People aren’t going to church in the numbers that they have in previous years and – generally speaking – Australians aren’t as religious as our USA brothers and sisters (who, after all, have ‘In God We Trust’ on their bank notes). So when Easter rolls around each year and we get ready for Good Friday and Easter Monday holidays, as well as the store closures that go along with Good Friday, you would imagine the same happening across the Pacific – not so.

Good Friday isn’t a Federal public holiday in the US, with only 13 states making it a state holiday. Easter Monday also is not a Federal public Holiday. So, how are these very different nations merchandising online during this period?

Toys are becoming an increasingly popular gift for children on Easter weekend. Parents and families are moving away from the traditional gift of chocolate – toys, books and games are beginning to be gifted more often, which prompts me to think: how is the major toys retailer, Toys’R’Us embracing Easter online?

Toys’R'Us Australia offer a “free Easter activity pack” as their holiday promo.

On the homepage things start out pretty well. The Easter activity pack and a countdown to Easter are featured on the front page as part of their rotating banner. Countdowns are great as they can induce a sense of urgency in a shopper. But upon clicking through to their Easter promotion I become a little disappointed, to be honest. Toys’R'Us provide a downloadable activity pack only. I download the five page pack, a little underwhelmed (this is a good start, but where are products? This is Easter after all, and I need gifts for the kids!).

The US version of Toys’R’Us offers a homepage that features an extremely similar link to its ‘Easter Shop’. However, this is a permanent link and not part of a rotating carousel. Here, the US brand is doing a ’35 percent off’ sale as well.

Toys’R'Us in the USA are at least offering me a reason to buy something in time for Easter.

Pressing through to the Easter link and I’m rewarded with the same activity pack as in the Australian website, however this one is presented better alongside actual products and specific Easter offerings. This is where Toys’R’Us Australia and others need to get to.

Without dwelling on one brand for too long, I figure it’s time to move on to examine Kmart‘s Easter promotions. Locally, I am immediately presented with an Easter catalogue on the homepage.

Kmart Australia has an Easter catalogue! Now, if only it were transactional…

Nice idea, but upon clicking through to the catalogue I realise I cant actually buy from it. Instead, I am just virtually flicking through an electronic version of the same junk mail I have already flipped through on my couch. What is this – 1999? Uninspiring and boring from Kmart Australia.

Kmart in the US is ready for Easter with a range of themed products ready to be purchased.

Upon landing at the US Kmart website, I’m immediately informed that “great gifting starts here” – and indeed it does, with pre-organsied searches based on a set budget, in addition to free colouring pages – just the kind of offering I was hoping for in the first place.

Then there was Target. In appraising the Australian Target’s site, I’m not sure if they realise Easter is just a week away – no mention of it at all. UPDATE: Since writing this, Target Australia has added an Easter promo to its homepage carousel, explaining that customers can win  ”1 of 20 $50 gift vouchers” if they can find hidden Easter eggs on the website. I guess that means it’s time to give the kids the credit card and let them go nuts!

America’s version of Target is drumming up Easter hype.

Now, let’s compare that with Target in the US. Its website knows Easter is nearly here and it tells me to “get a hop on Easter”, which is presented along with terrific merchandising and pre-organised search functionality.

At this point I’m definitely seeing a trend in comparing local vs. US websites for holiday promotions, but admittedly we haven’t yet had a look at the gastronomical element. Certain foods are essential during Easter, and they can vary significantly between cultures - with fish being the order of the day for many.

Woolworths demonstrate their connection with traditional Easter cooking by promoting fresh fish.

Locally, Coles and Woolworths couldn’t be further apart in terms of presentation and merchandising – Woolies appears streets ahead.

While Coles may be pushing a valuable fuel offer, which is certainly important during Easter weekend, but for a supermarket who have had Easter eggs on display in-store since just after Christmas, it doesn’t feel nearly consumer focused enough.

Coles’ website – definitely not as geared up for converting during Easter compared with Woolworths.

