Mele’s Musings

The Red Queen of E-Commerce

What are the 5 must-have features of an etail website?  You might not be surprised, but that doesn’t mean you’re doing it.

PIcture: nature.com

Article excerpt:  There are five must-have features e-tailers should incorporate into their online businesses, according to Joe Chung, cofounder and CEO of Allurent: interactive merchandising, advanced shopping tools, rich media, advanced search and guided navigation, and social commerce. The Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass lives in a very curious world where, as she explains to Alice, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” I think that sentence sums up the world of e-commerce with uncanny accuracy: No matter how hard we work to knock items off the priority list, there are always new ones popping right up to take their place. In the first generation of e-commerce, back in the mid-’90s when most of us were running on Perl scripts and a prayer, the priorities were at least easy to define: Build a site in which most customers can actually make purchases without things crashing more than once or twice a week. The second generation, built out on commercially developed e-commerce platforms, evolved to meet this basic challenge, and their success at enabling solid dependable e-commerce operations has indeed fueled the tremendous growth over the past several years. Now, however, as we enter the third generation of e-commerce, we find that when it comes to meeting the expectations of our shoppers, we’re really no further ahead than when we started. The rest: ecommercetimes.com

Musing:   Although the article lists 5 things that all e-commerce sites should have, I am more intrigued by some of the commentary in the article which I think is right on.  First, the article comments on how stunning it is that retailers don’t understand their customers better across channels.  Couldn’t agree more.  If I am a customer of your store, and I spend lots of money with you, you better know that no matter where I am shopping.  The second is that customers are spending tons of time pre-purchase on online versions of retailers, but most of the sites that are created are really focused on the transaction.  We are missing out on an incredible opportunity to add service, education, and interaction.   What a waste if we only have one lens or one view of online customers.  Imagine if we did this in the offline world – if we treated everyone who came in the left door of the store as someone who only wanted to transact and we gave them no more service than a cash register.  And imagine we only knew you as a customer depending on what door you came in.  Sounds ridiculous, right?  But that is the way we treat multi-channel customers.