It excites me to know end to praise a usability innovation from an online retailer that is NOT Amazon. Hooray!

I noticed a filtered navigation design on Overstock that is really interesting. It combines search with filtered navigation - here’s what I mean:

Say you’re checking out the “Rings” category. You’re presented with a number of ways to narrow your results: Category, Metal, Size, Price and Stone.

But if you’re looking for say, a cocktail ring - this could include a variety of gemstones and metals, could be at any number of price points and would depend on what size you are looking for. Rather than looking at ALL items in the “Rings” category, you can hone in on just the cocktail rings by searching for “cocktail.”

Read the rest of this entry »

We talk about Amazon often here on Get Elastic, because you’ll always find some innovation, design or usability improvement to blog about there.

Amazon sometimes attracts more reviews than customers want to read. So Amazon provides tools to filter reviews by star rating and displays the “most helpful” positive and negative review as determined by Amazon’s community.

Plus, you can also search reviews by keyword.

Which is helpful, because you don’t want to buy a product that sucks unless it’s a vacuum or a Flowbee.

Amazon is testing new waters in mobile marketing with its Text-Buy-It technology launched earlier this week. The new service allows customers to check prices from their cell-phone completely through text messaging - bypassing the need to access the mobile web (many people still don’t have web access or incur extra costs per web page viewed). Most if not all phones are text-ready and in general it’s not complicated to figure out.

Since Amazon undersells most brick-and-mortar retailers and is aggressively expanding its product line (including wines), physical stores could turn into local showrooms for Amazon’s inventory - only to help push customers towards an Amazon conversion.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Text a product name, search keyword, UPC code or ISBN number to “AMAZON” (262966)
Step 2: Amazon sends back a numbered list of products and prices matching your search
Step 3: If you find the item you want in stock and at a favorable price you can click the number beside the result to buy
Step 4: Amazon calls (not texts) you back with final details of your order
Step 5: You confirm or cancel your purchase, provide an email address and select a preferred shipping speed

While customers can’t access features that makes Amazon famous like customer reviews and cross-sell suggestions, this is likely going to be a very popular service that could really nail local retailers - the country is in a recession, businesses are already feeling the pinch and customers are more price sensitive.

No word on super-saver shipping options for multiple purchases or if purchases made within a certain time period can be combined.

We can thank Amazon for pioneering many innovations in ecommerce and now mobile commerce. This is certainly an exciting development for discount retailers like Overstock who could develop similar services. It could also work well for etailers that sell items carried by other retailers and can’t compete on price, but have earned loyal and passionate customers through rewards programs, great service or word-of-mouth (Zappos is a good example).

As customer reviews become more and more common on ecommerce sites, we can expect innovations to emerge in design, usability and quality.

It’s always a good idea to keep an eye on Amazon for usability innovations. Today we’ll look at an example of how Amazon helps customers filter product reviews when there are literally hundreds of them. Not only does Amazon help customers hone in on specific types of reviews, it also takes the opportunity to show relevant merchandising based on the customer reviews themselves. In this post I’ll also suggest something that Amazon isn’t doing yet that could help you save sales when review content actually discourages a customer to purchase the item in question.

I’m going to use the example of a book that’s going to be a top-seller on Amazon simply because it’s endorsed by perhaps the most influential television personality in the world - Oprah Winfrey. Most people will not feel the need to read reviews because they trust her opinion so much. Others will be so excited about the book they will read the reviews just to tide them over until the book arrives at their door.

Read the rest of this entry »

We just wrapped up our webinar on merchandising (cross-selling and up-selling) with Mike Svatek of Baynote.

This was an incredible session and I’m sure you’ll get a lot out of catching the Webinar replay which will be posted within the next few days. The replay will walk you through all of the screenshots used in the presentation - I’ll only be using select screenshots for this recap.

Mike chose the king of cross-selling Amazon to illustrate the concepts in the webinar, sharing an impressive statistic:

35% of Amazon Sales come from cross-sells & recommendations
Venturebeat (Dec 06)

How does Amazon do this?

