Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Rigney, CEO of Zmags (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What does this do to the conversion rates? Do you have metrics on how it influences conversion?

Brian Rigney: Beautiful question. It has dramatically helped their conversion rates. It has helped engagement as well. I’ll give you a couple of examples where it helped bring engagement up. From handbags, they saw a 50% increase in page views in the first 10 seconds—the really critical 10 seconds. There was a 20% increase in page views in the next 20 seconds. In the last 30 seconds, they saw a 9% increase in page views. Page views go up every step in that first minute and their conversion rates went up by 111%. Boathouse stores, a small Canadian retailer with 30 locations, saw their page engagement time go up by over 500%. People stayed. Boathouse just won an award from Retail Touch Point for commerce innovation around customer engagement because of their result.

Sramana Mitra: It’s interesting. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the piece that I wrote a long time ago, which has been referred many times and many follow-on articles have been written including a book called From E-Commerce to Web 3.0. The original formula for Web 3.0 that I had published back in 2007 was that Web 3.0 = 4C + P + VS. The 4 C’s are content, commerce, and community in context. P is personalization and VS is vertical search. You’re basically turning up your commerce site into more of a content commerce integrated site. You’ve just added a much more of a magazine-like feel to your commerce catalog.

Brian Rigney: Yes. One of your earlier questions was, “How do we give advice to entrepreneurs in this space?” The macro trend that we’re seeing is that content and commerce are merging. What you see in Neiman Marcus and many smaller brands is that the richness of the online experience is more and more important. With the rise of mobile phones, I really want to design everything I do for the mobile device. That means richer, more engaging images that allow me, at a glance, to capture or see what the brand power is and which allows me to shop very quickly.

In addition, because people are on their phones all the time, you get content online more quickly without having to go to someone to code it. That’s a huge win. If I could get more content online more frequently, I’d give you and my other potential customers a reason to come back.

Sramana Mitra: I think there is strong value in creating magic around content in a commerce website. There’s no question that you can really embellish the catalog. Especially in the interactive format, you can do a lot. It seems like what you’re saying is that the catalog vendors are not doing it. The content management systems are not doing it so you inserted yourself in the middle of that gap and are soaking in that gap.

I think you and I agree that content and commerce worlds are starting to merge. Are there other indicators that communities are also coming together? There is more content and community coming together. Not as much commerce in that situation. You’re coming from the commerce side and enhancing the commerce experience with content. My hypothesis is that somewhere in there, community needs to come in. I’ve talked to a few vendors of e-commerce systems who are trying to engage more of the community in that context as well. I wrote this piece years ago.

Brian Rigney: I’m looking at the formula now on your page.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very widely read piece.

Brian Rigney: Kudos to you though for seeing that so far in advance.

Sramana Mitra: I did an e-commerce company way back  in 1999. It was the first fashion e-commerce company in the world. I wanted to do content and commerce together. It was a bit too early for doing fashion online. It wasn’t successful, but I have been thinking about this issue for a very long time.

Brian Rigney: I think the rise of the mobile device, the increased speed of delivery through those devices means that now you can get richer and engaging content on your phone. I still remember dial-ups in 1996. Those were incredibly slow.

Sramana Mitra: This was an excellent conversation Brian. Thank you for your time. It was a pleasure talking to you.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Rigney, CEO of Zmags
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