Just getting back into the swing of things from getting back from Vegas last week and have lots of interesting news to get out on the blog over the next few days. However in the mean time, here are some key insights that were shared at the Shop.org Annual Summit 2009 conference:
- By far the best online retailing show, both in the quality of sessions, # of retailers attending and supporting partner/vendor ecosystem.
First from the Chariman and CEO of Macy*s
- In regards to Macys.com + Bloomingdales.com, these two sites generate $1 billion in online sales, but an additional $5 billion+ in store sales influenced. (Macy*s total revenue is $24B for reference)
- A multi-channel Macy’s customer is worth…
- 2X more than just a store only customer
- 50% more (1.5 times more) to the stores than just a store only customer
- Macy’s has found that $1 spent online influenced $5.77 in additional store purchases within first 10 days (Dunhumby analysis)
- Sees over 3X conversion for those consumers that go into a product finder experience online
- Macy*s nationalized all operations back to NYC, but created 65 “zones” of local decisioning at the market level so as to still receive intel on the local level
- Has over 300,000 product reviews live on Macys.com
- The online and store sides of the business each have dedicated staff that both report to the same person (the CMO)
Forrester shared some stats such as:
- 22% average open rate for emails
- 0.4% click thru rate on social media ads
eBay has some of the best insights around eCommerce such as:
- eCommerce growing from its current 5% of offline sales all the way up to 15% to 20% of offline sales over the next 5+ years
- Forecasting that up to 40% of all online access will come from mobile devices within the next 2-3 years
- From the eBay iPhone app alone, this app has driven over $400 million in volume for eBay
- eBay has over 170 million items live at any point in time, with only 10% – 12% of these items being structured data
- Over 75% of eBay’s traffic comes from organic sources, but they do buy over 20 million keywords from Google for example
- The largest seller on eBay sells over $40 million worth of stuff
- Auctions at this point only account for 25% of all volume on eBay
Resources Interactive offered up:
- The US household on average is making less money: $50,303 in 2009 from $51,295 in 1998 (US Census)
- Folks are getting thrifty: Sales at Goodwill stores open at least a year ago rose 7.1% in the first three months of 2009 over the same period a year earlier
- ROBO shopping is a behavior that youngsters are learning: 69% of young people now research all purchases before they buy anything
- Deals are red hot: Coupon sites have been the 2nd most visited category on the Internet, behind job sites, for about a year (eMarketer May 2009)
- The concept of buying branded products for many digital moms is dead: According to TNS Retail Forward , about 42% of moms are buying store brands all the time
- ROBO shopping overall is the only way consumers are shopping now. Its not a trend its status quot: Some retailers are reporting up to 98% of in store shoppers report that they have already pre-shopped online before hand according to BIGResearch and Resources Interactive survey from August 2009
The CircularCentral platform continue to mature. With graceful aging the richness of features multiplies. Yesterday three key new features were deployed to the the latest instance of CircularCentral live within ShopLocal.com which are:
- Related Online Offers: Within the item detail page, additional online offers provided by our great partner Shopping.com (SDC) are being tasteful integrated so as to offer the consumer a true mutli-channel experience. This also adds an element of cross-selling and discovery as it offers additional similar products to the local on-sale one.
- Synchronized Display Ads: Since CircularCentral is built using Adobe Flex 3 and deployed via the Adobe Flash Player browser plugin, all of the intrasite user actions do no cause the overall HTML page to re-load. This means unless specific ad server integration is undertaken, all of the many page views that a CircularCentral guest would generate (see past averages of page view per visit performance) would only result in one paid banner ad impression. The team has wired things up in such a way that the most every page view that is generated within the CircularCentral application results in a new display ad being rendered.
- New Backend Database: The SiteSolutions team here at ShopLocal has finally switched out the backend systems that power CircularCentral to use the much more powerful Endeca search engine that runs site search and guided navigation currently within ShopLocal.com. This is a key foundational building block of letting us expand the functionality further in the future.
Here is the default entry view of CircularCentral where a user is asked to pick a single retailer of interest that they want to explore the print ads for. Note the leaderboard display ads integrated above and below the CircularCentral content area.
Here is an item detail page within CircularCentral that depicts the related available online products. A user can actually scroll through a number of relevant suggested eCommerce offers within this horizontal carousel UI element. Also notice that the banner ads are different, even though the overall parent HTML page has not been refreshed.
Below are a few highlights from this new white paper that the e-Tailing group put together. It’s a pretty wide ranging report that you can download a PDF copy right here that is worth a read to get a nice perspective to what is on the mind of the top retailer executives as it it loaded with nice quotes and soundbites.
