etail strategy beyond the cart
Notwithstanding the gimmicky and highly irritating slide-intro, here’s a video showing off Firefox Ubiquity — an interesting concept which continues to blur the lines between user needs and user actions. These types of services help users share online experiences — and that sort of shared participation is a key to branding today.
Take a look. This is edgy and futuristic, but it’s a great thought-starter: Ubiquity for Firefox on Vimeo
I drove through McDonald’s this morning and ordered chicken mcnuggets. The price? Four for $0.99 or six for $2.99. In four packs, nuggets are 25 cents, but in six packs, they are 50 cents! Since I’m not as dumb as I used to be, and I provisioned my mcnuggets in packs of four. I force McDonald’s to incur more costs, and I enjoy a larger consumer surplus.
This experience reminded me of a practice I regularly employ on Amazon.com. When ordering something for, say, $20, I typically add items to my order to break the $25 barrier and get free shipping. That’s exactly what Amazon wants, yes? The problem is that I routinely add the same item to my cart to reach the minimum basket size. What item? Batteries????????. AAs, Cs, Ds… I don’t care, they all get used because I have small children (and I never run out, in spite of nearly endless toys beeping and buzzing).
This is a problem for Amazon, because batteries are extremely heavy to ship. By adding them to my basket, I get free shipping, but Amazon actually pays more in shipping costs. Batteries are an excellent change-maker for me, but a terrible one for Amazon. I am forcing Amazon to bear the entire cost of the shipping surplus and I am likely stealing most (or all, or more than all!) of the additional profit associated with the batteries.
In rural areas and foreign lands, the change-maker is often penny candy (Chiclets especially). If a transaction comes up near a currency threshold (a whole bill or coin), often the storekeeper will offer candy as change instead of currency. The consumer wins (they typically get more candy than the face value of the currency due) and the retailer wins as well (the candy costs less than the currency would). In this manner, the retailer and consumer split the surplus and everyone wins.
For all us etailers running incentives and upsells at the cart level, are we encouraging those sales which raise our actual margins, or are we simply giving more surplus to the consumer because we’re using blunt measures (e.g. basket size) to measure success?
Since I have small children, candy would be an effective change-maker for me at Amazon.
Cotton candy would, as you can already see, be the ultimate profit engine here.
A short, sweet insight from Seth Godin. Etailers take note:
“Sometimes, the best part of buying something…is the buying part.”
I have absolutely no idea what this says (nor is it a “real” etail site), but it is CERTAINLY worth you looking at for inspiration. Take a look at this page: HEMA - online winkelen and make sure you wait to see what happens.
EConsultancy has a great post on why retailers need effective feature filtering.
I know a lot of people are unfamiliar with this concept, and it goes by other names as well (most notably: “guided navigation.”) The non-obvious benefit of this type of technology (supplied by industry leaders as Endeca In-Front, Right Now Technologies, and IBM Omnifind) is that it can effectively turn a search utility on your site into a strategic selling platform. Search becomes more than something users expect and can instead provide them with an unexpected and delightful brand experience.