Merchandising Based on Intent

First-Time Visitors - Pre-Intent

If Amazon has no information on you (your first visit, you are not logged in or your cache and cookies are cleared) you’ll see default merchandising (pre-intent) within a number of merchandising zones, what Mike refers to as a shotgun approach:

Read the rest of this entry »

In case you missed it on TechCrunch the other day, Google is now showing search boxes within SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for some of the larger online retailers like Amazon, Zappos and Office Max.

The boxes only appear for certain keywords, for example “amazon” and “shop amazon” but not “amazon books.” Zappos shows up for “zappos shoes” but not “zappos shopping.” For other sites, adding “shop” or “shopping” to the site name won’t trigger a search box at all.

OfficeMax should be pleased that this works for them but not for Staples and Office Depot, at least it makes them seem a bit more important? I noticed that Target and Walmart get a search box, but not Sears. NewEgg, Radio Shack and BestBuy get one, but not Circuit City. Ebay and Overstock also are left out, which is a bit of a head-scratcher.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we all know how important customer reviews are to retailers and customers alike. They help convert buyers by building trust and confidence in the product, they reduce returns, draw long-tail search traffic and are a simple entry into on-site communities for ecommerce websites.

But there was a time when no one had them. It makes you wonder what we’re missing today that we don’t know we’re missing.

Let’s take another effective merchandising tool: cross-selling. Currently, ecommerce marketers are banking that their personal cross-sell suggestions or algorithmic-based recommendations will be relevant and attractive to shoppers. This *can* be really hit and miss. But what if we gave customers a crack at cross-selling?

Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve added your item to your cart, but you’re not finished shopping. So, you look for the “Continue Shopping” link to thrust you back to…to what? The product page? The category page? The home page?

Most sites don’t give you a clue where you’ll end up. GrokDotCom mentioned this in Grok’s Biggest Gripes about the ecommerce experience, and an informal survey of the author’s contemporaries revealed 100% of them found this irritating.

I’ve observed a number of different ways to handle “Continue Shopping” navigation in my online shopping escapades. I decided to check out 100 of the top internet retailers and round up the methods used and the frequency of each. The following is a rundown on “Continue Shopping” options, frequency and examples for your inspiration, curiosity and comments.

AJAX Pop-Up - 19%

Love or hate Web 2.0, 17 out of 100 retailers use an AJAX popup to indicate an item has been added to the cart. Though this is nice and convenient to keep the shopper on the product page, it can be hard for inexperienced online shoppers to notice what’s happened. Some sites are more obvious than others.

Patagonia and Moosejaw Mountaineering use a roll-out notice in the top right of the product page. You must click to close this box, but both retailers place the close button in the same place, with the same icon. This is Moosejaw’s:

Can you figure out how to close this window?

Read the rest of this entry »

Do you sell products that lend themselves to repeat purchases? This could be vitamins, pharmacy, contact lenses, hair product, office supplies, grocery or anything that you expect someone to “use up.”

Amazon sells, amongst other things, coffee beans. Check out the offer for free shipping and a 15% discount for customers who want to subscribe to the product:

Here’s what Amazon’s doing right:

1. Offers of free shipping and discount are strong motivators for repeat purchases.
2. Allows you to select the subscription schedule for 1, 2, 3 or 6 months.
3. Provides a customer service, no need to return to the site again, place order and wait when quantities get low.
4. The offer is placed in the product description and right near the cart button. Impossible to miss if you want to buy this product.

I bet you’ll be hard pressed to find many other online retailers taking advantage of this technique.

In last week’s webinar on holiday marketing, Jason Billingsley and I discussed the potential for online retailers to use Geo-IP targeting to serve specific content to different site visitors based on their geographic location. In this post, I’d like to recap the ideas mentioned in the webinar.

When your browser requests content from a website’s server that uses geo-ip techonolgy, it’s checked against a database to determine your country, region, city or even latitude/longitude and content is delivered based on your location. When you visit a web portal, for example, and you see your local news or weather appearing - this is geo-IP content delivery in action. This is just one example, but there are ways this can be effectively used on ecommerce websites:

Target By Country

If you have multiple websites targeted at individual countries, you can simply redirect visitors to the appropriate site when they click a link to your .com site or type it in directly into a browser.

Or you can detect when a visitor is from a different country when they land on your .com site and inform them of your nationalized site like Amazon:

Read the rest of this entry »