Churbuck.com

Randall Stross in the Sunday New York Times, profiles an Andover, Mass. company called SeeWhy and its forthcoming product Abandonment Tracker Pro.

As a digital marketing guy who was responsible for getting people into an online store, I also led a team that tried to “remarket” to those potential customers who came, looked, and left without purchasing. The remarketing concept reminds me of a shopkeeper who keeps an eye on a customer perusing the goods on his store’s shelves, watches them leave the store without buying, and then follows them out the door onto the sidewalk to say, “Hey! Hey! Come back!”

It’s creepy, but theoretically, if the ecommerce operator is willing to do something dynamic – like lower the price, extend the warranty, sweeten the deal – the benefits can be compelling: close the sale, gain a customer who can be retained into a repeat customer, and keep the virtual cash register ringing.

From the article: “When asked about possibly alienating prospective customers with overzealous remarketing, Mr. Nicholls said: “Tone and manner are important. The message should be something like, ‘Oops, was there a problem? Can we help?,’ versus an out-and-out hard sell, which will just wind everyone up.”

I think the reality is far different and requires a telepathic connection between the vendor and the customer that simply doesn’t exist. The first contradictory behavior in the ideal world where all-clicks-convert-to-a-sale is virtual comparison shopping where the customer fills a cart and configures it with goods, accessories, and services to simply build a price model for comparison to others. Pricing “homework” is a key behavior on my part – where I take the time to seek out the possible pricing permutations of a car or durable good before arriving at a dealer or brick and mortar store for a face-to-face negotiation with a salesperson. Many ecommerce sites, in my opinion, are research tools, not a means to an end, and as such as not going to be converting every customer every time, no matter what incentives are placed before.

The creepiest thing in Stross’ piece, is the disclosure that sites can now capture keystrokes typed into an input filed with relying on a “submit” button. That’s going to bring the FTC down like an avalanche of bricks and is evil. SeeWhy is not going to implement dynamic keystroke capture as a default. This is the technology that lets Google guess ahead on search queries (a good thing).

Ecommerce, in general, is a tired paradigm that needs to be blown up. Think about it. What was the latest significantly new online shopping experience you’ve seen? For me it has to be the Kindle – the ultimate in instant gratification – but on the whole, the cart metaphor is dead and needs to evolve to something different and built around empathy, not the finality of buying and the regrets of the merchant chasing their customer down the sidewalk shouting, “Wait! Wait! Can we talk?”

My custom running shoes

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck

I need a pair of running shoes — the old Salomon trail shoes are rounding on the heels and a threat to my health. So off I went for recommendations from the CrossFit community and came up with these — Nike Free’s.

When I checked them out on Nike.com I discovered I could customize them — really customize them — so in honor of my Cotuit Skiff, the Snafu II, I went with a yellow body and a green highlight.

Professionally, while these suckers will take a discouraging four to six weeks to arrive, I liked:

1. The customization interface was really intuitive and kind of cool to play around with.
2. The text entry for putting words on the heel cups was capricious — permitting some words: “Sinister”; but dinging others: “Dexter.”
3. The email progress notification is a great example of post-sale-pre-delivery expectation management. Including a photo of my shoe is very smart.

There’s a lot to learn from Nike in the customization and communications process. I know I will probably be horrified at how ugly these are on my feet, will look like I have two lemons strapped to my feet, and have an argument with my wife for not conferring with her before committing the order.

I wonder if there is any empirical evidence that the end of a school year drives any shopping behavior associated with the return of campus notebooks to the home environment. I have two kids home from college, both carrying Lenovo Thinkpads (A Z60 and an R60) and both need some serious hard disk sanitation work.

Being a cheapskate, lesson learned the hard way: “Max out the harddrive when purchasing a laptop that is going to school.”  The sheer volume of media files, games, and assorted crud is astonishing and will fill all available storage at the worst possible time: namely right before finals when papers need to be written and the mission critical scenario of cramming kicks in.

So, home come these sick and bloated machines and I find myself ready to:

1. Buy ultrafast, ultra-high volume hard drives.
2. Buy an external drive with enough capacity to perform the transfer and rebuild of the OS on the new notebook drive.
3. Potentially replace keyboards if I detect any crud or spillage.
4. Buy more RAM? Maybe …
5. Not buy replacement screens like I had to do last summer.
6. Consider padded sleeves
7. Even consider NQA replacement plans because I am paranoid and my kids haven’t yet met a notebook they couldn’t accidentally destroy

So, note to self. Push a “Back from School Sale” for accessories and parts.

