakfast options at Costa Coffee.

Forgive the terrible photo, this was taken with my phone - but we're please the stand is looking good ...

How to get fast real-time search with big data

Sergio Iglesias — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Mar.

How to get fast real-time search with big data

by Sergio Iglesias

If you've got a large amounts of data and need a powerful site search system with real-time access and speedy performance, you need to think about NoSQL.

NoSQL

The term NoSQL was first coined in early 1999 by Eric Evans, an employee of Rackspace, when Johan Oskarsson of Last.fm wanted to organize an event to discuss distributed open source databases.

The name tries to describe the emergence of a growing number of non-relational distributed databases that conform to ACID guarantees: ACID "(Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) is a set of properties that guarantee that database transactions are processed reliably", or to put it another way, that a series of separate instructions can be reliably regarded as a single transaction, for example "a transfer of funds from one bank account to another, even involving multiple changes such as debiting one account and crediting another, is a single transaction." (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID)

NoSQL: the movement against relational databases

NoSQL (sometimes called "not only SQL") is a database management system that differs from the classical relational database approach (RDBMS) in several important ways:

It doesn't use SQL as the main query language
Stored data doesn't require fixed structures such as tables
Typically do not support JOIN operations
Does not always comforms to ACID guarantees (see above)
Usually scale well horizontally

In San Francisco in 2009, a group of people who shared the vision of overthrowing the tyranny of relational databases, inaugurated the first NoSQL community. They saw the old relational databases as costly and slow and wanted to a much more efficient and cheaper way to manipulate data.

"Relational databases give you too much. They force you to twist your object data to fit a RDBMS" said Jon Travis, principal engineer at SpringSource and one of the 10 presenters at the NoSQL event, "the NoSQL-based alternatives just give you what you need"

(References: dosideas.com and Computer World)

Internet companies like Google, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook faced challenges in data processing that traditional RDBMS couldn't solve: the need to provide real-time information processed from huge volumes of data that have similar horizontal structures.

These companies realized that the old priorities of structural coherence, that relational databases devote a lot of time to, were far less important than the new pressures of real-time data and speedy performance.

In this respect, NoSQL databases come into their own. They are highly optimized to recover information and their loss of flexibility, compared to traditional SQL systems, is offset by significant gains in scalability and performance when it comes certain data models.

Many Web developers and Java programmers learned to pursue their initiatives away from Oracle. They built their own solutions for storing data (emulating Google and Amazon) and then published the results as open source code. Today these solutions manage terabytes and even petabytes of data for Web 2.0, and it's no longer feasible to go back, for technical, economic and even ideological reasons.

Facebook creates Cassandra

For example, Facebook created the Cassandra data store to support the new search on its website instead of using existing MySQL database. According to Avinash Lakshman, one of the Facebook engineers who designed Cassandara, the system can write up to 50GB of data to disk in just 0.12 milliseconds, and that is more than 2500 times faster MySQL!

... and that's a good enough reason to think about NoSQL solutions!

This is the first in a series of posts I'll be writing about big data tools such as MongoDB, Hadoop, Zookeeper and Solr. Get in touch if you have any questions, the team at Colbenson Software Factory are experts in open-source search and big data technologies.

Social Local Mobile at Internet Retailing Expo in Birmingham

John Tomlinson — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 08:05:00 GMT

Mar.

Social Local Mobile at Internet Retailing Expo in Birmingham

by John Tomlinson

One of the things I'm most looking forward to at IRX is the SoLoMo conference.

This slightly awkward acronym is, I am told, all the rage at the moment and means Social Local Mobile ...

reflecting the maturity of mobile from a technology and device into a full part of the customer's expectation and experience

See here for the full quote plus full details of the SoLoMo conference stream (Wednesday 20th only).

Joining up "mobile" and "social" is a great move. The mobile channel is the most important channel for social media and influence, and therefore for social commerce.

the use of social media is far greater via mobile devices than via the desktop.

This is so important because it reinforces that proper joined-up ecommerce doesn't end at the point of sale. The mobile channel becomes even more important after the sale, when customers (especially the most influential plugged-in types) influence their social networks via mobile.

Post-sales use of mobile is the key driver for social commerce.

We'll be discussing this and more at our eCommerce NG event on the morning of Friday 19th April in Leeds. The event, "Maximizing the Potential of Mobile Commerce" is free, but places are very limited. If you'd be interesting in attending, please contact us.

More information on the event here, but please note that there's still one speaker to announce!

Back at IRX ...

Mark Inskip, UK managing director of Group FMG, writes here about the importance of apps in the mobile experience. He quotes Adobe's latest research (The 2013 Digital Publishing Report: Retail Apps & Buying Habits) which we'll be writing about in the next couple of days.

Mark offers some useful simple rules to follow when designing the customer experience on the mobile channel:

Don't replicate or redesign but repurpose your content
Add interactivity
Don't try to re-invent the wheel

Repurpose your content

This means not just taking the same structure and design as the desktop website and making it smaller, but not doing a complete redesign either, that would make the two channels feel disconnected. It's about taking your existing content and "adapting it to fit on your chosen platform, without completely overhauling your design."

Interactivity

This is about adding in opportunities for customers to do what mobile does best: social. So we're talking about opportunities to like, share via social media and email, offer opinions and feedback, check in, pin, tweet etc.

Reinventing the wheel

What Inskip means by this is that when designing the mobile experience, we're tempted to go mad and create all sorts of fancy bells and whistles, and then we're going to have to "spend time and energy getting to work with what you have already in place."

In other words, the mobile strategy needs to fit in with the overall online strategy and work with it.

What do consumers actually want from mobile?

I'd also like to draw attention to the "What do consumers actually want from mobile?" slot at 10.30 by Mike Davies, Sales Director (UK and Ireland) at PayPal.

I like this because it's customer-centric. It starts by looking "not what the industry can do, but what consumers want it to do".

That's a very good place to start!

Are you going to IRX at Birmingham next week?

Emma Miller — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Mar.

Are you going to IRX at Birmingham next week?

by Emma Miller

IRX is only a week away!

This time next week we'll be in Birmingham setting up for the Internet Retailing Expo which takes place at the NEC (Hall 3a) on Wednesday 20th and Thursday 21st March! (Link to their site here)

Ian Jindal, the Editor-in-Chief of the show explains what's new in this video (links to the IRX site):

This year there will be 150 exhbitors, a decent increase on previous years, and a new conference stream called IRIS. This is Internet Retailing InStore and is about how to join up online and instore retail which we predict is the next really big challenge to retailers.

See our posts on recent research that made the same conclusions:

The other big changes in the new conference stream, eSeller. This is for smaller and medium-sized e-commerce vendors, and splits the procuess up into the six steps needed to succeed:

Start
Promote
Sell
Deliver
Retain
Expand

Here's a link to our article on the eSeller site.

This is the first big expo of the year and we have a stand right in the middle (B41), overlooking the networking bar in the centre of the hall.

If you're going to be at IRX, please come and see the SearchBroker stand!

(Here's a link to more information about the show).

5 omni-channel retail examples

Emma Miller — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Mar.

5 omni-channel retail examples

by Emma Miller

This is a really great article from Smart Insights about joining up online and instore retail!

5 omni-channel retail examples: How different types of omni-channel services can improve the customer experience.

Kate Traynier of Redeye shows five examples of top retail names that are succesfully joining up their online and instore channels to make for a more connected customer experience!

