Coupon aggregators have found a following among frugal shoppers, but all of them seemed to be a bombardment of text and bad design. See Coupon Surfer above for an example of what I am talking about. I expect these sites to continue to increase traffic, and I expect new entrant Trezr will be a large part of the increase. Look at the homepage:
Bargain hunters like a clean user experience too and I expect Trezr to take off. The site aggregates Deals (Free Cold Stone Ice Cream on Sept 28th), Coupons (American Apparel - 15% Off With Student ID), and Tips (The Best Time to Buy Everything). Slick design, but the site will benefit from a larger user base. This will help combat the gaming of the deals, as one user has done by linking to 5 different products from Anthropologie. Seems suspicious, but I might be a little paranoid. The products are on sale. Watch these sites, if you aren’t already, and keep track of their effects. You don’t want to be caught out like Starbucks was when their free iced coffee coupon went viral and they had to pull it for fear of losing millions.
I don’t watch much TV, and when I do it’s on my DVR so I can skip the commercials. But with the return of football I find myself watching live television again, and with live TV comes advertising. Thankfully the Pets.com sock puppet and GoDaddy’s scantily clad spokesgirl are gone, but I have noticed a resurgence in online retailers on TV.
The first ad I noticed was for eBay express, their site for selling new items. (just like every other ecommerce site, how novel) You can see all 22 commercials at whatisit.com. My favorite is in the top right corner, because everyone knows car chases and explosions are integral to the ecommerce experience. Wait, maybe a sockpuppet dog isn’t a bad idea after all.
eBay does a better job than Buy.com which thinks putting Scott Blum, their founder and chairman, on TV for 30 seconds is anything close to a good idea. Seriously, go watch the commercial. It’s creepy in a robotronic-kids-of-disneyland way.
This fall’s Buy.com commercial is actually the third they have run promoting 10% off of Amazon’s book prices. Compete.com analyzed the effect these commercials have had on visits and conversion rates for Buy.com and Amazon, starting with the introduction of the promotion last September. The analysis was published on Seeking Alpha. While the commercials raised awareness and increased the amount of Amazon customers visiting Buy.com, they did not help raise conversion rates.
Marketing is important, but dropping millions of dollars on national TV campaigns seems to be just as smart as it was in 2000 when Pets.com came out with that memorable sock puppet dog. From a 2000 Forbes’ article about the demise of Pets.com:
So indelible was the puppet that it was reportedly Pets.com’s best-selling product.
Of course, that should have been a warning. When your commercial mascot outsells your company’s actual products, you may need to rethink your business plan.
Starting this month you can find Varien wisdom in each issue of Practical eCommerce magazine. The feature, looking at the design/usability of a website and grading the site on its different aspects, is titled “Usability Report Card”. Some of the aspects include ease-of-browsing, product pages and error recognition. The first Usability Report Card is up on the website and in the September issue of the magazine. It looked at Fugitive Toys, a retailer of vinyl toys, a site that did quite well on the report card. From the ease-of-browsing section, which Fugitive Toys received a B- for,
There are no subcategories, only categories and product pages. This becomes a problem in the “Designer Figures” page where the user must scroll through 45 products. Dividing the section into subcategories or making the default view split the products between pages would help the browsing of products.
To see the rest of the article pick up the September issue or visit their website. A subscription to the digital version only costs $9 a year. I’m not able to post the full articles here, but I will consider grading sites here on the blog in the same way we do for the magazine. Post a comment or send me an email (chris at varien dot com) if you want your site graded.
In the interest of lightening up your Friday we share this story from today’s LA Times. It seems one Eugene Church saw the benefits of eCommerce and decided to expand his business online. The only problem is his business was selling “high-grade marijuana.” Church posted an ad on Craigslist advertising his wares and was met by Sheriff’s deputies when he showed up in Agoura Hills. The story closes out with this gem of a quote from Sheriff’s Capt. Ron Nelson,
We catch the dumb ones.
They certainly do.
The picture above is the RSS feed of Yahoo’s new movie releases. RSS, or real simple syndication, is a great way to monitor massive amount of information. Every morning I check roughly 50 different blogs and news sites to see if anything important has developed in the world of eCommerce. Clicking through to each site would take hours, so I use an RSS reader to check which sites have updated their content and to read articles. Basically, RSS is a great way to keep informed of changes in the content of a site.
However, only 5% of American adults use RSS right now and 88% of at work Americans don’t even know what RSS is. (If this includes you, just click on the first link of this article to find out) Why am I suggesting its use then? First let’s look at an example of an RSS feed one of our clients, Spark Fun Electronics, uses. This is the news section on their homepage:
This is what their RSS feed looks like:
While their RSS feed doesn’t include pictures, this can be accomplished. It is the ability to quickly scan articles that makes RSS such a time saver. Now, back to those statistics. Most Americans started using email because it was included with AOL and was easily learned. I firmly believe RSS will experience the same adoption rate when the world’s most popular web browser, Internet Explorer, is updated with an included RSS reader. The new version should do for RSS what AOL did for email. Is your site ready?