A Gimmick Becomes a Real Trend – New York Times

A very big day for Lenovo.com. We kick off the holiday sales season today. Good piece in the Times this morning about the online version of Black Friday.

“Mr. Hart of BDO Seidman said this year’s Cyber Monday deals would culminate a series of November promotions intended to drive holiday sales sooner. Sales like Target.com’s discount on more than 60 gift items, he said, helped set the promotional tone of the month for retailers. Free shipping offers for toys sold on Walmart.com and Target.com show how jittery merchants have become since the recalls of toys made in China, he said.”

I am a big ecomm geek — from the first year Amazon was in business when I bought about $500 in books (primarily on Byzantine History, I am a Constantinople geek), to my present gig at Lenovo, where a major part of my portfolio of my responsibilities lies in getting customers in the virtual door of the virtual store, I have been, and continue to be a big fan of online shopping. Will it cure global warming, cut traffic, and drive the Long Tail? Sure, a little bit at least, and all of us, I’m sure, can make some testimonial to our love affair with the old online shoppe and the trips to the stores and malls it has spared us.

Over the weekend the august New York Times sounded the warning buzzer to the ecomm party, saying the progonisticators at Forrester and Jupiter and other crystal ball shops are predicting a slow down in ecomm growth rates. Well sure, we’re now in Year Twelve of the ecomm revolution, and as the venture capitalist Ben Rosen (Lotus, Compaq) once told me, it’’s easy to double revenues when you start from nothing. The Times article had an interesting quote from a disillusioned online shopper:

“He and his wife, Liz Hauer, 51, a Macy’s executive, also shop online, but mostly for gifts or items that need to be shipped. They said they found that the experience could be tedious at times. “Online, it’s much more of a task,” she said. Still, Internet commerce is growing at a pace that traditional merchants would envy. But online sales are not growing as fast as they were even 18 months ago. “

Tedious. Memorize that word. Tedious is apt and accurate when it comes to describing the typical shopping experience. How many people dread the same form field fill-out (save those who use the Google auto-complete function), who enter into a shopping cart wondering if they will miss a required field, mistype a character, or run into some strange, opaque security threshold that reject orders that specify a different shipping address from a card’s billing address, or a vendor that screws military and government personnel seeking an APO delivery?

At Lenovo we’ve run in a serious rough path recently because of inaccurate Estimated Shipping Dates (ESDs) which give a shopper a sense of when they might receive their order, a crucial thing for small businesses and individuals who need a product to stay in business or start school. When the ESD is wrong — because the process for updating it is either manual or symptomatic of a broken back end system, then all hell breaks loose.

Dysfunctional ecommerce weighs heavily on my mind. Today, my wife confirmed for me what the Times was reporting. When the novelty wears off, when the sense of adventure in ordering a book online fades, when winning another eBay auction is as routine as buying a cauliflower … when that happens then the grumpiness follows.

So my wife decides to equip the household’s tennis players with some shoes, shorts, rackets, balls, etc.. Her business partner told her to order from a site, I think it is called “Tennis Warehouse” or something, but it doesn’t matter. The upshot is after spending close to an hour shopping, comparing, selecting and de-selecting, then committing the cart to her credit card, she received an email from the merchant asking to see a photocopy of her driver’s license, information about the originating bank, and other personal data that set her “phishing” scam bells a-ringing.

Fuggedabodit, I told her. Screw them. Go elsewhere. No merchant in their right mind asks for anything other than the little security code on the card. She was pissed, so pissed she called information, tracked the merchant down to San Luis Obispo, and flamed the first customer service rep unlucky enough to answer her call.

Turns out any order over $400 triggers the security measures. Solution? Split it into two orders — now she’s going on more than two hours for the transaction — resubmit, pay with PayPal and done.

Why can’t someone make an ecommerce experience that is seamless and secure and semi-fun? Remember when Amex came up with the lame-ass Blue Card? The one with a chip embedded in it? What was that about? Wave it over the laptop and watch the transaction go down? Not likely.

We may be a dozen years into the online commerce revolution, but it still feels like 1995 to me. Let’s “web 2.0-ify” the whole mess and get it to the next level.

Fred Wilson: 2007: The End Of The Page View

Om weighs in this morning with the resignation that the page-view model is what we have for a benchmark of web audiences and therefore it is the benchmark we have to live with. Knowing that Om’s GigaOm network is dependent on advertising revenue, he has to conform the prevailing metric in the market, which is the 1990’s Web 1.0 measurement of audience as expressed by page views and unique visitors.

