Pixar: Animation = ?: Online Shopping
The online world has changed in the last ten years from a basic user experience to a vastly more involved and integrated user experience. And yet, the online shopping experience is still fairly basic, elementary, and non-experiential. In brick-and-mortar commerce, store design is considered an art, and how a customer is drawn into the store experience is a good combination of art and science. Aesthetics play a big role, but so does customer understanding, personalized touches, and sophisticated brand management.
In the dotcom heydeys of 1999, I did an e-commerce startup, Uuma, positioned to provide a personalized clothing and accessories store to busy professional women who had a huge time-challenge, but were still style-conscious. My size, my colors, my shape, my style, … you get the idea. At the core of the concept was our enormous research on how In-store Personal Shoppers operate. Whom do they target? How do they remember their clients? How do they sell, up-sell, and cross-sell? What is the experience that they offer to the customer?
I have always believed in segmentation. Deep, precise, accurate segmentation of the target customer base always lets you be very precise about the needs of the market, and the corresponding solution. Diamond merchant Blue Nile did a good job of this, and came up with unusual conclusions: their main audience for selling diamonds online is MEN. Geeky, shy men who are uncomfortable going to shop for engagements rings. Red Envelope has done a sordid job of segmentation, which reflects in their business fundamentals.
Beyond the basics, however, today’s experiential shopping opportunity online has become many times richer and more attractive. Broadband has become ubiquitous. Publishing tools are orders of magnitude more sophisticated, easy, and accessible, and visual merchandising needs to correspondingly evolve to the next level. eBay, Yahoo, BlueNile - all have fairly limited experiential shopping capability, and lack creativity in personalization. Amazon has done well with personalization in its category, but their over-dependence on collaborative filtering is, in my view, a mistake. [Collaborative Filtering allows them to recommend “others who bought … also bought …”]
I am still waiting for that ultimate online shopping experience … what Pixar has done to Animation, I hope, someone will do to Online Shopping!
Sramana, just wanted to clarify - are you talking about Red Envelope doing a “sordid” job of segmentation - in a bad way?
On another note, newer technologies that incorporate Flash/AJAX have surfaced that have not yet impacted ecommerce in a big way. Broadband is going the route of ubiquity, not just from a connected standpoint also from a mobility/wireless standpoint as well.
This to me implies a fundamental evolution of ecommerce from a platform level that I do not see being addressed. Moreover in the mobile world, the customer experience is even more pathetic
Well, Red Envelope has focused on a “gift-giving-event” based strategy, as opposed to a segmented, “who is the cutsomer? what does (s)he want?” strategy. I personally disagree with the strategy.
On the impact of broadband, flash, video - yes, visual merchandising can take a humongous leap forward when those factors are incorporated into the methodology. It’s not only a platform level change - it is an adoption issue from an industry (retail) that has always been a slow adopter of new technology. In my view, this is what is limiting the online user experience, and the challenge of who bells the cat will rest on people sitting at the cusp.
May be, Yahoo! can bell the cat.