On the other hand, Woolies’ brilliant use of side real estate is theme merchandising 101 and presents a standard that all retail sites should replicate. The carousel on the Woolworths page highlights some Easter deals and offers – this is a long way ahead of their rival’s presentation in terms conversion opportunities.

Merchandising is something of a science – you only need to listen to brand managers, marketers for FMCG companies and big retailers themselves to know how much time, effort and energy goes into presenting products. In fact, there are plenty of statistical merchandising formulas that are worked on by highly paid marketers in many large retail businesses.

Local retailers should (and probably do) have as much merchandising knowledge as their overseas counterparts – yet they aren’t applying it online. Why is it that the local big stores continue to miss opportunities?

The post Australian Retail Sites Don’t Stack Up with US Counterparts at Easter appeared first on Power Retail - Australia's News and Information Resource for the Online and Multichannel Retail Community.

Today, we’re presenting an infographic of a few of these basics, collated by e-commerce agency Shopatron. It covers site speed, user interface, social connectivity and trust.

What other basic conversion optimisation concepts are there for online retailers? Share your expertise in our comments section below this article.

“Closing Sales Online: How to Increase Website Conversion Rates” – by Shopatron.

The post Infographic – Basic Conversion Optimisation Tips for Online Retailers appeared first on Power Retail - Australia's News and Information Resource for the Online and Multichannel Retail Community.

In the 40-minute Improve the User Experience to Increase Revenue through Site Search  webinar, Wes Blundy, Director of prominent Australian jewellery retailer, diva.net.au, will share how site search helped to create a more user-friendly and engaging website. Blundy will also show the great results Diva is experiencing from SLI Systems’ site search solution.

As mobile and other contemporary offerings continue to heat up in the retail landscape and consumer shopping habits mature, so too do the requirements for an optimised website across all devices, and site search is at the crux of e-commerce best practice. Learn how SLI Systems can help retailers increase customer conversions through implementation of various site search and merchandising solutions in the upcoming webinar.

SLI Systems’ APAC Country Manager, Mark Brixton and Power Retail’s Managing Editor, Grant Arnott will also contribute their e-commerce expertise, with practical case examples and useful hints for optimising the user experience through search.

SLI Systems’ Learning Search solution learns from past site search activity , tracking behaviour, language and site journeys so that retailers can create a better user experience and ensure that visitors find exactly what they’re looking for easily and quickly. You too can deliver a better search experience – making for happy visitors, loyal customers and increased sales - by partaking in our webinar.

The webinar will incorporate case studies and highlight the trending techniques for optimising the user experience through site search.

UPDATE: This webinar is now archived and can be viewed by registering here.

The post Boost Revenue & Improve User Experience with Site Search: SLI Systems & Power Retail Webinar appeared first on Power Retail - Australia's News and Information Resource for the Online and Multichannel Retail Community.

As of just a few weeks ago, all of that has changed.

Following a horror sales period and the closure of its iconic Newcastle store, the C-level at David Jones decided to go all-in on an updated omnichannel strategy at the beginning of this year. This strategy involved partnering with IBM to provide an e-commerce platform on which the retailer would upload 90,000 SKUs, multiplying its original online inventory by ten.

The result of this gargantuan undertaking is the recent iteration of the David Jones website – as much alike to its previous iteration as a racing yacht is to an inflatable life raft. Clean lines, a cogent aesthetic and a healthy helping of on-trend e-commerce principles places this website streets ahead of the one that stood before it. There are some further tweaks to be made that may further improve conversions, but it’s safe to say this iteration is a vast improvement on its predecessor.

“We are delighted that we are able to launch our new online store with such a strong representation of our Australian designer brand portfolio,” says Group Executive of Merchandise for David Jones, Donna Player. “For the first time, customers anywhere in Australia will be able to access the breadth of brands you would find in one of our flagship downtown doors.”

