As one of the UK’s undisputed leaders in innovative, design-led stationery, cards and gift-wrap, Paperchase have been around for over 40 years and are now firmly established as the top destination for customers looking for new and different stationary merchandise.
With ecommerce booming and consumer demand for multi-channel services growing day on day, SMBs need to be in the digital space to compete. Surprisingly though, 51% of businesses still don’t have a website and are missing out on the benefits of integrating ecommerce for their own profitable ends.
Recently we reported on the ecommerce boom that was encouraged by a bout of glorious sunshine during the early Spring months. Now, at the beginning of May, growth seems to be slowing in Britain’s ecommerce market. Internet Retailing reports that sales were up by just 9% during the wettest April since records began. Granted, this is still healthy growth, but not compared to the 14% experienced across the same period last year.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock you’ll know that 2012 is a big year for UK retailing. The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and London 2012 are both key seasonal ecommerce opportunities with unlimited potential for merchandise, themed products, special promotions and more.
Run a search right now to see how many internet retailers are jumping on the occasion-led bandwagon – and onto the front page of Google. Are you ready for the flurry of online buying we’re expecting as these events finally hit?
Back in March Retail Technology publicised seasonal advice for ecommerce retailers. Retailers need to follow best practice actions “around 60, 45, 30 and 15 days prior to each seasonal peak” said Keith Bird, eSellerPro Chief Executive, adding that “in an era of convenience where the consumer expects what they want, when they want it, through whichever channel they want, it’s not an option for retailers to fail to keep up with seasonal demand.”
Mr Bird is quite right – it’s not just Summer’s patriotic celebrations we should be planning for. Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day and more all present prime sales opportunities. Let’s look at how you can optimise your ecommerce site to ensure that you pick up every opportunity during these key periods.
One of Locayta’s key clients, the British Museum Company, are showing the world how it’s done when it comes to the Diamond Jubilee. They’ve developed extensive merchandise – and as a massive UK visitor attraction with a global footfall, the ecommerce potential is huge. Where they’re really getting ahead on revenue though is in their cross-selling and up-selling strategy.
Not only are BMCo pro-active in intelligent product recommendations across their range, they’re making clever use of cross-sells with the British Museum’s own site, as Head of Ecommerce Fabrice Druelle recently told me: “We have re-schemed our site to make maximum use of product recommendations and give visitors a whole new look and feel with more cross-selling opportunities”
Locayta Freestyle Merchandising® is powering this strategy with product recommendations that respond in real time to user search and basket preferences. The ability to integrate with the main British Museum site, and constantly update suggestions automatically maximises business potential.
As Prezzybox have discovered, refining search options to suit occasions is key to conversion rates. Locayta search has helped them get this down to a fine art. A vast array of gifts is superbly categorised on their site giving logical, clean search functionality for shoppers. But on special occasions they need to be able to adapt both categories and search criteria quickly.
It hasn’t always been easy. Until last year manual input was intensive. Then CEO Zak Edwards discovered Freestyle Merchandising and our unique technology Balance Factor®. Search categories are quickly updated via the central dashboard, plus Prezzybox can influence results according to their own product placement strategy. Check out our recent blog for full details on how Balance Factor works.
We all know that multi-channel is a must these days, and Marketwatch‘s recent report confirms that 55% of shoppers now purchase online with their smartphones. This March 50% of all online flower orders were placed on a mobile. It’s hardly surprising when you think about it. We’ve all been caught out with a last minute occasion purchase and mobile technology offers a convenient consumer solution.
The issue isn’t just one of sales volume – it’s one of conversion and retention. Internet Retailing reports that bounce rates are 40% on mobiles (10% higher than on tablets). More worryingly, they point out that 61% of shoppers are unlikely to return to a site after a negative mobile experience, and 40% will turn to a competitor site.
If you’re looking for a quick and cost-effective way to get your site onto shoppers’ phones take a look at Locayta M-Commerce. It’s a click to buy iPhone shopping app that supports our full features set. Because the app queries your website directly customers can browse your full product range without any changes to your e-commerce platform. They are then transferred directly to your site’s checkout to complete the purchase wherever they are.
Across the ecommerce sector we’re dedicated to providing retailers with innovative solutions that achieve a high return. Our clients know it – the likes of Tesco Clothing , boohoo.com, Superdry and Paperchase are all transforming conversions and revenue with Locayta. Want to know more? Get in touch – we’ll be happy to help!
