e-retail has a lot of room for improvement, usability and customer serivce wise

Was checking my RSS feeds after almost a week today, and stumbled upon this eye-opener.

The Get Elastic blog posts about a study that was done on 300 major e-retailers on the basis various usability and customer support related factors. The results make you wonder that e-commerce could really have been much larger/more trusted/liked than it is already only if e-retailers would pay more attention to giving customers a ‘better than simply “good”‘ shopping experience.

A few of the study’s findings:

Enlarge Image Feature - used by 76% of sites

Estimated Delivery - 74% of sites

Gift Cards - used by 58%

Timely and Accurate E-Mail Support - 58% responded correctly within 24 hours

Free Shipping - 43%

Pre-Checkout Shipping Calculation - found on 42% of sites

In Stock Availability - used by 39% (Especially important over the holidays)

Poor Fonts - 38% had fonts that are difficult to read - either too small or not web-friendly

Multiple Image Views - 38% offered this feature

More Than 4 Steps in Checkout - 35% of sites

Customer Reviews - 33% of sites

In-Store Pick Up - 10% of sites that have local stores

Mulitple Payment Options - 10-20% offer one or more options like PayPal, Google Checkout, pay by check or Bill Me Later

More on the Get Elastic Blog

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Customer Support 2.1 - ClixConnect.com

Mitch Cohen, entrepreneur and undergrad student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada sent me an email last week.

Mitch writes:

I’m a long-time reader and subscriber of Final Tag. I wanted to shoot an e-mail over to you to let you know what I’m up to - I thought you may be interested because I’ve leveraged many of the teachings from your blog in my new “Web 2.1″ endeavor

(LOL @ “teachings” hehe … I just talk here, never thought these posts would be perceived as teachings, hehe. But thanks for the ego-boost.) Cool! :D. It’s awesome to know ideas are being extracted out of the what is posted here!

That’s the first email of it’s kind I have seen in my mailbox since starting the blog a few months ago.

Anyway, Mitch and his friend - also an undergrad students at the McGill university have started a “customer support 2.1″ web company called ClixConnect.

Here’s why it’s cool:

The thing about online shopping is that there is no time constraint. Stores are open when you want to shop. The live chat feature that many sites offer is a great way to make online shoppers feel they are interacting with real people and persuades them to make their buying decisions quickly. In most cases, however, the live chat feature is only available when a store employee is online. If one wants to shop at say 2 AM in the morning, smaller shops will have no live chat, and probably, the sale will happen ultimately at a larger shop where instant customer support is available at that time.

Clicxconnect enables small to mid sized internet companies, specifically e-retailers, to offer 24/7/365 customer support on their websites. The idea behind how this is done is pretty simple and unique - You take care of the customer support while you are online. When you are offline, someone from the clixconnect call center will take over and offer customer support on your behalf. Pricing, apart from a monthly fee is based on the number of customer support minutes provided by the clixconnect call center. Plans (with a certain number of minutes included with each) start from $79/ month - which most smaller e-retailers can easily afford to spend in order to attract much better conversion ratios and very satisfied customers.

That was only customer support 2.0. Here’s the 2.1 part:

In Mitch’s own words:

hat’s half the innovation. The hugely innovative component of ClixConnect (and the part that for which we were truly inspired by your blog) is that we also have a new technology in our software which enables automated chat recommendations for customers, based upon the product they are viewing. So say someone is looking at a red t-shirt on a website, an automated chat window can appear recommending a blue pair of pants to them.

That’s the “if you like this, you may also like…” feature as seen on amazon.com, but done by a human - well, at least it will seem to the shopper that a human is making the product recommendations. if the customer replies back, a real human takes over over. Cool, eh? the only problem here may be a scenario where a shopper wants to quietly browse the store and “people” keep interrupting her by recommending stuff - because of which the shopper gets irritated and leaves the store. That’d be too much customer support and that’s equally bad as too little customer support.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Why Amazon.com is E-commerce 2.1…

It’s the simple innovations that have made Amazon the e-commerce leader, and ensure that amazon will hold on to it’s position as a leader for many years to come.

The latest of such simple innovations: A subscription service that will automatically ship to you a new toothpaste in June (and other such stuff) as soon as the toothpaste you purchased for May is used up.

In a “Why-Didn’t-Everyone-Think-of-This-Before” move, Amazon.com has recently begun to offer a subscription service for frequently purchased drugstore-type items like one’s preferred shaving cream, face wash or soap. It also offers an incentive to try the service, providing a discount on the product as a reward for subscribing. It’s a great concept, catering to a convenience-obsessed consumer who increasingly relies on the web for all of his or her shopping needs. The service itself is straightforward and flexible, allowing the consumer to choose the duration of the subscription both when making the initial purchase and during check-out.

Read more about amazon’s latest simple innovation on e-commerce cache

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Online, Apparel is selling more than gadgets : NY Times

For the first time since online retailing was born a decade ago, the sales of clothing have overtaken those of computer hardware and software, suggesting that consumers have reached a new level of comfort buying merchandise on the Web.

Reports the New York Times.

And this is so true, about 5-6 years ago, when I first got into e-retail marketing, I would think people will never buy clothing and shoes and all online, shoppers need to see and touch a product, then try into on, before they actually buy it, but to my surprise, back then, consumers had already started adapting to the new way of buying.

This was and is being made possible, I am sure, because e-retailers who started out then, thought the same thing I did, and offered to convert consumers’ homes into dressing rooms by offering services such as free return shipping if you don’t like a product or if it doesn’t fit (also the reason why some of us affiliate marketers have so many reversals on referrals to some online retailers and our monthly earnings projections mostly always go wrong).

It’s not only the large venture-backed online retailers who can do this, even smaller retailers with nothing but their inventory, oscommerce and ebay etc stores and small advertising budgets can afford to offer such shopping ease to buyers, all one has to do is not care about margins, build customer loyalty that way and the volumes will happen before you know it.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Dabbawallas and Customer Service

Seth Godin points out the secret of Bombay’s Dabbawallas..

How do the dabbawallas manage to be so accurate and popular for almost over a century?

“Simple: the dabbawallas know their customers. If they rotated the people around, it would never work. There’s trust, and along with the trust is responsibility. By creating a flat organization and building relationships, the system even survives monsoon season.” Says Godin

E-retail, IMO, needs the Dabbawalla Efficency when it comes delivery and customer relations, those who are getting this right, are already some the most successful e-businesses!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!