We've being going on about this a lot recently!

Just this week we wrote about the importance of the holistic multi-channel approach based on research by Demand Ware and the University of Arizona (read it here) and we drew the same conclusion when we wrote about SDL's Holiday Shopping Report (see here). Both showed how customers will connect the experience of online and instore as they progress through the customer journey and they'll expect retailers to do the same.

The Smart Insights post focusses on the following brands:

Oasis: Online Shopping Instore
M&S: Instore Experience
Waterstones: Instore eBook Service
John Lewis: Click and Collect Service
Boots: Instore Digital Kiosk

Some of the examples they cite include:

Use of iPads in Oasis stores so customers can order items online whilst in the store, avoiding the need to queue and carry the item home.
M&S iPad application.
Waterstones allowing customers to download eBooks with their free instore WiFi while they browse real books.
Boots instore kiosks for their loyalty programme.
John Lewis click and collect service which allows customers to buy online but collect in store.

Some of these examples may seem a little unimaginative - a click and collect service is nothing new after all - and while they may not all be ground-breaking, they have many small innovations which together vastly improve the customer experience.

And this is so important!

Great e-commerce isn't about massive eye-catching fancy whizzy stuff with whistles and bells, it's at least as much about well-considered tweaks that together add up to a better customer experience.

Read the full post here on Smart Insight site.

Digital Divas: the drivers of the e-commerce fashion sector

John Tomlinson — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 08:05:00 GMT

Mar.

Digital Divas: the drivers of the e-commerce fashion sector

by John Tomlinson

Demand Ware have put together a report about online fashion divas and the important role they play in the e-commerce fashion sector.

"Demandware partnered with the University of Arizona to survey more than 7,000 consumers in the US, the UK, Germany, and France. The research, conducted online in the fall of 2012, revealed that there is an emerging and valuable consumer segment that retailers should be aware of and serve. They are both digitally engaged and fashionable consumers. They are Digital Divas. They own more than two-thirds of fashion purchasing power."

They define Digital Divas as customers who are "highly engaged with both fashion merchandise and digital technology"

Key findings:

Digital Divas make up 22% of fashion shoppers but 69% of all fashion spend
The US has the highest percentage (27%) then Germany (23%), the UK (18%), and France (15%)
They are faily evenly split by gender: 53% women and 47% men
They have higher household incomes than the non-diva population.
64% fall into the 25-44 age bracket, 68% have children and 71% are primary wage earners
They are highly influential: partly from their direct spend, and partly as opinion leaders.
Demand Ware estimate that "Digital Divas indirectly influence an additional 43% of spend in Europe and 37% in the US given their word-of-mouth impact on non-divas" and that "as opinion leaders, Digital Divas are five times more likely than non-divas to influence friends, family, and colleagues"

This is really interesting for e-commerce sellers.

Social commerce and Digital Divas

The way they exert their influence is most often through social media channels, such as Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, meaning that the "ripple effect of their point-of-view emanates throughout their social network."

The research also found that 52% read online customer reviews and half read the online product ratings on the e-commerce site. This reliance on social sources for quality information is far higher than the third (36%) who use the offiical information provided by the fashion site.

Facebook is the most popular channel for influence, with 40% using it to share their opinions and influence their network. This is greater than the numbers for Twitter and Pintererst (both 31%).

Multichannel commerce and Digital Divas

Their behaviour is different too.

Firstly, they don't only engage online, they also shop widely in physical stores, showing the ever-growing importance of joining up instore and online channels (see our post on this here). This channel inter-connectedness is seen as important for 45% of Digital Divas (compared to only 17% of non-divas).

They also shop around, visiting an "average of 3.5 sources before purchase". Non-divas tend to only visit a single source.

The good news is that Digital Divas respect non-price competition and value the quality of the customer experience, "As compared to their counterparts, level of retailer service and quality of multichannel experiences has a significantly higher influence on where Digital Divas choose to shop."

So, again this is about multi-channel inter-connectedness, and demonstrates the importance of understanding today's customers (see our post on Customer 3.0 here).

Mobile commerce and Digital Divas

These Digital Divas are twice as likely to use mobile devices while shopping in stores too - and not just for purchases, but also for price comparison, special offers and influencing their network.

"Retailers are being forced to transform their stores as Digital Divas continue to embrace mobile – and persuade non-divas to do so as well. Retailers that resist this market pressure will likely fall prey to practices like showrooming – where shoppers visit a store location to touch and feel a product and then use a digital channel to find and purchase the same product"

Digital Divas are here to stay. There are knowledgeable, influential and vital to the success of multi-channel fashion retail. Retailers need to engage with them, join up their online, mobile and instore channels and focus on those factors which the Divas most value.

You can download the full report here.

Want more sales? Just relax ...

John Tomlinson — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 08:05:00 GMT

Feb.

Want more sales? Just relax ...

by John Tomlinson

I don't think I'm ever relaxed when I'm spending money, but according to the Journal of Marketing Research report "Relaxation Increases Monetary Valuations", the more relaxed customers are, the more they will spend!

The report explains:

Of all the consumer experiences that marketers try to create, states of relaxation are among the most common (e.g., in hotel rooms, business-class cabins, airport lounges, spas)

This is because we tend to believe that the more relaxed and calm people are, the more likely we are to make good decisions and the more likely they are to be in a positive frame of mind. This may be partly true, but according to the research paper, it's not quite as simple as that.

When considering how much a product is actually worth, they found that "states of relaxation not only increase the monetary valuations of products but actually inflate them."

Some of the tests in the study showed that:

Relaxed customers bid 15% higher for a digital camera than less-relaxed customers.
The less-relaxed customers tended to bid much closer to the actual market price.

Why is this so?

Writing on the findings, the Faraday Centre for Retail Excellence said:

Relaxed consumers think products are worth more because when relaxed, individuals think about product value at an abstract level. For example, when buying a camera, relaxed participants focused on how desirable and advantageous it was to own it. In contrast, the less-relaxed participants focused more on aspects such as the number of megapixels and the shutter speed.

Considering how much effort we make to appeal to customers on an emotional level, having this sort of insight can be hugely valuable!

Applying this to e-commerce is interesting.

How do we make the online retail experience more relaxing for our customers? If we can work this out, we can be sure to increase the rate of sales conversion and the increase in spend per transaction.

The key is the focus on the customer experience of using the site, how engaging and enjoyabe it is to use, and how we can avoid the negative traps that maybe don't add greatly to the experience, but if we get them wrong they can certainly take away from it.

"This research is a great example of how academic thinking can help you design and develop the shopping experience for your consumers", says Professor Cathy Barnes, Professor of Retail Innovation and Head of the Faraday Centre for Retail Excellence.

Professor Barnes will be speaking at our eCommerce NG event on April 19th in Leeds ("Maximize the Potential of Mobile Commerce"), please Contact Us for more information or to reserve a place - the event is free but places are very limited.

Paid click advertising growing fast on mobile and tablet channels!

Emma Miller — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Feb.

Paid click advertising growing fast on mobile and tablet channels!

by Emma Miller

A recent research report by The Search Agency on The State of Paid Search showed that paid clicks from mobile and tablet sectors are growing fast. During 2012 they doubled to over 23% of paid traffic, with tablet growth the main driver.

Q4 2012 marked the first time that share of spend on tablets exceeded spend on smartphones

This graph from eMarketer shows that the computer is still the dominant channel, but tablet and mobile are gaining fast:

The eMarketer article goes on to look at the US market for paid search ads, now a huge part of the advertising industry.