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Ecommerce vendor published seasonal advice Retail Technology, March 2012
The global rise in “always-on” shoppers is driving ecommerce MarketWatch April 2012
Retailers losing 1 in 20 sales through lack of mobile enabled sites Internet Retailing April 2012
The opportunity of responsive design Silverstripe, April 2012
Our discussions to date have addressed how Locayta Freestyle Merchandising® can optimise your eCommerce platform as a whole. Now we present the first in a series where we take each particular service in turn and discuss the workings, merits and necessary considerations in employing the particular technology.
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As ecommerce merchants we recognise the scenario – and as customers we’ve all been there ourselves. There you are, ready to make that exciting purchase, but the supposedly empowering tool that we call online shopping is behaving like a petulant child. You can’t find what you want, you don’t understand how the site works, displays are unclear, pricing changes when you checkout…it’s almost they’re deliberately trying to put you off! Take a look at this brilliant video from Google that shows what would happen if you transferred such experiences to the physical world.
Tongue in cheek this might be – but Google illustrate an important point. Econsultancy reports that over £1 billion of online business was lost in 2011 due to abandoned transactions. That’s serious stuff.
In a previous blog I showed the importance of creating a visual merchandising experience akin to the high street for retaining and converting visitors. With conversion rates still woefully low across the sector (The State of Retailing Online reported conversion growth in 2011 but the starting point of 2-3% is hardly a commercial utopia), it’s vital to adopt sophisticated tactics across your site to ensure that users enjoy their experience with you. Here are some key ways in which you can do exactly that, using real case examples from Locayta’s key clients.
It’s hardly an earth shattering statement to point out that the more accurate your search results are, the more likely customers will be to buy. Get this one wrong and you’ve lost out straight away. But if you’re using an outdated black box engine that promises personalisation, the chances are it’s delivering exactly the opposite.
That’s because assumptions are made based on group targeting rather than on genuinely individual behaviour.
What’s more, consumers are getting wise – take a look at this frustrated blogger’s indictment of online retailing techniques. Genuine personalisation is a long way off, he suggests. In fact the good news is that it’s here right now.
Locayta have developed intelligent behavioural and ranking algorithms that track individual user behaviour and can make intelligent decisions as to that user’s preferences at that minute. They cooperate with merchandising rules – defined by the retailer – to optimise product placement in response to search queries and your own retailing rules.
The proof is in the pudding, of course. That proof comes directly from our clients including boohoo.com, Superdry and Tesco Clothing – all of whom have reported increased conversion rates since using Locayta Freestyle Merchandising®.
Tesco have certainly enjoyed their share of the press this week due to their planned shake up. In fact, Tesco Clothing is dominating the European market share with sales up by 12% in the past year alone. Tesco clearly recognises the value of ecommerce with plans to invest a further £150 million in their online performance.
One of the tools in their armoury is Locayta Product Recommendations. Again, they respond directly to the user’s real time behaviour – but can also be weighted to the retailer’s strategic priorities behind the scenes thanks to Locayta Balance Factor®.
Take it from the horse’s mouth. Our recently published IRX2012 article includes an interview with Tesco Change Manager Mark Wakeley, who confirms that “the ability to control product and accessory recommendations makes sure that customers have fast, convenient access to the outfit they seek, ultimately increasing conversion rates and order values.”
It’s also worth taking a tip from another of Tesco’s key strategies announced for the future: their “clicks and bricks” plan to expand the 770 store collections for products bought online. For the first time this will apply to all products and not just groceries. It’s a canny response to widespread evidence that 50 to 70% of shopper abandon their carts, and a key factor in this is the failure to show exorbitant delivery costs until the point of purchase.
One of the issues we regularly encounter with new clients is the level of manual labour involved in keeping their sites up to date. With Locayta, that’s no longer a worry. Once the technology is plugged in (without any need to make changes to your own platform) you can control every aspect of your search, merchandising and product recommendation functionality via a single, simple to use dashboard.
Naturally you can opt in manually when you need to – but for many of our clients including Prezzybox this has made a massive impact – saving them “hundreds if not thousands of man hours” to quote Founder Zak Edwards.
Tempted? Contact us at Locayta today. It might just transform your ecommerce success!
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Read more…
UK shoppers abandoned over £1bn of online transactions in 2011 David Moth, March 2012
The State of Retailing Online (Forrester Research and Shop.Org, September 2011)
Ecommerce conversion rates: making visual merchandising matter Locayta, April 2012
Personalisation doesn’t work…yet Brian Manning July 2011
Tesco working to improve its clothing offer
http://www.just-style.com/analysis/tesco-working-to-improve-its-clothing-offer_id114098.aspx Just Style, April 2012
Tesco to invest £150m in online business ComputerworldUK, April 2012
Tesco the six point turnaround plan Telegraph April 2012
Recently we’ve been treated to a sudden burst of British sunshine and it’s warmed up a potentially gloomy scenario for online retailers. Whilst BRC-KPMG reported a disappointing performance in online sales during February, it seems that the fresh Spring weather has picked things up quite nicely in March.
