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Mediarun Search Marketing News

E-tail 3.0 – Experience is Everything

June 01st 2009

Website Design & Build News

With doom and gloom across the high street, traditional retailers are facing an insurmountable task to retain market share and basket value. In addition to the economic conditions affecting consumers, retailers are facing increased competition from e-tailers and clicks and mortar organisations. The industry body for global online retailing, the IMRG, predicts that 20% of the UK’s £300bn retail industry will be e-commerce by the end of 2009.

So what lessons can the high street learn from the current breed of e-tailers?

With over 875 million active shoppers on the internet, and more than 85% of the world’s population having used the internet to make a purchase (Nielsen, Global Survey), e-tailers can no longer only compete on the traditional areas of price and convenience. The move towards a more engaged, experience-led and customer focused model has been described as e-tail 3.0.

Engagement

Finding ways to engage with your target audience is crucial as the market becomes more crowded. Zappo, an online footwear retailer, offers a free 365 day delivery and returns service. It has also re-trained all of its customer service assistants to remove any bad habits and scripts they have picked up at other retailers and ensure they are completely focused on providing customers with the best possible service, tailored to them. Other organisations have harnessed user generated content to engage with customers across a range of platforms – including Twitter, social media platforms such as Facebook, virtual assistants and user forums/communities. By interacting with customers through unique methods that appeal to them ensures e-tailers fully engage with their target audience.

Experience

Any successful retailer knows, looking after your customers and finding ways to excite and surprise them is crucial for success. It can also help overcome potential e-tail problems faced by those offering tangible, tactile products. Glasses Direct have used an experience-led, customer focused approach to successfully sell glasses online. Traditionally a product customers need to try on, glasses can be modelled by the virtual ‘you’ – upload a photo and you can ‘try on’ as many pairs of glasses as you like. When you have narrowed them down to 4 pairs, Glasses Direct will send all 4 pairs to try in real-life - just keep the ones you like, and return the remaining 3. The examples illustrate how this can be done successfully, and commercially. It also highlights the inadequacies of less innovative traditional retailers. Woolworths for example had a website, but didn’t use it – Amazon and Play came in, pure e-tail focusing on price, convenience and experience and literally took the market from underneath it.

Where does this leave the high street?

The success of major e-tail 3.0 players such as Net-A-Porter, ASOS, Blue Nile or Glasses Direct show that retail is still well and truly alive, despite the gloom of the media, but to be successful you need to focus on your customer and finds ways to engage with them in unique, experience-led ways. Traditional high street retailers are not out of the race yet, but to ensure they keep their market share, they will need to focus on capitalising on brand equity and build experiential focus in any online offering they develop.

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