Fred sparked Om’s defense of the PV with this:

“…there are changes afoot in the Internet measurement business. Everyone is recognizing that pageviews matter less now. Ajax and other more modern web technologies allow for new ads to be diisplayed without a page reload. Ad views can grow even as page views decline. I know that there have been a number of discussions about this at the highest levels of the leading Internet measurement firms and the leading Internet businesses. And we’ll be seeing the outcomes of those discussions at some point in 2007.”But it doesn’t even stop there. Web pages themselves are changing, moving from pages controlled by publishers to pages controlled by users.”

I’ll reiterate my position from the point of view of a buyer of traffic, which is ultimately the onus on the site I buy from is not gross tonnage of views, nor even clicks, but the end-of-funnel conversion that occurs on my site after the publisher delivers the traffic into it. This of course is further complicated by the reality that the “deal is everything”, no publisher can control the creative run on the page — AJAX or static — but in the end, when I operate the campaign, optimize the creative, retraffick the placements and optimize the backend landing page for A/B and multivariate possibilities, I will look at those sites or networks which sent in the best traffic conditioned to respond to me.

I don’t buy large numbers. I don’t buy CPMs. I look at publishers as providing me blunt approximations of an audience, and then it is up to me and my agency to put the right offer in front of that audience at the right time. If I believe a publisher’s pitch on gross tonnage, then I’d be buying into the fact that they are pushing forced page refreshes to hit their campaign guarantees (which I did in former lives) are needlessly chunking long stories into multi-jumps to force up their pages per session, and otherwise playing the games with the logs that I played myself.

It takes one to know one and I know that ad impression numbers are wholly unreliable and again, reiterate, that the burden is on the buyer — aka, let the buyer beware — and take responsibility for the user experience once they wind up on the destination site.

Is expensive. $23 bucks a day. Granted it’s Singapore bucks, but still. I’ve dropped $50 since leaving Boston on Tuesday to stay connected. I am totally time-zone challenged right now. It’s Wednesday at 1 pm on Cape Cod. I left Cape Cod on Tuesday at 7 am. I arrived here at Wednesday at 11:30 pm. Now it is Thursday at 2 am.

Singapore? Hot. Humid (gee, it must be on the equator). I didn’t get caned at customs. The hotel is nice. The scotch tastes the same.

Time to eat a sleeping pill and aim for six hours of unconsciousness.

My Weblog: Internet Commerce: Sephora.No, HP, Yes!

“Internet commerce has to be drop dead simple and build a consumer’s confidence. There are two computer purchasing sites that I do business with and which come close to replicating the Amazon.com’s gold standard. In addition to HP’s commerce site, I also like Lenovo. And Lenovo comes close to establishing a sense of community. If i have a problem with a ThinkPad notebook one of the first places i go is to Lenovo.com. The site queries my computer, determines what model i have and establishes its configuration. Logic trees take over from there and pretty soon I’ve found the answer to my question, or more importantly, a solution to my problem.”

Jim makes some good points about getting in-and-out out of a shopping experience in as little time as possible. Usability comes to a sharp point when applied to the transactional web. Where a media site is all about delay and diversion — related links, click here, please don’t go away — a commerce site is all about masking complexity (ship to multiple addresses, remember my account details, find-it-and-buy-it) and getting people in and out of the store as soon as possible. When a consumer has a negative experience, like Jim did at Sephora trying to get a gift certificate, to when they have a positive, like one gets from Amazon’s One-Click, the chances of a repeat transaction are highly predictable.

I  had two commerce experiences yesterday — one was with NewEgg as I purchased a new 60 gb 7200 rpm Hitachi drive to revive a dead Fujitsu P2040, the other was at Fujitsu when I tried to get the OEM information on the dead Toshiba drive. Fujitsu failed. NewEgg ruled. Now, Fujitsu was able to find my machine based on the serial number, but had no level of detail about the components. I had to google out to a third-party “enthusiast” site for P2040 owners, look at the discussion threads, find the part I wanted, then hit NewEgg. Fujitsu lost all opportunity of selling me an upgraded drive — I suppose it’s understandable given the complexity of any PC manufacturers catalogue and the impossibility of keeping sunsetted machine information active for any period of time.

I want to hit a site and be recognized as a customer, to be asked how my machine is doing, how that book was I ordered, and then be offered suggestions on how to improve it.