The latest figures shows that online retailers have seen sales up by 13.9% on March last year. Stephen Robertson, Director General of the British Retail Consortium, commented that the main areas of growth were in “people keen to buy clothes, footwear and garden furniture”.
Here’s the rub though. In the same report female shoppers are holding back on extra purchases. To quote Head of Retail at KPMG, Helen Dickinson, “female shoppers are tightening their purse strings, focusing more on lower price point items to control the household budget. This buying behaviour saw women’s clothing perform less strongly than men’s and childrenswear.”
The question this poses is, how can online retailers adapt to these seemingly conflicting priorities and achieve consistent retailing success across product ranges targeted at different consumer profiles?
Fashion ecommerce is here to stay. Our own client Boohoo is a prime example – recruiting 1.8 million shoppers in just 5 years. Even haute couture is jumping on the bandwagon, with revered designers Karl Lagerfeld and Alexander McQueen taking to the internet. At the other end of the scale, Tesco Clothing (also a client of Locayta) is now the UK’s second largest volume clothing retailer.
What’s more, online fashion is an area where product recommendations are at their most powerful. After all, fashion is all about accessorizing and coordinating. With product recommendations’ ability to drive sales by up to 45% it follows that optimised product and accessory suggestions are bound to generate big business for ecommerce retailers.
However, if you take a look at the red heels conundrum I explained in an earlier blog, you can see that two of the traditional recommendation methodologies – collaborative filters and content based filters, run the risk of clumsy group targeting that negates the desired effect by actually impersonalising results, not personalising them.
Let’s get back to our cash strapped female shopper. If kids and men’s clothing sales are up in March but women’s clothing is struggling, this suggests she is prioritising her family over herself. But in fact, by using the right technology, it’s entirely possible to deliver product suggestions that will fit her value shopper profile as well as delivering the results she seeks for her family.
The key lies in moving away from group targeting and striking out on a whole new journey. Referred to by one intrepid blogger as hybrid recommender systems, we have taken the principle much further and developed Locayta Freestyle Merchandising®.
Freestyle Merchandising achieves a truly bespoke response to each individual user’s behaviour whilst matching this with retailing priorities, thus optimising product placement and hence online sales revenue. The principle is simple. The technology behind it, however, is incredibly sophisticated.
So how does the technology work? Well, several principles apply that make for a potent merchandising cocktail. The first ingredient is our intelligent algorithms. Ranking algorithms are a key feature in creating a relevant search hierarchy for relevant results. Behavioural algorithms, meanwhile, will track the behaviour of your individual users in real time and optimise results and recommendations accordingly. This ups the ante from traditional group targeting or responses to past user behaviour which may not be relevant to the shoppers’ current priorities.
Meanwhile, rules based merchandising enables the promotion, adjustment and positioning of products based on rules defined by the retailer. Key to retailing control is Locayta Balance Factor®. This unique tool allows you to define any metrics you like – price, size, new stock, sale stock – and tell Balance Factor exactly how important they are to you.
Balance Factor then applies your weightings automatically behind the scenes – whilst cooperating fully with our algorithms to present a balanced and fully optimised result for both you and the customer.
Mix in feature rich flexibility, manual or automatic control options, and the ability to manipulate key merchandising elements such a display advertising, brand adjacency, and multi-channel applications, and you have an advanced solution that’s easy to control and integrates with all main ecommerce engines.
Our clients have experienced proven revenue growth and increased conversion rates after implementing Freestyle Merchandising. Plus, thanks to its automated functionality, manual input and labour costs can be cut significantly. Want to know more? Get in touch with Locayta today and start maximising your ecommerce revenue.
Read more:
Sunshine lifts March sales, online and off Internet Retailing April 2012
Ecommerce growth is plateauing, how do you stay competitive? Geoff Galat April 2012
Karl Lagerfeld and Alexander McQueen take the internet Racked.com March 2012
A quick guide to product recommendation engines Rueben Corbo March 2012
Forrester Research and Shop.Org‘s much anticipated study The State of Retailing Online has good news for ecommerce retailers. Nearly 60% of survey participants reported a rise in conversion rates during 2011. But the starting point for those improved statistics was an average conversion rate of just 2-3%. That’s still a weak ratio in real terms. It seems as an industry we have more to do to crack the question of truly embedding online purchasing into the sales loop.