They estimate that "US advertisers will increase mobile search ad spending 80.6% this year to $3.54 billion, up from $1.99 billion in 2012"

This suggests massive growth potential for Google who are even more dominant in the mobile and tablet sectors than on other online channels (they have nearly 90% of the tablet and mobile advertising space), and with overall advertising spend expected to rise only around 12.4%, that means of the predicted rise of $2.18bn, around $1.55bn, or 71%, is expected to hit the mobile and tablet channels.

Gosh.

What does this growth in mobile search advertising mean for online retail?

This means that as more cash gets ploughed into making sure that mobile and tablet users can find your website, more of your site visitors will be using mobiles and tablets when they browse your catalogue.

This means that m-commerce (or mobile commerce) will continue to become an increasingly important part of e-commerce!

Mobile commerce: e-commerce but smaller?

We will be writing a lot about the unique challenges of the m-commerce channel over the coming weeks as we prepare for the eCommerce NG event in April (Maximizing the Potential of Mobile Commerce), and especially challenging the myth that m-commerce is just like e-commerce on a smaller screen.

It's not.

There is a huge difference in the customer experience, for example the tablet in particular is a "lean back" device and this changes the customer experience.

See here for more about the importance of "lean back" in online customer experience design - it's surprisingly interesting!

Please follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn to see how we develop this theme over the coming weeks.

If you are interested in attending the eCommerce NG event, please contact us - there is no cost but places are very limited.

Empowering the customer with site search!

Emma Miller — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Feb.

Empowering the customer with site search!

by Emma Miller

I wrote before about how we developed a "unified findability" concept for our own search engine (see here, and to understand what we mean by findability, see this post), but now we've taken it further!

We call it the SearchBroker x-space, because it's a space where the customer gets to take control and build the connections they want to make between themselves and your site content.

This is the Colbenson website x-space:

Some of the fancy things it does:

It opens as soon as the customer types - no need to click search.
The suggestions dynamically change as the search query changes.
Matches to the customer query are shown in bold.
Promoted results set by us are shown in the right-hand column. The organic results generated automatically by SearchBroker show in the left.
The results are ordered by business priority: rtesults relating to SearchBroker show first, then Colbenson Learning, then Colbenson Live (the largest content section), and lastly results relating to Colbenson the company.
It is all navigable by the keyboard or mouse.
Filters can be used to refine the content.

The idea is to empower the site user, so that they feel in control of how they engage with the site content.

My favourite bit is the Filter View. I love how it feels to use it, especially using the keyboard commands rather than the mouse (which I always prefer), it makes me feel like I'm actually driving the space.

Try it out, do a search and click the Extend Filters column. You can now filter the content by clicking on any of the images or by hitting the relevant keystroke (S for SearchBroker, L for Learning, V for Live, or C for Colbenson corporate stuff).

To remove the filters, just press A (for All), and to open or close the Filter View, just press F!

I hope you like it - please let us know what you think!

If you think any of these innovations in site search might help improve the customer experience on your site, please contact us, we'd love the opportunity to discuss how we might be able to help!

Highgrove Shop integrates SearchBroker for their site search analytics

Emma Miller — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Feb.

Highgrove Shop integrates SearchBroker for their site search analytics

by Emma Miller

We are pleased to announce that Highgrove Enterprises will be integrating SearchBroker analytics into Highgrove Shop!

Highgrove in Gloucestershire is the private home of HRH The Prince of Wales. Highgrove Enterprises manages tours of the famous organic garden and the Highgrove Shops.

Highgrove Shops are dedicated to promoting skilled craftspeople making unique products using traditional methods in harmony with the environment. This includes organic food, drinks and products crafted from traditional materials such as silver, glass, wood, wool, and English willow.

All profits generated go to The Prince of Wales's Charitable Foundation, a broad-ranging charitable trust established by the Prince in 1979 to support various causes including the Built Environment, Responsible Business and Enterprise, and Young People and Education.

For more information on The Prince of Wales and his charitable work, please visit his website here.

Highgrove Shop has three physical stores, at Highgrove itself, and also in Tetbury and Bath. Highgrove food and drinks are available at Fortnum & Mason in London.

The online store is the an increasingly important channel for sales, and SearchBroker will initially be used to provide a comprehensive set of analytics to allow the team to build a customer-centric finadability strategy.

This is a really interesting project, and we're looking forward to working with the team at Highgrove in the coming months!

Mobile commerce set to grow by 1758% in next decade!

John Tomlinson — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:05:00 GMT

Feb.

Mobile commerce set to grow by 1758% in next decade!

by John Tomlinson

The retail sector is set to grow by £377 billion in the next decade, and a lot of this will be led by growth in mobile commerce!

This is according to The Reshaping of Retail report commissioned by the retail property business Hammerson (conducted by Conlumino).

The report states that whilst the retail sector as a whole should grow by 26%, the mobile commerce (m-commerce) part of that will jump from £2.9 billion today to around £53.9 billion by 2020 - that's growth of 1758%!

This article in Retail Gazette (Retail spend to reach £377bn by 2022) by Gemma Taylor explains that "[r]etail sales are set to grow more rapidly in the coming decade as the number of older shoppers increases and a new era of buying behaviour begins."

The article goes on to quote David Atkins, the CEO of Hammerson: "The retail environment is changing more quickly than ever. The digital revolution is having a profound effect on the way people shop, and how retailers operate. We're entering a new era ... Online, and particularly the use of mobile devices, will play an ever more important role as part of the multichannel mix and help improve the shopping experience."

Understanding this new mindset is vital. We call this Customer 3.0 (more about this here How to succeed with Customer 3.0: Five key e-commerce principles and here The best online shopping experience: Customers 3.0).

Customers are not the same as they were years ago.

There is now much more supply than demand and tech-savvy consumers have access to vast amounts of information at the touch of a button, and are well-connected on social networks and so heavily influenced by social commerce factors such as customer recommendations and the opinions of their social network.

Retailers that don't respond to this will not be able to maximize the potential of this predicted decade of retail growth.

Multichannel mix in retail

The other key phrase that Atkins uses is "multichannel mix".

This isn't just about having both online and instore retail channels, it's about having multiple channels that cleverly complement each other.

We talked about the importance of joined-up retail here: What's the most important thing about instore and online retail?

The thing is, even if retailers see their online and instore channels as separate entities, the customer doesn't: "it is expected that 69 per cent of consumers will use an average of three or more channels during the purchasing process"

The point is that retail isn't a singular transaction, it's a journey. The customer moves through the marketing funnel - or round the new-fangled Purchase Loop and will use different channels at different points in the journey.

Joining all this stuff up - especially with the mobile channel - will become increasingly part of the retailing challenge over the next decade.

Another article on this from Shopping Centre UK magazine.

How to convert long neck customers in e-commerce site search

Emma Miller — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Feb.

How to convert long neck customers in e-commerce site search

by Emma Miller

Search is driven by people.

People have one thing in common: they are all unique.

This means that people will search in lots of different ways, and your onsite search engine must be able to deal with it.

The proper way to do this is to start with customer-focussed search analytics. This means going through all the words (terms) and phrases (queries) and working out what people are talking about.

Putting this into a graph, with quantity of searches on the vertical y-axis and each search term (in quantity order) on the horizontal x-axis, you get something that looks like this:

Roughly speaking, about 80% of your searches will fall into the top 20% of terms (the long neck), and then the other 80% of terms will be spread across about 20% of your traffic (the long tail).

