American Eagle Outfitters recently AJAX-ed up its web design including its navigation menu. What’s different about AE’s flyout menu that’s different from Office Max’ and Eddie Bauer’s navigation redesign is that it actually merchandises within the flyout. Here’s what I mean:

When you roll over a section in the horizontal menu, a sub-menu appears with some featured items. In the example above, you see one featured Clearance item from each category: men’s, women’s and aerie.

This technique allows you to show more content without a click. Clicking away from a page means another click if you want to go back. But flyouts give the user a faster peek at what’s behind the menu buttons. And if you accidentally roll over a menu item, you may be enticed by that 50% off offer you otherwise would not be aware of.

The downsides of AJAX-y menus are they cover up content, can be finicky and require steady mouse control to operate properly. Or worse, they can appear when you don’t expect them too when you mouse a bit too close to the hot-spot. Not everyone will find this a usability improvement.

I noticed when you click on the Clearance button you get different featured items. I think it would be better to keep the same items as in the flyout, because a customer may click out of habit, and wonder where that green camisole disappeared to. You want to minimize the “whoa, what happened?” factor, especially when you’re introducing Web 2.0 coolness that may involve a learning curve. (Even for technosavvy Millennials like the AE customer. It just might be mom or grandma picking out a gift).

Text in the red box doesn’t need to change after you click on Clearance. If a customer clicks on Clearance, he/she understands it’s the clearance section, you don’t have to restate the obvious. When it comes to online copy - less is more.

All-in-all, it’s a pretty neat idea. What do you think about merchandising within navigation? Love it? Hate it?

PS: If you’re interested in merchandising tips and trends, be sure to sign up today for our upcoming webinar: Effective Online Merchandising: What Sells?

I heard a true story years ago about a telephone service in the UK, where lonely women would call to hear a soothing, pre-recorded male voice say things like “you know what, you’re really beautiful.” Apparently it was hugely popular.

Well, Australian natural male grooming product company Vitaman has put this idea on steroids with its interactive and innovative online store.

Meet Nikki, a leggy Micha Barton lookalike with an Aussie accent. She is your personal shopping valet. When you drag items into your shopping bag, Nikki complements you on your selection with lines like “Mmmmmm, this smells amazing on your skin,” and “Oooh, I love a brave sportsman who puts his body on the line.”

What’s genius is, Nikki changes her outfit for each product category, so that motivates guys to at least check out each product category. Unfortunately, most of the products on the shelf have identical packaging, so it might be a bit better for Nikki to give a quick spiel on each category’s offering and what makes them so amazing. You’ve got a captivated audience, girl, sell!

Another unfortunate is that products must be added to the bag to be rewarded with the purring praise for your selection. This means many overloaded carts filled with products not really intended to buy. But Vitaman makes it easy to remove items from your cart when you’re ready to check out. The best part of the cart is when you view your cart, Nikki says “Are you sure that’s all you want?” Don’t you wish you could say that from your cart page?

Continue Reading:
Is Flattery A Viable Selling Strategy? »

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?

Continue Reading:
Continue Shopping Means What? »

I discovered an interesting UK Shopping 2.0 site called the Imagini Gift Finder. It’s kind of like social wishlisting meets Myers-Briggs — you work through a series of “questions” and you get results based on your answers. But the twist is, you choose from a set of images what appeals to you most. The system uses your choices to determine your “Visual DNA” and present you with relevant gifts.

You can get suggestions for your own gifts and build a wishlist that you can send to your friends *hint.* Or, you can invite a “Valentine” to take the quiz and build a wishlist for you so you don’t have to obsess over whether your honey likes a burger with or without a bun.

Here are just a few of the questions and images. If you don’t like any of the pictures, you can click on a gray box to skip.

Continue Reading:
Imagini Helps You Find Gifts Using Visual DNA »

If you’ve heard of Twitter, you either love it or can’t understand what all the Tweet’s about. A fairly new social media phenomenon, Twitter is a mashup between intant messaging and blogging, allowing users to give subscribers (friends/stalkers) updates on what you’re doing. Users can receive twitter updates via instant message, email, SMS (text messages – yes this costs money) or more recently, through Facebook.

Twitter’s been steadily growing in popularity, and now a couple e-commerce sites have pioneered the application to integrate with their own sites.

Woot.com

If you haven’t heard about Woot, it’s an online shopping site with a twist – one product, one day only. When it’s all sold out, that’s it until the next day when a new product is featured. And it’s insanely popular (at least amongst the geeknorati). Here’s a more detailed and entertaining explanation of Woot’s raison d’etre, and a Wikipedia article if you’re keen.

So now you can stay in the know about Woot’s product of the day via SMS or instant message by signing up with Twitter and subscribing to Woot’s feed by clicking “Add Woot” under the “Actions” box. And you’ll also receive notification when the product’s sold out.

What I think is missing from Woot is a call-to-action to subscribe to the Twitter feed on their website.

Amazon.com

Someone beat Amazon to the username punch, but you can see the feed here under Amazondeals. Here you’ll get every update from Amazon’s Gold Box Deal of the Day.