Of course, an undertaking of this scale and speed could not occur without developing a few gremlins and the issues that can be identified on David Jones’s new site can be squarely blamed on human error, with perhaps a few performance issues thrown into the mix. Developing content and copy for tens of thousands of SKUs in six or so months is no easy task, and so it’s no surprise a few hitches have developed.

These errors include issues with sorting products (sometimes they take a long time to re-assort, or they just won’t at all), mislabelled items and identifying stock levels (which can result in the odd error message when selecting an item to be placed in the cart). David Jones also seems to be working through a number of SEO-related issues, as some pages and tags continue to display generic information.

However, the most glaring of these issues are the mislabelled items, which can result in poor customer feedback as well as negatively influencing conversions. During our initial appraisal, we discovered the following example within five minutes of visiting the site:

Spot the difference: the price of these two items has been miscommunicated in the process of uploading their SKUs to the David Jones website.

Taken on its own, this error isn’t exactly catastrophic. However, it isn’t the only example lurking on the new website and the e-commerce team is sure to be working very hard over the coming weeks to rectify anything that is pointed out. It’s safe to say that by the time you read this, many problems will have already been eliminated.

Overall, this release from David Jones demonstrates just how far the retailer has come, revealing a true dedication to an omnichannel future. While problems still abound, the retailer has proven that it understands the online space by embracing the ‘don’t let perfect stand in the way of good’ ethos, which also encompasses the ‘fail, but fail fast’ principle of e-commerce.

David Jones now has an opportunity to test its new offering, analyse feedback and continue to improve. It will be interesting to see how this offering evolves further in the coming months.

What do you think about the new David Jones website? Have your say in the comments section below this article.

The post Relaunched: The David Jones Website appeared first on Power Retail - Australia's News and Information Resource for the Online and Multichannel Retail Community.

The Grays Outlet website was unable to accommodate the high traffic intake after the Today Tonight PR plug. This followed a similar Grays Outlet PR promotion that Power Retail reported on earlier this month. The article induced over 50 comments from disgruntled customers, complaining that they were unable to access the site.

Nathan Johinke said “I can’t get through, would this be considered false advertising on the company’s behalf? I know it’s a grey area legally because they could say ‘oh we were having site problems’”. Ibhinx said “I can’t even get access to the web, this is rubbish! I’ve been wasting my precious one hour trying to upload the page”. Alan said “you go and put yourself all over TV to get that extra exposure but it’s probably a good idea to work on the website to handle the extra amount of people who would love to see what’s on offer”.

The Grays Outlet Facebook page was also bombarded with comments from unhappy customers, unable to access the site during the $1 sale, representing how social media channels can be used to voice frustrations and lead to online viral attacks.

Justus Wilde, founder of full-service e-commerce consultancy, Amblique said Software-as-a-Service e-commerce solutions like Demandware are designed to cope with large traffic spikes, and work to protect and manage brand reputation.

“Traditional build and run e-commerce platforms unfortunately require infrastructure and scalability management and while most retailers can manage newsletter blasts and normal marketing triggered traffic spikes many still fail to support large spikes caused by social media or TV. We have seen a number of large retailers fall over this year and every time this happens the brand is compromised,” he said.

“Enterprise SaaS solutions such as Demandware have been built with this requirement in mind. They can scale automatically as infrastructure is shared across several sites. Cloud based (SaaS) infrastructure helps retailers maximise these opportunity and protect their brand.”

Stuart Mills from Macquarie Telecom’s Digital and SaaS Hosting department said today’s consumers are unforgiving when it comes to poor performing websites and retailers need to be responsible for providing a positive user experience.

“With a retail website it’s the speed with which you can navigate around and have new pages load that’s crucial, so that if you’re searching for a product and it takes a long time to search or you find it and it takes a long time to load, literally within a few seconds you’re going to lose a potential customer and they’ll go off to your competitor,” he said.