Most search analytics advice talks about the long-tail.

This is because it's talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is the science of attracting traffic to your site from external search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing.

This is not the same thing as site search.

Site search is about making connections between customers that are already on your site and the content (or data) on your site.

Therefore, whilst the long tail is vital for SEO, and a fantastic source of data for content marketing and keyword advertising, it is less important in site search.

In site search, 80% of your customers are at the long neck; that's where you need to be!

How to convert long neck customers in e-commerce site search

The great thing about long neck search terms is that they are predictable. It doesn't take too much effort to scan through the top bundle of search terms used, see what's happening, and create a plan for the kind of connections you want to see made between customers using those terms and your site content.

The way to convert the long neck is by creating promotional links to either successful searches or high-performing content. Or both.

This contrasts with the long tail where the search terms are more numerous and less predictable. For the long tail we need the search engine to be really clever at ranking results organically - but in the long neck, because we're working with fewer terms and we know what they are, we can take control and create the links we want.

But what links should we create?

The best way to decide is by A/B Testing.

A/B Testing involves trying two or more options and randomly applying these to your customers at the same times of day. You can then compare which is the most successful at building connections.

Content or search terms?

A search engine like Google will link you to popular search terms by suggesting popular searches as you type. This is called Google Suggest. In this case, the search is still performed and a page of results shown. The customer needs to browse these results and select the content they want.

This is great when there is no obvious stand-out link between the term and the content.

If there is a strong relationship between a search term and site content, you can bypass the search and results process and directly suggest that content to the customer is the autocomplete space. This means the customer clicks and is taken directly to that content.

A great example of this is Apple:

Be careful with this, you can overdo it, and end up thinking all of your customers want to make the same connections to the same content. You must always allow the customer to feel in control of the search, and allow them to make the connections they want to make.

How to succeed with Customer 3.0: Five key e-commerce principles

John Tomlinson — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:05:00 GMT

Feb.

How to succeed with Customer 3.0: Five key e-commerce principles

by John Tomlinson

In a previous post (here) we looked at this HBR webinar by Jeffrey Rayport and how he defined today's customer as Customer 3.0: online, informed, and in an environment of abundant supply and limited demand.

We then expanded on this (here) looking at some of the implications of niche marketing for e-commerce sellers (and also wrote here about whether niche was really the right solution for your business - it isn't always).

In this post, we run through the other four key issues that Rayport raises, what he calls the five principles for succeeding with Customer 3.0.

(The first was Go niche - see here)

Go social

The brand must become a social experience, with real benefits for membership and involvement.

The example he uses is Nespresso.

This used to be a sleepy little backwater of the Nestlé coffee empire, but the development of the brand and the Club led to five years of 30% compound growth.

But Nespresso is a bit of a doozy. Most of us don't sell stuff that fits so easily around a social model.

Can we apply this concept across all of e-commerce?

The Nespresso example combines a strong brand with a product that people care about. Coffee is a social thing, people go out for coffee and serve coffee socially when friends come around - but could a site selling office supplies or sewage pipes really socialise the brand in a way that will be engaging for customers? Yes, but not easily. It may involve partnering with other e-commerce brands to create a suite of suppliers that serve a particular sector. Difficult, but not impossible.

(Here's an example we wrote about ages ago from Nike)

Go inside out

This is about how to use social media in business.

At some point soon, I predict that the term "social media" will be too broad to be useful. How we use Facebook is totally different from how we use Pinterest or Twitter. Some channels, like YouTube or Flickr, are more about quality content and in that way have more in common with a blog than with a tool like Twitter.

The point of this is not about social media tactics, but about social media tone. It's not a tone of polished marketing copy or advertising-speak, it's a tone of informality. The social media channels should be way to see inside your organisation, see its human side, not just another way to be wowed by how clever your marketing team is.

Sorry to be negative, but I am a little skeptical of the real impact this will have in most cases. I like the point, I like the idea of "letting the inside out and the outside in", but will it really add value in all cases?

Go personal

This is about "designing for occasion ... personalising ecommerce interactions"

This includes things like optimised interfaces for the tablet and mobile channels, but also focussing the e-commerce experience on how customers will engage with the product, what they will use it for.

Integrate

This is so important!

(We wrote about this before here, based on a retail report by SDL).

Rayport says, "mandate a unified field theory" which means join stuff up - even if you see online and instore as two separate things, your customer don't. They need to be connected and work together.

The example he uses is Apple Stores who cleverly integrate their online and instore experience. For example, using technology like Square, customers can make purchases anywhere in the store, avoiding queues at the till, and receipts are sent via email obtained by linking up the credit card with the iTunes account.

In terms of sales productivity, a store like Tiffany's (the jewellers) produces $2800 per square foot, Apple Stores make $6600!

What does this mean for e-commerce?

In the past when demand vastly exceeded supply, just getting the product within arms length of the customer was enough to succeed. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, with supply outstripping demand, the focus must move from supply and distribution (company focussed) to the customer.

Exactly how this applies to your business depends on how you engage with your customers.

When people split the e-commerce sector up into different types, they focus on the process of who is selling to whom, e.g. B2B, B2C etc. I think it would be more useful to split the sector by product engagement, like the typical Loyalty Ladder model in marketing theory.

The idea is that we try to push up the ladder to maximize customer loyalty, and whilst this is absolutely correct, each product and business will have a natural starting place on the ladder and this will dictate exactly how they build the e-commerce business model around the customer experience and driving customer engagement.

Contact us to discuss how this thinking might impact the role of your onsite search engine as part of your customer experience strategy.

Why Site Search? The Magic Quadrant for Site Search

Ángel Maldonado — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Feb.

Why Site Search? The Magic Quadrant for Site Search

by Ángel Maldonado

Are you unhappy with the site search on your online store?

Do you think it could be better?

There are three parts to addressing this: Why you should do something about it, What needs to be done and How to do it.

In this post we deal with the fundamentals: Why should you care about Site Search? (or why you shouldn't!). Later we'll show you What can be done and finally, in the final post in this Site Search Magic Quadrant series, we'll set out How to achieve excellence in Site Search, so don't miss out!

First of all, it goes without saying that it's not about what matters to your online store, it's about what matters to your customers. Having said that: Why would your buyers require Site Search to buy more?

We have created a Search Value Quadrant to visualize in a snapshot an answer to the Why question.

On the y axis we set how wide, heterogeneous or complex your Catalogue is; big, wide and varied catalogues go higher up and are more likely to require a Free Search feature.

On the x axis we set the level of knowledge that your prospects have of your products. If a user knows a product (name, brand, category, use, reference, etc) and is committed to buy, they expect a Search feature to get straight to it. Equally, if they don't have a clue and they want your store to tell them what they need to know then they are more likely to browse and will expect the store to provide the lead.

So ...

Top right quadrant, effective site search is a must, it will be a major part of the customer experience.
Bottom left quadrant, the site search is much less important, probably not worth spending much on it.
The other 2 quadrants, the impact of site search will vary according to industry sector and other factors. You will need to consider carefully the business case for investment (see here for our post on Business Case for Site Search).

In the next post we will set out what simple but effective features and aspects really matter when planning your online store Site Search.

The Campaign Against Rubbish Ecommerce Site Search continues ...

Emma Miller — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Jan.