1. Surprised to see how high retailers are ranking the integration and on-site promotion of sales and specials.
Letting the Numbers Talk
A look at the merchant perspective relative to 52 features surveyed in our Annual Merchant Survey sets the tone for the next section. Performers that are most valuable to merchants and rate in the top-ten position include keyword search, promotional elements such as sales/specials, seasonal promotions, and free shipping, all of which were mentioned by those interviewed. Email has already been covered extensively and rich content, from alternative views to user generated content, is high on the list of strong performers as well.
Note the #2 spot the Sales or Specials holds on this "what's the most important" feature on a retailer's web site.
2. No shocker here as pretty much every retailer client of ShopLocal’s has been talking about some variation of this print to digital shift this year. However everyone has very different predictions on how fast the shift will happen and what digital marketing and advertising vehicles will be a part of the new media mix.
Shift from Print to Digital
Generally speaking, we are likely to see a great shift to the Web. Some, like Orvis’s Wolansky believe, “The future of the direct business is online, particularly for customer acquisition. Ten years later we’re at the place where these words are coming back to our lexicon.” Another direct marketer, Patagonia, reports reducing their print advertising budget. The majority of their print efforts are now going to the catalog. JCPenney’s Rich Last, Vice President, Director of New Business Development, jcp.com is among those who discuss the shift from print to digital, especially for brick and mortar merchants. “The economy has clearly forced this to accelerate where we must move to marketing that is manageable and measurable from a cost standpoint.” Oriental Trading, according to Taylor, is also cutting back their marketing spend which includes less paper mailings as prospecting performance has been poor with customers being relatively risk-averse.
3. Great to see continued confirmation that for retailers with large store footprints, many of the users that show up on these retailer.com sites are in fact looking for store based information and that the store finder and online circular remain absolutely key.
Acquire for Cross-Channel Exposure
Last imparts that every other household shops at JCPenney so their strategy is to get as many dollars from customers overall and to get them exposed to the digital channel. For them the Internet is a cross channel traffic acquisition vehicle driving customers store-to-Web or Web-to-store depending on preferences. Similarly, because the Wal-Mart store shopper is online and 130 million strong, walmart.com has an enviable prospecting universe. As such they (walmart.com) have designed programs to be relevant to store customers including the online circular, Find-In-Store functionality, and the popular Site-to-Store program.
So within the last week or so, two nifty retail print ads appeared within the Chicago Tribune newspaper that promoted a reader of the print ad to go online for more information. This type of of integrated multi-channel promotion really is becoming the norm rather than the exception.
The two retailer examples that were spotted out in the wild were for Sears and Target. Both do a nice job of messaging that there are other store based deals available within the retailer’s online weekly ad site.
Sears in the bottom left hand corner (e.g., the blue box) of this print ad that appeared within the Chicago Tribune is trying to promote three e-buster deals that are only available online for a limited period of time. It also messages that there are other great deals always available within the Sears online weekly ad site.
Within the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune, Target is taking out a ROP ad every single week within the bottom of the front page that is promoting grocery deals within their SuperTarget (those Target stores that sell grocery items) stores and the same ad also attempts to drive consumers back to their online weekly ad site for more deals.
One of the easiest ways to become more multi-channel within an online weekly ad site is to enable buy online linkage or to easily allow a user to add a specific product of interest to the retailer’s dot com checkout cart / basket. This post will overview the later on how setting up a one-click to buy online integration is a great value add to consider deploying to any SmartCircular site.
There are only a few base requirements that are needed to allow for this add to cart type integration:
- The retailer’s dot com site engine needs to allow external 3rd parties (such as ShopLocal) to directly place an item within a user’s cart. This method needs to be able to be documented, explained and tested
- The retailer needs to help ShopLocal understand if all items in the weekly ad should have this add to cart feature enabled, or if only a subset of the items qualify for having this additional add to cart button displayed
- The retailer needs to make clear how to construct an one-click add to cart URL for any given product
- The retailer must decide if there is value in displaying the regular eCommerce item detail page link (that takes a user to the product detail page within retailer.com) AND the add to cart link, or just the add to cart link. It typically makes sense to display both, but to re-label the buy online link (eCommerce item detail page link) to read “View More Info” or something similar and to use this as a way of connecting the weekly ad item back to the product detail page on the retailer’s dot com site for informational purposes (since many retailers have really rich product detail pages filled with ratings, reviews, product specs, etc).
Best Buy’s online weekly ad site is a great example of how a one-click, add to cart integration can be very organic and help drive additional eCommerce purchases. Target’s weekly ad also features this type of data driven, add to cart integration on those weekly ad items that are available for purchase within Target.com
This is how a category browse result set is returned with the SmartCircular 4.1 site. Notice that two (2) of the four (4) items visible in this screen shot have an blue "Add to Cart" button visible. This is all data driven logic that determines which products are available online within the retailer's dot com site and automatically creates the correct deep add to cart link
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