There’s no doubt that multi-channel shopping is here to stay, with more than 50% of shoppers incorporating virtual channels into their shopping journey. But in March 2012 Experian demonstrated that 90% of actual purchases still happen on the high street.
One year on, bricks and mortar remain integral to multi-channel retailing, with 87% of UK shoppers still favouring physical stores as the point of purchase. Shopping behaviour, it seems, may not have changed as much as we might think it has.
Shoppercentric’s research Shopping in a Multi Channel World reveals that 45% of shoppers will ‘always love going to the shops, no matter what new technologies are available’. We all know that ecommerce satisfies a growing consumer demand for multi-channel convenience. However, the evidence suggests online retailers would do well to pay attention to high street merchandising techniques on their sites to satisfy an inherent consumer love for the physical shopping experience.
Forrester and Shop.org’s research also highlights the most useful tools in driving conversions. Sales and clearance pages, product reviews and the ability to search by price, brand and other parameters all rank highly. It’s not a coincidence that these techniques closely reflect retailing strategies deployed in-store.
It follows that conversion rates online can be influenced by powerful visual merchandising strategies and their effect on the customer. Yet in my experience many retailers still encounter serious limitations in the ability of their ecommerce platforms to do just that.
Harvey McEwan highlights the user’s site journey as a powerful conversion strategy. “Search engine optimisation is essential for driving visitors to your site” he points out, “but will also have very little effect if the traffic doesn’t know what to do when it arrives there”.
Well said, Mr McEwan. Shoppers will abandon a faulty search experience or uninspiring product placement in the same way that they might avoid a dowdy, incoherent high street display. All that investment in SEO will be wasted if you don’t get your merchandising right on your site.
My previous blog shows that target product groupings do not in reality respond to personal behaviour, but make clumsy assumptions based on group behaviour. Locayta Freestyle Merchandising takes a different approach. A powerful mix of rules based merchandising, user responsive algorithms and unique Balance Factor technology function collaboratively. They deliver genuinely targeted search results and category listings plus elaborate visual merchandising, equipping ecommerce merchants to create a more sophisticated journey that genuinely recreates the high street experience online.
Our client Boohoo’s Ecommerce Manager Catherine Turner sums up the benefits beautifully. “When a new buzz hits the catwalk it’s vital for us to adapt our visual displays and search criteria at a moment’s notice” she says. “With Locayta we can tie our categories and sequencing into a wide variety of trends, colour stories, collections, and special promotions in line with the latest media coverage. It’s all about delivering fast, relevant product placement as well as detailed category and search functionality.”
Other clients including Tesco, Superdry, Paperchase and the British Museum mix and match key elements of the platform which uniquely combine search and product recommendation functionality with visual merchandising within a single system. This approach has resulted in increased conversions and average order values for these brands.
By taking the best elements of high street merchandising techniques and delivering them effectively merchants can optimise their online retailing strategies, and hence their sales revenue. What’s more, they can streamline operational input, increasing their ROI and deliver an efficient, responsive online performance.
Locayta Freestyle Merchandising is the first system enabling retailers to do this in a single, simple to use system that can be integrated into their own ecommerce platform. If this grabs your attention you can view a free demo online, or contact us to find out more.
Read more:
The State of Retailing Online (Forrester Research and Shop.Org, September 2011)
The Changing Face of UK Retail in Today’s Multi Channel World (Experian, March 2011)
The high street is central to multi-channel retail strategy: stats (Graham Charlton, February 2012)
Shopping in a multi-channel world (Shpppercentric, February 2012)
Conversion rate optimisation tips for ecommerce (Harvey McEwan, March 2012)
The IRX2012 debate: Is ecommerce personalisation fact or fantasy? (Andre Brown Locayta March 2012)
The past year has seen the number of shoppers on Britain’s high streets drop by a worrying 2.6%. Wales in particular was badly affected, with a staggering 9% drop in consumer numbers – whilst the West Midlands and the east of England also experienced declines of over 6%. Even Greater London was unable to escape the trend, with 1% fewer consumers visiting stores between May and July than had been the case 12 months earlier.
According to Stephen Robertson, director general of the British Retail Consortium, who published these unsettling statistics, there are a variety of concerns that are prompting people to stay clear of the high street. High inflation, low wage growth and uncertain job prospects are all contributing to reduced household spending.
Diane Werhle, research director at Springboard, the company that compiled the statistics on behalf of BRC, adds that ease of access is no longer necessarily enough to guarantee sales. Retail parks and malls used to outperform the high street for reasons of convenience, but are now finding themselves in a similar position to town centres.