The Campaign Against Rubbish Ecommerce Site Search continues ...

by Emma Miller

Our Campaign Against Rubbish Ecommerce Site Search (CARESS) continues today!

I did a post on this a week or two ago (here) picking three search engines mentioned in the 37 Signals report. This time I'm picking the top three names in the Internet Retailer Top 500 List of online retailers:

Amazon
Staples
Apple

Amazon

Three great things jump out immediately with Amazon's search

It's big and dead easy to see
It allows the customer to filter (by category) within the search box
The autocomplete fires immediately, on one single character

Nice.

The autocomplete

The autocomplete is very functional. It's simply words of popular searches or trying to channel me into a category. The objective of this step on the process is about trying to get me to the most effective landing page possible.

This is effective, but unlovely.

Landing page

Amazon's landing pages obviously do the trick, they deliver sales to the business, but for me they lack charm.

I tried the generic term "printer", and am now on the first page, looking at 16 results from a total of 637,314 with no understanding of what order they are in. This makes me feel overwhelmed, like there's no way I can be sure I'm getting the best deal, and I want to go somewhere else first to help me make the decision before I come back to Amazon to complete the transaction.

This is an opportunity missed. The customer reviews are useful, but there is actually very little information available and no links to buying guides for these kind of more complex purchases.

I expect Amazon get away with it based on their powerful brand name, good prices and great service, but the whole process feels like a well-oiled machine rather than an empathetic and cuddly touchy-feely human experience of joy and love.

Staples

So, what about Staples, will they build on Amazon's efficiency with the human touch?

Again we start with a nice search box. It's easy to see, in the centre, quite large, and is clean and uncluttered. It lacks the ability to filter but this isn't a big deal. With office supplies, customers often search by brand name, so perhaps a way to filter by brand within the search would be useful.

As with Amazon, the autocomplete kicked into action on the first character, but again, like Amazon, a text-only space with links only to popular searches, no links to products. This means that I still must go to a results page.

The results page is good. It's got clear filters, the search box is still there, it has information such as how many search results there are and has two things Amazon doesn't:

I can choose how to sort the list
I can choose how to view the results: list or grid.

At this point it crashed (I was using Chrome), so I tried again and still it wouldn't work. So I switched to Firefox and it still didn't work. Eventually a little box popped up saying "Help us improve!" and I thought that maybe start by getting your search engine to work.

So I got bored and went to look at Apple.

Apple

The first thing you notice is that this is much less of a search driven operation. Obviously they have far fewer products than Amazon or Staples, and it's more about style and engagement than the "pile it high, sell it cheap" models of the other two.

The tiny little search box is hidden away in the top right-hand corner.

Did you see it?

But ... as much as size is important, it's also about how you use it, and Apple know how to use it.

When you click, the search space changes colour and expands, the autocomplete drops down on the first character, with lovely pretty pictures and formatted text sections.

Each link jumps you straight to a product, not just a search results page, but let's continue to the results page anyway ...

This is a real disappointment. It feels bland and functional compared to the rest of the experience, not up to Apple's usual standards. It feels like a forgotten backwater rather than a space to drive online sales.

The information is minimal and the quality of results is poor. Ok, I'm going a bit off-piste because Apple don't sell printers, but I expected results more related to my need.

So, because I like Apple, I gave them another chance, and tried iPad, surely an open goal ... my first surprise was to see the top results in the autocomplete was an iPad cover rather than an actual iPad! ... then the actual results page was just the same as for "printer", despite "ipad" being a key Apple term. It was just funtional and bland, not the fixed landing page I had assumed ... a real let down after the glossy promise of the rest of their website.

(Also there was no autocomplete on the search box on the results page!)

Back to Staples

I'd left Firefox open and running the Staples page, I wanted to see if was going to be able to offer me some search results, and so, being A Nice Person, I thought I'd go back and check it out:

Oh well.

Scores

Amazon - 4 / 5 - solid and efficient, but full of holes. Getting away with it because they're Amazon.
Staples - 2 / 5 - didn't work with two different browsers - but had initial promise. If I can get it to work I'd expect it to rival Amazon.
Apple - 3.5 / 5 - nice and fancy start, but disappointing results page that felt like an unloved aside that no one cares about.

Six ways to improve conversion through site search

John Tomlinson — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 08:05:00 GMT

Jan.

Six ways to improve conversion through site search

by John Tomlinson

Search is an art form that can drive sales to your website through human interactions, not by tricking computers. In this piece, John Tomlinson, Chief Operating Officer at Colbenson explains how to compose a search campaign that will make your customers sing.

Making your search engine drive sales

Telephones are no longer just telephones, they're little computers with cameras. Cameras are also computers, just ones that are dead good at turning analogue light into digital pixels.

Computers don't just compute anymore either, they're ways of processing digital information for whatever possible purpose … and e-commerce site search engines are not just little search boxes that trawl your product catalogue anymore, they're part of an integrated approach to making sure your customers can actually find what they're looking for.

The importance of the search engine to any particular site will vary depending on the nature and quantity of the content, but it's clear than in most cases good search can drive conversion, and bad search can drive customers away.

Six tips for more effective search

Here are six ways to improve conversion through search.

Read the rest of this article here on the eSeller website.

Birmingham here we come!

María Martín — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Jan.

Birmingham here we come!

by María Martín

We're really excited about getting involved in the Internet Retailing Expo (IRX) in Birmingham (UK) this March!

We have a stand at the event, right in the centre next to the main networking bar, so we'll be hard to miss! As usual, we will not be giving away any free stuff other than our sparkling conversation and great advice on how to make your e-commerce site search more effective at driving your sales ... so if you're looking for free stress balls and pens, sorry - but if you want more online sales, please call round to see us!

We haven't yet designed the stand, but we have decided to show as SearchBroker rather than Colbenson, and focus our presence on the product rather than the company. I'm thinking TV screens showing our new Search & Broker video, and maybe cardboard cutouts of the characters ... to be confirmed ... don´t be shy, let me know what you think, or if you have any ideas about how we could make our stand more effective and useful for you, we´re dying to hear them.

If you'd like to book time to see us at the Expo, please get in touch.

Hope to see you there!

The event will be held on the 20th/21st at the NEC (Hall 3a) - here's the link to our Events page with more details and links.

What's the most important thing about instore and online retail?

John Tomlinson — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 08:05:00 GMT

Jan.

What's the most important thing about instore and online retail?

by John Tomlinson

"Understanding and engaging global customers based on their preferred use of each channel creates a customer experience consumers will value during the holidays and year round"

That is the new take-away message from SDL, a customer experience management organisation, taken from their new Holiday Shopping Report about the customer experience of the Christmas shopping period.

Holiday Shopping Report

The report surveyed over 3000 shoppers from both the US and the UK, and although not exclusively looking at e-commerce, the report compares and contrasts online with in-store experiences and has some useful observations.

The first point that slightly surprised me was that the US slightly favour instore shopping (51/49), whereas the UK prefer online (54/46). This backs up reports which show the UK as the biggest per capita e-commerce market in the world (e.g. here), but also reminds us that "shopping in the physical store isn't going away".

This is backed up by this article in Wired magazine, which argues that of the $59 billion the National Retail Federation say was spent in the US over Thanksgiving weekend:

"[even] if a full $1 billion of those sales each day took place online, that's still less than 7% of total spending. This is consistent with e-commerce's share of consumer spending any other time of year. All of which leads to a less-than-revolutionary dog-bites-man headline: People still shop in stores. A lot."