“I don’t think that enough companies pay attention to what’s supporting that at the hosting level but there is a lot that can go wrong with cheap hosting, and for many pureplay retailers this is their only business. It’s not just about the high availability environments but also the speed with which their site is served to the customer.”

This is a timely reminder that if retailers want to play with mainstream media, then they need to ensure that sites are optimised with the best practice infrastructure and performance capabilities to account for the likely traffic spikes.

The post Hard Lesson: Grays Outlet Learns the Importance of Good Web Performance appeared first on Power Retail - Australia's News and Information Resource for the Online and Multichannel Retail Community.

CEO at SLI Systems, Shaun Ryan, says non-product content like blog posts, videos and social media conversations can aid customers in their online buying decisions. “A lot of our retail customers are producing a lot of non-product related content. They may be writing articles about products, they may be doing videos, or have discussion boards where the customers can discuss the products or services. This content encourages people to engage with a brand,” he says.

Using default refinement tabs to filter different content is an innovative search feature, Ryan says. “The way SLI Systems normally displays different content is to use a tabbed format, where you show products front and centre but you have a tab so you can also see discussions and articles, and we can even index content that is off the site as well. “A lot of retailers are present in social media now so we’ll pull all of that content out of social media channels so users can find Facebook posts, tweets or videos from YouTube channels relating to the keyword entered into the search box.”

SLI customer, Adore Beauty allows visitors to refine by Products, Discussions from its forum and reviews, and Social from its social media channels in separate tabs. This allows visitors to see product results and refine by social media content. Word-of-mouth is a powerful marketing tool so you should take advantage of what your followers and subscribers are saying.

Adore Beauty uses refinement features to show non-product content in search results.

Highlighting non-product content that relates to a search query gives users targeted information that may get a sale over the line.

The post Utilising the Search Tool for Relevant Content appeared first on Power Retail - Australia's News and Information Resource for the Online and Multichannel Retail Community.

The post Infographic: Conversion Optimisation appeared first on Power Retail - Australia's News and Information Resource for the Online and Multichannel Retail Community.

According to an eMarketer report, tablets are slated to be adopted more quickly than smartphones in the US. By 2014, more than one third of internet users from the US will own tablets. Currently, almost three quarters of US tablet users own an iPad as their device of choice, according to Forrester Research.

As a retailer, this means there is an increasing potential to carve out a connected audience by staking a claim on a tablet platform, but to do so successfully will require a high degree of technical skill and an intimate understanding of how consumers wish to interact with their devices.

In order to assist you in the process of breaking down and digesting all the facts and figures about t-commerce, Milo have created this infographic for your perusal.

‘Why Tablet Users are a Retailer’s Dream,’ Infographic by Milo.

The post Infographic: Further Proof that Tablets are a Big Deal for Retailers appeared first on Power Retail - Australia's News and Information Resource for the Online and Multichannel Retail Community.

The results of the 13-month study, ‘From Intent to In-Store: Search’s Role in the New Retail Shopper Profile‘ which in-part explores the influence of online search on in-store purchases and featured consumer electronics retailer RadioShack and luxury automotive brand Audi, indicated that:

• 86% of buyers who purchase in-store use generic terms versus brand terms on search engines to inform their purchase decision.
• 90% of in-store buyers click on the organic listings of a search engine results page (SERP) when conducting a search online and are 2.5 times more likely to click on a generic link.
• 93% of all buyers (online or in-store) used search.
• 80% of buyers rated search as very or extremely useful.
• 10% of shoppers reported using tablets during the retail shopping process.

“This new understanding of the retail shopper represents a behavioral shift. The intent shown in search provides brands an opportunity to maximise their online revenues and encourage and cultivate greater in-store sales,” said Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search.

“This research indicates retailers have an opportunity to rethink how their current search efforts – paid and especially organic – can pair with owned and earned media to bridge the gap to the trillions of in-store revenue potential.”