Worried about your eCommerce business? In light of the spending trends of 2011, even online retail companies need to do everything they can to ensure successful sales. Luckily, Locayta SRM is on hand to help you maximise your site’s potential and increase your revenue, in spite of the current economic climate. Here’s how:
Site search solutions
Locayta Site Search uses impressive technology to help improve customer satisfaction and click-through rates. Our intelligent navigation system helps customers to refine their search, whilst our predictive type ahead and spell check functionalities reduce the chance of a failed search.
Want to control search results? With Locayta Site Search it’s simple. Our unique Balance Factor technology allows retailers to adjust search results in line with metrics such as popularity, stock availability and newness to site.
The result? Happy customers who are able to find what they want quickly and easily, leading to improved conversion rates and higher sales figures.
Visual merchandising
Visual merchandising is a method of engaging customer interest – something which becomes particularly important when financial difficulties are making people reluctant to spend. A compelling display can make the difference between a customer entering a shop and passing on by; the same can be applied to eCommerce sites.
Locayta Merchandising provides a powerful yet flexible solution to your visual merchandising needs. Our merchandising functionality can be configured to run either automatically or in conjunction with manual merchandising.
Using Locayta Visual Merchandising, you can make sure your site is as appealing as possible. Our technology can help to customise your banners and homepage, changing page elements according to different behavioural or date triggers. Our specially developed Balance Factor technology can also help you to sequence product display according to you own personalised sales strategy.
Product recommendations
Carefully placed product recommendations can be key to making a sale. Locayta Recommendations operate in real-time, making suggestions based on collective and individual user behaviour. Our recommendations help customers to discover relevant products that they might not otherwise have come across – making their journey on the site more satisfactory for them and for the retailer.
Once configured, Locayta Product Recommendations operate automatically. Whilst you concentrate on running other aspects of the business, our product recommendations will engage customer interest, increasing conversion rates and increasing revenue.
Want to learn more about how you can optimise your eCommerce site? Visit www.locayta.com for information and demos.
Could spelling errors be holding your retail business back? Online entrepreneur Charles Duncombe certainly thinks so. According to Duncombe, UK-based internet businesses are losing millions of pounds in revenue as a result of bad spelling – a fact that shouldn’t be ignored.
Worried about how spelling could affect your business? Duncombe suggests that many eCommerce sites suffer from poor spelling or grammar, ultimately deterring consumers. A single spelling mistake can cause users to question a site’s credibility – leading to a dramatic loss of revenue. In a case study featuring tightsplease.com, figures for revenue per person doubled once an error was corrected – proving that good spelling really can make all the difference.
Professor Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institue, said, ‘When a consumer might be wary of spam or phishing efforts, a misspelt word could be a killer issue’.
Whilst spelling errors in a site’s content can kill sales, it is also important to consider the implications of user mistakes. Many online retail businesses suffer from inadequate site search systems that are unable to compensate for consumer errors. On such sites, a spelling mistake in a search term often leads to a failed search – resulting in an unimpressed customer and a loss of revenue.
Don’t want spelling errors and typos to kill sales on your site? Locayta Search has the solution:
Powerful spell-checking
Locayta Site Search operates a superior system of spell-checking that prevents failed searches, helping to increase conversion rates. This accurate spell-checking functionality employs sophisticated algorithms to correct any misspelling, mistyping or misunderstanding that would typically be missed by a dictionary-based spell checker.
Unlike most spell-checking systems, Locayta Search’s is able to help a consumer to find the product they are looking for, even when they have mistyped the first letter of the word. Locayta Search always aims to provide a result for product searches, rather than returning a zero result.
Businesses using Locayta Search can expect to see fewer frustrated customers, higher conversion rates and increased revenue – all marks of a successful eCommerce site. Examples of businesses using Locayta Search to maximise sales include Boohoo, Tesco, Superdry and the British Museum Store.
Intelligent auto-complete functionality
Locayta Search’s impressive auto-complete predictive search functionality helps customers to find what they are looking for faster, as well as minimising the chance of a failed search. As soon as a customer begins typing in a search box, Locayta Search is able to suggest likely product and search terms in a drop down list. This allows the customer to select what they are looking for from the list provided, rather than typing the rest of the search term themselves.
By eliminating the need for the customer to do much typing, the auto-complete function also reduces the likelihood of spelling errors. The result is a higher number of successful searches, leading to optimum conversion rates and improved customer loyalty.
Do you think that Locayta Search’s powerful search solutions could help you to maximise sales on your eCommerce site? Why not read more at www.locayta.com.