So why do people still shop instore?

At first glance, the findings of the report are not really very surprising:

Why people prefer in-store

They can touch stuff, try things on and better evaluate products
There are no shipping costs
Instore discounts

and ...

"in-store experiences are preferred by both U.S. and U.K. consumers as a way to interact with a product. And, many research gifts in-store before buying through a different channel."

This last point is really important, and I think this points to one of the most important challenges for internet retailing: the better integration of channels to cover the whole customer experience.

We think of shopping as buying, and quote numbers in terms of money spent. When we look at conversion, we're talking about how many customers click the "buy" button, and when we talk about in-store versus online, we think about where the customer makes the actual purchase ... but this is a seller-centric approach. Shopping is about much more than buying; it's also about browsing, evaluating, researching, comparing, reading reviews and recommendations, trying things out, interacting, looking for ideas and inspiration and lots of other steps in the chain before the purchase, and then issues like delivery, returns, customer service, and support after the purchase.

This means that online and in-store are not separate ways for customers to give you their money, they're different channels that do the same job of connecting your customers to your products; but more than that, they're complementary channels that must work together to cover the whole customer journey.

This is backed up by a study by Forrester Research, quoted in the SDL report, that showed "that one in five consumers is visiting brick-and-mortar stores to try products in-person, but then checking for the best price online."

So why do people shop online?

The report find the main three reasons people favour online shopping are:

Avoid crowds
Convenience
Online discounts

and ...

"Interestingly, nearly 10 percent (8.9%) of U.K. online shopping will take place on a smartphone, tablet or iPad, with 25-34 year olds most likely to buy holiday gifts through a mobile device or tablet, at 15%"

This is especially interesting when taking into account that, according to Jeffrey Rayport in this HBR webinar, conversion on tablets is higher than conversion on any other channel, and the typical spend is also higher:

Device Shopping Performance (desktop / tablet / mobile)

Conversion rates: 2.3% / 2.5% / 0.8%
Order size: $102 / $123 / $80

Rayport says this higher performance rate for tablets is down to three main reasons:

Products look better on tablets such as the Apple iPad, they are simply a very good display device.
People carry them around all the time, something they don't do with their desktop PC or even their laptop.
The core demographics that use tablets, are the most responsive to social commerce, and the most likely to purchase online.

The role of social commerce in product research

Online social commerce is about the influence of other people, via whatever online method. This could be recommendations, product reviews, social media or any other channel - but the role it plays at the research phase of the customer journey is weak.

The top three resources for product research are not actually that social:

Online search
In-store
Retailer website

The bottom three are social media:

"Despite buzz around social media, people in both the United States and United Kingdom are using other resources to learn about products they want to buy this holiday season."

This shows the importance of basic tools like good online and instore information to help customers get answers to their questions ... but this is not the same thing as making purchase decisions, and that is where social media and social commerce really come into play ...

The role of social commerce in decision-making

So social media is less important at the research phase, but it becomes much more important at the decision phase. The list below is interesting, not only does it show the importance of social commerce (product reviews), but also the point about delivery, returns and service, factors which are not necessarily directly related to the purchase point itself.

76.5% are influenced by shipping/packaging costs
68.8% of e-commerce customers are influenced by product reviews
65.8% are influenced by returns policies
54.4% are influenced by customer service, especially instore.

What's the most important thing about instore and online retail?

Instore and online are not two separate things.

They need to be joined up across the whole customer experience.

Even if you separate instore and online operations and analytics, your customers don't, and focussing solely on the purchase point will mean missing all the other touchpoints of the customer shopping journey

As SDL say:

"To gain the insights that drive results, retailers need to integrate and analyze inputs across all channels, both on- and off-line."

What Facebook's Graph Search means for e-commerce

Emma Miller — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Jan.

What Facebook's Graph Search means for e-commerce

by Emma Miller

The big news in search is that Facebook have announced their new Graph Search!

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, announced it during a press conference at Facebook's Menlo Park HQ earlier this week (15 Jan, 2013).

It's not really available yet, only in beta and only to a select few users, but it is, what Chris Winfield (co-founder of online marketing agency BlueGlass Interactive) called, "the first real shot in the search war between Facebook and Google" (Source)

Maybe, or maybe the first shot was when Google started building Google+ data into their search engine to create personalised search results. At the time, this was seen as a major move into Facebook territory, forcing Google's social network Google+ to be taken seriously. In the end that didn't really happen. Google+ remains a quiet little backwater compared to Facebook and other social networks.

On the flip side, Facebook remains small compared to Google's massive advertising revenue and search traffic. According to this Silicon Valley article, Google took nearly 75% of the entire $17.6 US search advertising sector, compared to Facebook's paltry $4.2 billion advertising revenue.

But Google don't have Facebook's depth of social data, and with Facebook's search feature being widely criticised, this move was not entirely unexpected.

As The Guardian reports, "Industry analysts have long waited for Facebook to develop new ways to tap its lucrative mountains of data" and last autumn, at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook weren't even trying when it came to search, but that "Today with search, the vast majority of it is people trying to find people, but there's also a meaningful portion of queries where people are trying to find Pages, brand Pages, other business Pages — so there's a bunch of that that actually does link to commercial behavior, and I think there's a big opportunity there and we just need to go do that…" (Source)

The fact that this announcement failed to impress the markets is more about the high expectations surrounding the event. Many expected a major game-changing move into hardware, a Facebook phone or tablet for example, rather than what looks like not much more than a fancy new search engine.

So what's so different about Facebook Graph Search?

Graph Search is not about indexing the web, it's about indexing Facebook's Social Graph. What this means is, as the BBC describe it, "the social graph is the name given to the collective pool of information shared between friends that are connected via the site" that includes "photos, status updates, location data as well as the things they have ‘liked'."

This means that you will be able to search for stuff like "TV shows my friends like" or "My friends who live in Palo Alto who like Game of Thrones" or "Which of my friends knows a good indian restaurant in London" and loads of other socially-driven ways to access the data (There's a really useful and thorough explanation here on Fast Company's excellent blog).

So what does Graph Search mean for ecommerce?

It's too early to say for sure, but for B2C e-commerce in particular, it looks like this will increase the importance of Facebook connections and engagement. Mere presence won't be anywhere near enough. The main concept behind Graph Search is about how things relate to each other, how people who like one thing also like another, so getting Facebook Likes will be a key driver in getting on the social graph.

This also means "social graph" is going to become a major business buzzword.

In reverse, in what The Guardian describe as "a market researchers' dream tool", data mining will become easier and richer. Querying those who liked your products and page to find out who they are, where they live, what they like etc, will be a lot easier and the data a lot more useful.

That said, am I the only who thinks Graph Search is a pretty rubbish name?

The Stories of Search and Broker: The Beginning

María Martín — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 08:43:00 GMT

Jan.

The Stories of Search and Broker: The Beginning

by María Martín

I love shopping online, but it can be really annoying if I don´t find what I´m looking for, or even worse, when an online business has all this cool stuff on their website, ready for the world to see, and no one can find it!

It drives me mad!

When I mention this to other people, they've got loads of stories of bad search engines too! How you put a word into the search box and it's like the search is tone-deaf and just doesn't get it ... so I thought that there's great material for a series of stories ... how bad search affects real lives!

So here's Chapter 1, I really hope you like it. Please tell us what you think!

