Black Friday is nearly upon us, and interest in the annual shopping splurge appears to be taking hold in the UK… sort of.
In the US it makes sense as Black Friday always coincides with the day after Thanksgiving, but on these shores it all feels a bit forced.
Why should we care about a shopping event that coincides with a public holiday that means nothing in the UK?
It’s that time of year again, when people struggle to choose presents for relatives they see but once a year and barely know.
The solution to this, beyond just plumping for wine or a selection box, is to use a gift finder tool.
Some of our biggest retailers have kindly provided these tools to assist our present buying this year. So how well do they work?
Product recommendations are responsible for an average of 10%-30% of ecommerce site revenues.
However, with so many ways to present product recommendations, I’ve decided to highlight four facts based on anonymous aggregated data collected from 50m sessions that were exposed to product recommendations.
Keeping these four facts in mind can really make a difference in generating what can be up to a third of your site’s revenue.
Cycling has become a hugely popular sport across Britain in recent years, thanks largely to the nation’s success in the Olympics and Tour De France.
Bike retailers have obviously been among the main beneficiaries, as any new bike purchase also requires the customer to invest in a load of expensive accessories.
In a previous interview Adam Tranter, editor of Cyclosport.org, told me that Wiggle and Chain Reaction are two of the most prominent ecommerce sites in the cycling world, so I thought I’d conduct a site test to see what they’re getting right.
I’ve also included Evans Cycles as that’s where I bought my current bike from.
As a trendy London hipster (the only true part of that description is that I work in London) I’m well into fixie bikes, so for this user test I thought I’d try to find myself a new single-speed model.
Read on to find out how these three retailers stack up, and if cycling is your thing then get involved with Econsultancy’s Marketing Cycle.
Stage one is from London to Brighton on Thursday 9 October, an 85-mile route that’s so leisurely even I’ll be joining the peloton.
In the same way that exclusive offers and flash sales cause shoppers to throw rational thought out of the window, dwindling stock levels create a fear of loss and a sense of urgency that nudges consumers ever closer to making a purchase.
Ecommerce retailers are obviously wise to this as a sales tactic and it’s common to see stock information displayed prominently on product pages.
With this in mind I’ve been scouring apparel ecommerce sites to see how different retailers present stock levels as part of their product page design.
Here’s a selection of what I found…
If you were wise enough to setup an online marketplace in the early days of the internet and also had great business chops, you might have been a very rich person by now.
Some of the world’s biggest ecommerce companies are those that don’t actually sell any of their own products, or rely to a large extent on third-party sellers.
Amazon is the most obvious example, while eBay has also taken great pains to rebrand as a marketplace rather than an auction site (try saying that eBay is an auction site in a blog post and see how long it takes for the PRs to knock on your door).
Similarly, in the UK Play.com shifted from being an ecommerce site to an “online trading platform” after being bought out by Rakuten, a Japanese tech company that is best known for its Rakuten Ichiba marketplace.
Multichannel retailing involves offering customers a variety of experiences and ways to buy, including brick-and-mortar stores, online shops, telesales, mobile and tablet commerce.
It covers transactions from browsing to buying and returning, as well as pre and post-sale service. For luxury retailers, this means more channels and more devices, across which quality, service and experience must be communicated.
The transition from bricks-and-mortar to clicks-and-mortar, although full of opportunity, is not without its challenges.
In addition to the generic challenges that come with updating a business model, the luxury sector, and indeed the department store luxury market, has its own set of unique challenges.
Psychological pricing is a strategy that retailers can take advantage of, whether they operate online, offline, or in multiple channels.
When retailers tap into these pricing tactics, they are able to effectively boost sales and conversions.
There are a variety of pricing tricks and tips to entice shoppers to buy, so price intelligently to benefit from this phenomenon.
Sainsbury’s has unveiled a few tweaks to its ecommerce store as part of a site replatforming that is aimed at improving its multichannel shopping experience.
The new site has one or two new features, including improved navigation, favourites and more personalised offers.
However the addition that caught my eye is the new ability to add ingredients directly from the recipe pages.
I’m surprised that this functionality didn’t exist before as it seems like an obvious way of improving the user experience and grabbing some incremental sales.
The huge rush to content marketing also makes these recipe pages important for customer acquisition and engagement, so one would assume that they would have been prioritised before now.
Online shopping has become so much more than simply a place to buy.
Ecommerce websites are now places to curate brands and promote customer interaction and editorial content is a key tool to ensure consistent engagement for continued sales and results.
Here’s an overview of how you can use content to help increase conversion rates.
Online retailers are struggling to unearth the reasons why shoppers abandon their sites without converting.
Econsultancy recent Reducing Customer Struggle report reveals that a staggering 73% of the companies surveyed admit that they are unaware of the abandonment reasons
“I’m just browsing” is reported as one of the major abandonment reasons. This reason accounts for anywhere between 37% to 57% of the total online shoppers who left without buying.