etailology

Here’s an “incite-ful” post about retail store organization from Seth Godin. Seth seems to have caused a fury amongst traditional retailers by suggesting a logistically difficult (read: near impossible) store organizational model.

The lesson? He’s right about the organizational opportunities, but he’s suggesting something along the lines of the classic content restriction or contract management which is found in major etail platforms — but which is rarely (never?) found in the terrestrial world. In a nutshell, the system he suggests is not only possible, but relatively easy to implement for online merchant — it is the promise of a true “my store” which displays/filters content and products to suit my personal preferences… including size. (The web has been waiting 12 years to fulfill this promise, and while now the technology exists, it seems that the will of marketers does not.)

But there’s a bigger opportunity here as well. If I know you’ll customize the store to my size preferences, why wouldn’t I provide additional information (on which the retailer would be expected to act!) to inform additional customizations?

Too often retailers fail to act on the information they gather; these data-hungry retailers ultimately lose out — even on size based preferences. They fail to customize site and catalog… instead choosing to bombard plus-sized customers with “teeny bikini” ads just because it’s summer. These same retailers complain that customers fail to provide valuable data upon which to base customizations; it IS a chicken or the egg scenario, but in this case retailers need to lead the value proposition. Eggzactly.

A non-apparel example? Handango does this quite well for smartphone/pda software — effectively limiting the view of the site to those products which are compatible with the user’s identified phone.