In search of great ecommerce search: part one

Emma Miller — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 07:05:00 GMT

Jan.

In search of great ecommerce search: part one

by Emma Miller

So many search engines are rubbish.

So often I am searching for something on an e-commerce website and it's like the search engine is tone deaf. It doesn't hear me. It drives me mad.

I'm not the only one. My friends and family have loads of bad search stories and about how much hard work it was to find stuff online. Why do internet retailers make it so hard for their customers?

So, I thought I'd do some research, and begin a quest to find great internet site search.

Here is my the first chapter in this exciting adventure

1-800-Flowers

The first search engine I tried was American florist 1-800-Flowers - which is the kind of efficient business name that suggests a dynamic approach to marketing.

I had high hopes.

At first I couldn't even find the search box. It turned out it was hidden behind a promotional pop up banner that I had to cancel before being able to carry on. Not a good start.

I don't know how to search for flowers so I put in the word "birthday", interested to see if they'd thought about ocassion not just product. They had, but infortunately I never got to access the results because I was blocked by this:

I could see the results behind, but couldn't get to them!

How frustrating!

Clicking "close" didn't work.

I tried again and got the same thing so I gave up.

It's all very well to try to make the results as relevant as possible, but placing obstacles between your customers and your site content is not a great idea.

Lands End

So I tried Lands End.

This had come top in 37 Signals eCommerce Search Report so I got quite excited about this one.

I entered the term "red shorts" and was quite surprised by the lack of autocomplete - when I played about with it some suggestions for search terms came up, but they seemed unrelated and the first I clicked led to zero results.

The results page was better.

The system hadn't recognised the colour "red" as a colour, only as a word, so the results were a mix of colours, but with the simple function to switch colours below each item, this didn't really matter.

The results page was neat and tidy and had useful information including customer ratings and a neat trick to see the back of each item. I tried again with the intangible search term "summer". This was less good, four boy's t-shirts with the word "summer" in the name but no recognition of it as a fashion season.

On the whole a very mediocre search experience, mechanical and clumsy, no intelligent recognition of terms and no autocomplete.

ToysRUs

So I thought I'd try ToysRUs, a major online player and surely a hotbed of recent Christmas activity. The first mistake I made was to put the search term "lego" in the email address box.

Silly me.

So I looked around and found the search box a bit lower down on the left.

The autocomplete jumped into immediate action. Nice. Good use of pictures and it had clearly understood the term I was using:

The autcomplete continued below, but there was no scroll so I wasn't sure how to access further content suggestions.

The search suggestions were good. They were trying to get me to refine my search by a sub-category of lego: Lego City, Lego Technics etc - very sensible for a broad category of so many different products such as lego.

The results page was a bit of a shambles: a huge promoted result for Lego Chima pushed any results out of view below, a problem exacerbated by a second advert. Scrolling down is not a big deal, but customers need to at least know there's something worth scrolling down to - here there was not even a hint of results.

The results themselves were not site content, but further categories. I was expecting products.

Force filters

We call this "Force Filters". It means you force the user through a process of filtering before you show them the goods. This can be effective, but it has to be clear what's going on and the customer must have an option to avoid it (like a "See all results" option).

The filters on the left were comprehensive, but it was strange that "Lego" hadn't intelligently been picked up as a brand, the brands in the filter list were topped by Apple, with Lego being placed a lowly fifth.

Each retail sector has certain search terms that generally drive the searching. Book stores tend to be driven by Author, electrical stores by Brand - in these cases, a good search system should be picking up on these terms as not just more words, but as authors and brands, and responding accordingly.

In the end I clicked through on the Games category and the results were nicely displayed. They clearly showed customer ratings, information about the product and price. A lot of thought has gone into this engine, but it still doesn't feel customer focussed. It feels a little ragged around the edges and has some flaws, but was easily the best of the three.

For thoroughness, I felt I needed to go back and look at 1-800 Flowers again. This time I tried to crack their code and stuck in a Zip Code I made up and it launched me off on a totally different search, taking me away from the results I so craved to see.

I hit Back quickly, and scoured the page for ideas.

Eventually noticed the little option to Skip this stage.

This worked!

Wow, you have to really want to be the customer to get this far!

The results page was rightly visually driven, and was beautiful because flowers are beautiful, but other than that it was nothing special. It had an adequate amount of information and great photos, but was unimaginative.

So what did we learn today?

In none of these three did the experience feel engaging.

I didn't feel that any of them really understood what I was trying to find - ToysRUs being the best in this regard - but overall a very inhuman experience.

Some key points from this research:

Do not hide the search box, it needs to be visible and easy to recognise.
Use autocomplete - driven by analysis of customer behaviour and the real search terms they use.
Think about search as a customer experience, not a series of mechanical processes.
Don't put obstacles in the way.
If you use "force filters", make sure it's clear what you're doing and offer the customer a way to get straight to the results.

The scores:

1-800-Flowers: 1/5 - clumsy awkward experience; no autocomplete function, but they did recognise an intangible word; an average results page - although with pretty photos.
Lands End: 2/5 - unimpressive experience; no autcomplete - although there were some disconnected search suggestions; the results page had some nice touches and good information.
ToysRUs: 3/5 - reasonable experience, but quite seller-centric; nice autocomplete, although it needed a scroll bar; too many promotions on the initial results page but eventually quite a useful, if unimpressive, page of results.

Is niche marketing right for you?

John Tomlinson — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 08:05:00 GMT

Jan.

Is niche marketing right for you?

by John Tomlinson

We talked before (here) about the importance of niche marketing in e-commerce and the opportunity this offers to internet retailers.

But is niche the right way forward for everyone?

The High Street used to be stuffed full of specialist traders selling a narrow range of products. Shoppers would visit the delicatessen, then the butcher, the fishmonger, the green-grocer ... and at each they'd get specialist advice from expert traders, but the model that eventually won was the lower-price convenience of the supermarket.

Is e-commerce really going to buck that trend?

The key success factors in e-commerce are not so different from those on the High Street: price, choice, service and, in the case of e-commerce, reliable logistics to get the product delivered on time and in one piece.

Of the top ten most successful online sellers:

Four are "mass merchant";
Three sell computers and electronics;
Two do office supplies;
The other, Netflix, sells books, music and videos.

(Source: Internet Retailer)

This is hardly the stuff of narrow niches.

Of course you wouldn't expect a small independent e-seller to be on a global top ten list, or even the top 500 list, but the point is that online sellers serving traditional retail sectors can, and do, succeed.

So why would you want to turn customers away and go narrow?

Matt Winn of Volusion argues that "narrowing that niche market down to a much smaller audience means that customers will have a higher interest in what you have to sell" and Richard S Davies of Nine agrees, quoting one of his favourite fashion designers: "the world doesn't need to produce more clothes or factories - just individuals who can approach the business of fashion in highly creative ways."

In other words, we don't need more broad generalists, we need more narrow specialists who have deep expertise and can focus on groups of potential buyers who are really interested in that market.

For example, how's this for narrow ... the Single Serve Coffee blog by Jay Brewer has been going since 2004 and only blogs about single serve coffee machines. He now has a loyal following and makes money through related advertising by maximizing the potential of a very narrow, but passionate, sub-sector.

So niche works too, but it's not the only answer.

How do you decide if niche is the right strategy for you?

Here are four things to consider to help decide if niche is the right approach for you.