Twitter feeds are an easy and cheap way for any e-tailer to use social media. Just be sure to build your following by letting site users know that you’re Tweeting deals and news. Add a call-to-action button on your site, blog about it and notify your opt-in subscribers.

Shel Holtz joins the conversation to discuss the ways new marketing and communication tools can assist retailers collaborate with customers - resulting in better experiences and increased sales.

Along with host DaveO, they discuss blogging for business, reasons for podcasting, what’s up with Second Life, ways to engage audiences with Twitter and Ustream.tv and the low-down on Social Media Releases plus Shel wisely advises strategic action before diving in.

MP3 File

(crayonville in Second Life)

Shel is frequent flier, professional speaker and prolific writer as well as VP of New Marketing at crayon (a new marketing company). He joined us from Toronto where is presenting at Visa’s Ecommerce Summit. Thanks to Chris Clarke at Thornley Fallis Communications for the hookup. Thanks to Derek K. Miller (Penmachine.com) for music track “That’s No Dream.”

Topical Annotations

A Shel of my Former Self - Shel’s Holtz’s personal blog

Holtz Communications + Technology - Shel’s professional services

Road Weary - Shel’s Travel frustration blog

crayon - a new marketing company - Shel’s daily toil

The American Family Whirlpool podcast

Linden Labs’ Second Life

Darren Barefoot’s GetaFirstLife project

GetaFirstLife.com

Get a First Life - Second Life Insider

Technorati tag: secondlife

crayon in Second Life

Twitter

Twitter - Wikipedia

twittervision

Ustream.tv

Social Media Release

Chris Heuer’s Idea Engine

Microformats

Social Media Club

Social Media Club is being organized for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and for promoting media literacy. This is the beginning of a global conversation about building an organization and a community where the many diverse groups of people who care about social media can come together to discover, connect, share and learn.

Sample Social Press Release (Coca-cola Virtual Thirst campaign by crayola)

I am currently in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Expo. The first session I attended was on the New Hybrid Designer. Some well known panelists were on stage including Kelly Goto. They essentially chatted about how the typical ‘web designer’ is no longer just a designer, but must also have a command of development as well - okay maybe not command, but they should be versed and know what a variable, loop and array is. The one nugget I grabbed from this session is particularly relevant to Elastic Path…

We have recently been on the hunt for a User Experience Designer (the job is now filled). We had a high bar as we desired a workflow and experience/front end coding/visual experience person. Quite a lofty expectation. Like in any project, you can usually only have 2 out of the 3. The panel discussed not pigeon holing employees into vertical roles, but educating and enabling cross functionality.

The most successful hybrid designers/developers are often the knowledge seeking ones. They subscribe to both design and programming feeds. Often send emails to other staff about new things they have found or have developed. They are rare, and we need to start molding more of them within our organizations in order to become more agile. Agility seemed to be a key factor in the shift to a hybrid designer.

The last thing that was quite relevant was regarding workflow. The old way was to start with a sitemap. A very “book” centric approach. The new way is to start with user intent. This is a huge shift in thinking for a user experience designer on the web. Users enter a workflow from so many different ways nowadays. The system should be more open and less linear.

EP’s marketing dude Jason B and product guru (and resident Scotsman) Peter are at the Web 2.0 pow wow laden with industry bigwigs and schoomers. I am following along here in Vancouver via Jeremiah Owyang’s and Robert Scoble’s live Ustream feeds.

The notorious Scobelizer is sporting a head cam and Jeremiah is set up with a tripod and just talked to Tris Hussey from Pender Island here in BC. Right now, they are both chatting with people over ham and cheeses sandwiches in a crowded cafeteria area but this is not lightweight chatting - big topics and heavy memes as the geeks congregate on camera - not the best dressed crew but smart indeed.

At each Ustream live feed, there is a chat room and the interactivity is basically real-time with technical tips as well as general banter coming across the wire as these Podtech guys tweak this new technology.

I’m keeping an eye out for Jason and Peter but no spotting them yet. Also, the Twitter is going wild with the back-channel ephemeral goings-on of the tech-set.

Wrapping up Etail West in Palm Desert, Dave O chats with Greg Kaldor of Jellyfish about their hyper-socialized shopping comparison engine with a reserve auction component called Smack Shopping (a smack is to jellyfish what a herd is to bison or a flock is to geese). Topics include group psychology, crowd behavior, honesty in pricing, fair compensation and the unpleasant sting of an angry jellyfish plus there vision of the future of advertising.

MP3 File

[Photo of Jellyfish crew (Greg Kaldor far right)
by DaveO at Etail West]

Delivering personalized, opt-in, granular product info rather than spewing ads at a mass market is the topic as Paul Rosenblum of Mybuys.com visits with DaveO and Jason Billingsley who also talk about RSS feedreader adoption and Web 2.0 social shopping trends while at Etail West.

MP3 File

[photo of Paul Rosenblum by DaveO at Etail West]