Michael Perlman, Managing Director Online Media and Search at Compete added, ”These findings are consistent with the results of research we have conducted in multiple industries around the important role search plays in a consumer’s path-to-purchase. Many consumers clearly do not exclusively use either online or offline channels throughout the entire buying cycle, but rather navigate across channels at different stages of the consideration process.”

In bridging this gap, US department store Sears are encouraging shoppers to go online while in-store by offering free WiFi and iPad access.

Quoted by Marketing Pilgrim, Joy Liuzzo, Senior Director of Mobile Research at InsightExpress said, “These devices will allow floor sales people to engage with customers right where they are standing, sharing the screen rather than having a monitor in between them. It’s another way to break down barriers and make the sales process better for everyone involved.”

The post Generic Search Terms and Organic Listings Are Retail Gold appeared first on Power Retail - Australia's News and Information Resource for the Online and Multichannel Retail Community.

Whatever your particular goal, getting visitors to engage and follow a path to conversion is at the heart of driving value from your website. While most web teams track website conversion, the diversity of potential factors that affect conversion (and its evil twin, abandonment) makes this a very hard process to manage.

The biggest of these factors is promotions, which can cause massive changes to your website conversion rate. Equally, your competitors’ promotions can also have a big impact on your website conversion rate. Seasonally, customers have become conditioned to expect promotions at certain times of the year; as a result, looking at your conversion rates without considering these factors is a bit like stumbling around in the dark looking for the light switch.

In the early days of the web, we focused first on page views and bounce rates, and finally on the website conversion rate, which has become a core method of measuring site success. Website conversion is usually defined as a percentage as follows:

Desired Actions / Unique Visitors * 100
Of course, there isn’t just one website conversion rate. There are several, and this is one of the challenges when it comes to comparing your website conversion with other sites’ website conversion rates.

Here are the three most common website conversion rates:

Visitor-to-Sale / Visitor-to-Goal
The visitor-to-sale website conversion rate currently averages 2-3 % for most e-commerce sites. It’s a simple measure of the percentage of visitors that land on your website and purchase in the same session. Divide the total number of sales/goals by the total unique visitors. By contrast, top-converting websites currently convert 23 % of visitors to sale, and what they do differently is worth understanding. SeeWhy recently published a free eBook titled “Lessons Learned from the Top 10 Converting Websites,” and this is well worth reading. The visitor-to-sale/goal website conversion is the easiest to compare with other sites.

Funnel Conversion Rate
The funnel website conversion rate looks at the proportion of visitors that complete your conversion process. If it’s a shopping cart, then the start of the conversion funnel is usually when a visitor places an item in the shopping cart. In a web form, this would be arriving at the first page of the form itself. The funnel conversion rate is probably the most widely used rate when people are talking about their ‘website conversion rate.’ It’s a simple percentage: divide the number of sales/goals achieved by the number of visitors that started the process. SeeWhy tracks conversion rates across approximately 9,000 e-commerce sites. This data shows that website conversion rates can vary wildly, but the average funnel conversion rate is 29 percent, meaning that more than 7 in every 10 visitors that start conversion processes do not complete them. The average abandonment rate is 71 %  (i.e. 1 minus the conversion rate).

Page Level Conversion Rate
The page level conversion rate is the proportion of visitors that arrive on one page and subsequently progress to the next stage of the conversion funnel. It’s typically used to examine the performance of each step in the conversion funnel itself to ensure each step is performing well and to eliminate bottlenecks.

If you’ve got a problem with one of the pages in your conversion funnel, it will show up on your page conversion rate. Running a split test (using Google Website Optimiser or similar) will enable you to test two different versions of the same page and see which one works better.

Of these three website conversion rates, the most useful is the funnel conversion rate. This tells you what proportion of the traffic that demonstrates intent to buy, actually go on to buy in the same session. In many ways, it is one of the most important measures of a site’s effectiveness.

The post Understanding Which Website Conversion Rate to Use appeared first on Power Retail - Australia's News and Information Resource for the Online and Multichannel Retail Community.