Supplyant

I’m a firm believer that when it comes to e-commerce sites, its wrong to go too far away from what customers are used to. Every 3 months I take a look at the tools, features and styles that the top e-commerce setups are using to woo customers. My snapshot takes a look at some of my favorite shops and shops that consistently feature well in hotlists.

Who are we looking at?
Ebuyer | Asos | Argos | Boden | B&Q | MyDeco | Apple | Tesco | Ebay | Amazon | John Lewis

1. Layout

Its appears to be true that there is now a way e-commerce should look and feel. There are standardised design elements throughout big brand e-commerce

The Header

Consistently menus now reside on the top, with logo on the left, search & shopping basket on the right.

Home Page

Always featuring a big picture of some kind, normally full width with no side navigation

Category Pages

Sidebars to narrow searches are commonplace and getting more intelligent.

Products – full width

Once you get to a products page its now mostly full width, with no side navigation, and heavily product focused above the fold.

2.  Video

Video is a trend that seems to be cropping up regularly and I love it! Video provides masses of extra emotion and trust on any product it appears on. For me the best use of this is at ASOS, fantastically emotional salesmanship on the kids cloths and great runway videos for the products in adult fashion. Its also in use at  Ebuyer with selected lines giving QVC style buying guides. Do your videos have to be flawless to get a response? If you take a look at this youtube clip of somebody unboxing his new ipod with over 650,000 views you’ll see that real user videos are also a massively powerful customer conversion tool.

3. Quality of photography

If your retailing online and want to roll with the big guys there no excuse for an under exposed 50×50 jpg anymore.

I see a few consistencies from my chosen retailers:

• Giant images are OK for homepages (see examples below)
• Branded commodity items image quality isn’t so important (have a look at Argos, Tesco and John Lewis sites for examples of this)
• Providing more that 1 image if possible is most definitely better
• Modern e-commerce layouts absolutely place focus on product shots
• At each of the sites I looked at there was no genuinely poor images.
• On a number of sites I saw standard product images teamed up with “in use” pictures with people in them

4. Search tools

Search results on all the sites I looked at were pretty good. I loved the search on ebuyer, it was intuitive and helpful. Apples search was awesome, extremely polished I’d recommend you try it.

Second stage filtering of search results was an absolute requirement for all stores for me mydeco ruled on this one, the colour chooser was a nice touch. Despite Apple having a great search it was one of the few stores were I didn’t feel a need to search as the navigation was incredibly clear.

5. Delivery

A constant frustration for me with online shopping is poor delivery information. I started out in Automotive parts and its shocking how poor many of  the distributors of these parts are compared to leading online shops.

ebuyer and asos stood out as excellent examples of going above and beyond for customers.

• Ebuyer offers next day delivery on orders up to 11.00 at night. WOW!
• ASOS offers same day delivery in London. WOW
• Zappos in America stood out with its free delivery both ways promise

2 consistent elements cropped up.

• Free delivery is commonplace (and so it should be, it removes all confusion)
• Delivery on a nominated day is gaining traction

Conclusion

If there is one thing that’s clear above all else is that the strength of modern platforms means its all about high quality content. Many of the sites I used looked and functioned in pretty much the same manner.

Selling online now is more about the determining why somebody should buy it from you. Is it the quality of the service, the great video help, the  awesome delivery or something else.

I wouldn’t use any of the companies because they have a great site, but because they are great companies. Good sites are just a  tool to that may provide enough extras to push customers in your direction rather than some other retailer.

If you have favorite sites you think I should be checking in on I’d love to hear them.

Just last night I was contacted by a potential customer.

I had never spoken to them; I had not heard of the company; I didn’t chase them around interrupting the persons day; I didn’t get his name from a list of prospects and call him out of the blue; I didnt spam them. They came to us asking for help.

What was unusual about this contact was that they found our site searching for “ASOS annual report”

At position 8 on google was this result:

The tricks that ASOS is using to get 100% growth | Supplyant

In my eyes ASOS stand out clearly as a company using a common sense, planned approach to rapid growth. ASOS’s recent annual report, gives a great insight …
www.supplyant.com/…/the-tricks-that-asos-is-using-to-get-100-growth/ –

They found the site despite the site not ranking for any of the traditional web design or web marketing type phrases (its just too new to do well for them yet)

It just so happened the person concerned was an ASOS shareholder looking for the report but thought that our page on google looked like it  offered something that might be of interest to him.

He also happened to be looking for help marketing his brand new website, and thought that based on what we had said we might fit the bill.

Better still he also gave us some feedback on how we could tweak our site to make it clearer for people like him. I’d like to thank him for this.

Every article you write, every comment you make on somebody elses site, every twitter, facebook or forum post you interact with may just generate you best customer ever.

Everybody has favourite websites; sites you use, recommend and admire. I never look for inspiration from sites in my own market, but for leaders in other markets. That’s the only way you can innovate.

In my eyes ASOS stand out clearly as a company using a common sense, planned approach to rapid growth. ASOS’s recent annual report, gives a great insight into what a rapidly growing online trader is looking towards to maintain this growth.

The headline figures:

• Turnover: £81 million to £165 million
• Profit: £37 million  to £71 million
• International Sales: up 303% to £32 million

The full report is here

The ASOS story – ecommerce by numbers

Find a niche
ASOS (As Seen On Screen) began life imitating celebrity fashions. Seen a handbag posh spice  is wearing in a magazine? ASOS will sell you a handbag in the style of posh.

Grow the customer base
By doing a great job, customers used them often and recommended them to their friends, building a loyal bunch of fans.

Brand Extension
ASOS then launch into men’s, designer labels and kids

Overseas
The UK is a small place, lets take on the world.

What’s next for ASOS?

Delivery
Improved delivery has been identified as a big mover in increasing conversion rates. So much so that a same day delivery service is being launched.

Social Media
Growing the blog, Facebook, Twitter and Bebo channels are a fundamental part of the strategy. Building a community of people who love clothes and love talking to each other about clothes.

Overseas
A weak pound and economies of scale with delivery allow massive growth opportunities

More own brand
Now they have built a strong brand with a great identity it’s time to leverage it.

The lesson

It’s easy to look at your own competitors and copy them, but it will be time consuming and expensive to build a brand by doing this. ASOS didn’t start out saying “We want to be like Next”  they had a clear identity and worked it.

If you must copy somebody, look to leaders in other markets and take the best they have to offer. It’s a better way to retain a clear identity.