1. Have you got any other choice?

Many companies go niche because they can't compete at the mass-retail end of the market. They simply don't have a choice. If this is you then it's not about whether or not you go niche, it's about making sure you do niche properly.

The point of including this is the list is that many retailers can't compete, but they don't really go niche either, possibly out of fear of turning away from potential markets - but niche is not necessarily less profitable, this article in Dropstream says "This is not to say that running a niche ecommerce store is less profitable; on the contrary, offering these specialized products is often an excellent option for small businesses that cannot compete with larger online retailers."

2. Is there a niche?

Not every retailer is going to be able to find a niche. This means you can either invent one, accept that niche marketing isn't suitable for your business, or change the way you work.

Tyrone Shum (in this article) identifies three qualities to help locate the right niche:

Exists already;
Easily identifiable; and
Marketable and targeted

He also makes an observation that I really like: "Looking for a profitable niche market is about finding the buyers first. Most people start off with the wrong idea and look for a product to sell first. Find out what their problems or needs are and then provide a solution."

The best way to do this is to look at "longtail keywords". This phrase was first by Chris Anderson in a Wired magazine article (and subsequently in his book "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More") and it's about trawling your search analytics to find out what search terms and queries are used by your sector enthusiasts. These terms are not generic, they're very specific, and are invaluabe in understanding how to find and target your niche.

The next step is to cluster these words and phrases together to help understand the sizes and shapes on the niches, and then stick these terms into different search engines and explore the pages that get returned.

See here for our earlier article on Long Tail Analytics for internal site search.

Here are some other tools you can use to explore what keywords are being used by your potential customers:

Google Adwords, or even just Google's autosuggest on their regular search box.
Wordtracker (and their free keywords service and resources).
Keyword Niche Finder from Wordstream.
Major retail platforms such as Amazon and ebay - what are their most active categories and sub-categories, and what else do buyers in those sectors also buy?

3. Can you make money in that niche?

Astonishingly this is an oft-forgotten little point, but this is not just about identifying a niche jam-packed full of enthusiasts, but finding a niche that has business potential.

A quick way to get a feel for this is to see how much paid advertising there is for the keywords you've identified. If Googling these terms and queries returns a good range of paid keywords or other forms of advertising, then there is money to be made.

If not, then maybe this niche isn't the right one.

This process also helps you identify who your main competitors will be, which is useful for the next point ...

4. Can you dominate that niche?

Who else is in the same space? Can you differentiate your product from theirs? and can you provide something to the buying community that they will value?

Since you're appealing to a smaller audience, you need to figure out what drives their needs ... what are they looking for? What type of information and products appeals to them the most?

The main techniques are to build expertise and get involved in the community.

Being an industry sector expert or thought-leader is great way to add depth and presence to your brand, even for people who aren't your customers (yet). Richard S Davies, of Nine, says "If you didn't snag them on your website, you can woo them with your knowledge!"

And lastly, getting involved in your niche's community can be done by:

Creating your own blog
Writing for established blogs
Engage on social networks
Contributing to established community sites and forums
Partnering with a more established site within the sector
Going offline, sponsorship of community events, print advertising in community magazines and journals etc.

Note how few of these are in the traditional marketing mix.

So is niche the right strategy for you?

The internet offers a great opportunity for smaller specialised players to succeed, and even flourish, but to do so they will need to find and dominate the right niches.

This won't work for every product.

If there is no group of enthusiasts, or no narrow demographic that makes sense, then a broader-based price-driven strategy may be the best way to compete. For example, in office supplies, most customers are not the consumers, they're not spending their own money, and it's not a sector that necessarily interests them. Success by the big name providers like Staples and Office Depot (the two in the top 10 world online retailers) suggests that this is not fertile ground for niche marketing.

If niche is the right way forward, then doing it properly can be hugely rewarding.

How you can win with niche marketing in e-commerce

John Tomlinson — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 08:05:00 GMT

Jan.

How you can win with niche marketing in e-commerce

by John Tomlinson

In this post we look at some of the implications of this for e-commerce sellers.

In the HBR webinar, Rayport maps out five principles for succeeding with Customer 3.0. Here I'm going to focus on the first and look at what this means in e-commerce.

Go niche

The irony in categorising today's customers as 3.0 is that 3.0 customers don't slot neatly into traditional categories. The trend is toward personalisation of the customer experience, the individualistic 3.0's have less tolerance with being bundled together in homogenous pigeon holes.

This "fragmented world" is an opportunity for sellers because it allows us to narrow our focus into one small sub-sector or niche: "horizontals lose and verticals win" as Rayport puts it.

The key step is to identify the right vertical:

"It is essential to target the core of your customer segment ... find the most rabid users among them ... then overwhelm that microcosm ... deliver a commanding and targeted abundance of content, apps and service to truly own that niche."

The example he uses is the Toyota Scion, the most successful new car brand launch in US history.

Toyota didn't use broad-based TV advertising (literally none) or typical marketing channels like glossy magazine ads, they targeted only one demographic niche only: male, 18 to 24, with sufficient funds to buy a used car. They only marketed to this segment by going to where they were via online marketing and relevant sponsorship such as sporting events and rock concerts.

Knowing how much car buying research is done online, the Scion website experience was focussed on customer engagement. They created a whole customisation system where the customer can build their own vehicle and personalise it to express their own personality. It even included having their own Coat of Arms sprayed on the side!

It worked.

Not only was this the most successful car brand launch, but customers spent as much on the car in the three years after purchasing it as they did on the car itself!

At the same time Honda launched the Element that was targeted at the same young demographic as the Scion.

The design of the car was meant to "unlock the youth market", but the marketing was not. Advertising was overwhelmingly on TV (around 75%) and across other traditional channels. Not surprisingly they missed their target.

It sold reasonably well at first, but to the wrong demographic (average age 44) and this soon tailed off.

The Element is now being discontinued.

Key points:

Tightly focus on a small sub-sector or niche
Market only at this niche, go to where they are
Do not waste marketing time or budget outside of this niche
Identify the "most rabid users" and "overwhelm" them
Focus on ways that genuinely engage them

In future posts, I will look at the other points that Rayport identifies and expand on ways to engage e-commerce customers.

Merry Christmas 2012: Let´s think of others

María Martín — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 07:05:00 GMT

Dec.

Merry Christmas 2012: Let´s think of others

by María Martín

As every year, we think of a special gift to offer to our customers and friends, a gift we can associate with an idea or a motive to enter the new year.

Last year we sponsored over 70 trees on behalf of our 2012 clients and so reflected on the future. This year we donated to the Red Cross programme for "Children and young people in difficulty" €10 each of the over 100 people who trusted in SearchBroker throughout 2012.

From the bottom of our hearts we believe that each and every one of the people who have a chance to live, deserve the opportunity to advance, to fight, to strive and to make every effort and will in whatever their concerns are, in maximizing their own potential.

Happy 2013!

The stories of Search & Broker

María Martín — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 07:05:00 GMT

Dec.

The stories of Search & Broker

by María Martín

Even though they have already been with us for a while, we believe it´s about time to officially present you the new members of our Colbenson family: Search and Broker.

Search & Broker tells the story of how a search query onsite and a good search engine in your web can get together to create an almost human experience. SearchBroker is a product that is more than a search box, it´s like a little elf that lives in your site, listens to your visitors, understands them, empathizes with them, finishes their sentences, propose ideas and makes their online experience as attractive as it can get.

Would you like to meet them?

The story begins right here....