Retailer Deal Centers Help Solve A Key Shopper Problem

So think about a lot of retailer web sites.  Most of them have the various types of “deal” content separated and siloed.  Coupons are located in one spot, clearance items are stuffed somewhere else and weekly ad sales are delegated to yet another location.  From a consumer perspective, that is a daunting challenge to navigate.

Shoppers have a very simplified view of the world.  They do NOT make all of the types of deals distinctions from coupons vs. clearance vs. TPRs.  A deal is a deal is a deal.  Ultimately all of these are price reductions on items.

Consumers view all of these various types of content as "deals" generically.

So Staples is a retailer that has listened to consumers in this account.  They saw how the internal segmentation of different types of offers was not the ideal solution.  So they aggregated all of the various types of deals into one centralized location within Staples.com caledl the “Hot Deals Center“.

Within this deal center, there are three main types of content:

• Featured Weekly Deals
• Clearance Center
• Weekly Ad

More retailers need to think about this type of approach.  It just makes too much sense from a consumer perspective.  Shoppers don’t want to hunt around retailer.com looking for information.  They want it all nicely lumped together in an organized, consistent manner.  This confusion and siloing of content will only continue to become more of an issue as retailers bring more and more store promotional content online.  So retailer beware of failing trap to this issue and instead make sure that “deal” content is aggregated together.

Here is how Staples integrated the ShopLocal hosted weekly ad into the Hot Deals Center. They also pulled together a number of other types of "deals" under this umbrella concept.