During the internet boom/bust years companies such as boo.com were criticised for trying to sell apparel online. Common opinion was that the internet wasn’t mature enough and business models (or execution thereof) were not robust enough to cope with the notion of selling clothes online. Broadband didn’t even exist in any meaningful way and most people were struggling to identify how best to harness the opportunities presented by the web. Here we are nearly 10 years later and according to a report from IMRG the UK e-retail market was worth nearly £50billion in 2009 with ecommerce showing 15% year on year growth (for clothing that jumps to 18%) and the UK in particular now has a seemingly insatiable appetite for buying clothes online. The apparel industry has seen a lot of success online where you’d imagine that most people would be more inclined to try before they buy.

So what is it that is driving this trend and why has it attracted the likes of companies like Google and countless others? Some of the answer lies in technology adoption, infrastructure improvements, generational shopping habits and accessibility but all of that is for another blog. The main answer lies in usability. It is no coincidence that the most successful and fashionable brands online have taken the extra care to focus on one of the central planks of shopping for apparel online – the user experience. It is also no coincidence that a recent Forrester report cited navigation and site search as the top two initiatives towards improving online performance. More than any other sector buying online in the apparel industry relies heavily on the emotional part of the user experience and the behaviour thereof. If you want to buy a 32″ tv and have a poor online shopping experience you can easily find an alternative website and buy the same brand (or an alternative) knowing that fundamentally you’re going to end up with a 32″ tv that looks and operates as you’d expect. That sort of scenario doesn’t lend itself so readily to fashion where looking and feeling unique is part of the aspirational sell. Therefore the speed and ease by which products are navigated, presented and then experienced is critical to the success of a fashion brand online. Other factors like logistics and customer service are also crucial but it’s the area of findability that continues to drive these important business processes within the fashion sector.

It still perplexes me why a business will spend a fortune acquiring and engaging new customers only to provide them with a poor site experience. The two standout areas to review in order to correct this are relevance and usability (with imagery not far behind). Whilst this may seem obvious there are many brands (large and small) who struggle with this. For example why show shoe sizes as a refinement when someone has done a search for shirts? When you realise this problem why then spend a small fortune and wait weeks/months to fix it when it can conceivably be addressed within minutes or prevented from happening in the first place? Speaking of refinements these are a vital part of the search results page as are other features such as zoom options, video, alternative viewing angles, reviews, blogs etc. The experience can be further enhanced with best of breed solutions like recommendation engines, personalised email, outfit makers, multivariate testing, surveys/polls and social media. Add to this the commercial opportunity that a mobile strategy can bring (without costing a fortune) to your fashion brand and it becomes all the more apparent that the time to look sharp and be smart with your site search experience is now.

In my last post on list, grid and hybrid views, I discussed the pros and cons of list and grid views and offered a new alternative – the hybrid view for search and navigation pages, which takes the best of both and combines it into one.

Today we’ll take the discussion a step further and, using the hybrid view as an example talk about using site search pages as landing pages for any campaigns your are running.

The key to these pages is they allow you to easily and dynamically create a landing page that is tailored to any phrase that is important to your customers. They are updated to include the latest products, prices and other content like reviews. Also important – and perhaps a bit more difficult – is presenting relevant product information above the fold that creates an engaging user experience. This is where the previously discussed hybrid view comes in.

Here are some tips for how to optimize the page for website visitors, using the site of our customer Sports Unlimited as an example:

1. Display relevant product information above the fold — we refer to this as “Auto Merchandising”

The ‘Riddell Revolution Youth Football Helmet’; is in position #1 as more people have selected this product than any other when searching for ‘revolution football helmets’ on the Sports Unlimited site. A different helmet may be # 1 tomorrow, or next week if the preferences of the site’s visitors change.

2. Include keyword specific clickable banners at top of page displaying related brands and categories
3. Offer standard landing page options:
1. Display the keyword at top. This provides what is called an information scent that should reaffirm to the visitor that they are on a page that is relevant to what they are looking for.
2. Offer “sort by,” “view” and “pagination” options at the bottom



3. Include related, user-generated phrases at the bottom



4. Include relevant refinement options to narrow selection by gender, category, brand, etc.



5. Offer product options to select quantity, color, size and call to action (i.e. “add to cart”) button (see image below point #6)
6. Use “mouse over pop ups” to offer more information, oftentimes a larger image



7. Use AJAX search to provide the WOW experience – which can be seen by clicking on any refinement option from this page (AJAX delivers a fast, streamlined experience when clicking on refinements or going back and forth within the search results):

http://sporting-goods.sportsunlimitedinc.com/search#w=revolution%20football%20helmets&asug=rev

This special type of dynamic landing page has resulted in increases in revenues and average order value. They can be used as landing pages for many types of campaigns, paid search, email, display advertising.

If you have any questions about this or comments to share, please feel free to comment below.

For retailers selling online, the question of “Grid View or List View?” for results pages is a common struggle. As Linda Bustos points out on her “Get Elastic” blog, “When presented with a list of search results, people often click the first result – paying attention to the top 3 or so.” And as “Get Elastic” reader Bob points out in his comment, “Grid views are predominantly used on sites selling merchandise when the visual appearance matters to the customer (i.e., clothing). List views are used when the text is important like a model number or more technical info is what matters (i.e., printer ink, computer RAM).”

Over the last three years I have had hundreds of conversations with retailers, and the overwhelming preference is to show site visitors results pages in grid view. Having also conducted a few A/B split tests to see which view performs better, the evidence suggests this as well. Our argument for why grid view performs better is that retailers can show more products “above the fold,” meaning that website visitors see more items in the browser window without having to scroll down. However, an argument for list view is that it gives you the opportunity to showcase additional descriptive text – good for shoppers who need product descriptions in order to make a buying decision.

The glaring problem with list view is that on the average laptop or desktop monitor, the visitor typically sees only two products above the fold. Given this conundrum, we’ve created a new view – called “hybrid view” – that incorporates the best of both worlds, offering pages that show more products, as in a grid view, while also including the additional descriptive information for shoppers.

Let’s look at a site search page from Sports Unlimited as our example. In the image below you can see how Sports Unlimited (with our help) has created a results page incorporating the best aspects of both list and grid views, and the results have been positive:

• 271% increase in revenue (directly from the landing page)
• 16% increase in Average Order Value (from the landing page)

If you have any questions about hybrid view for search, feel free to post a comment here or contact us at (866) 240-2812 or sales@sli-systems.com.

With the holiday shopping season well underway, there is talk of recent ecommerce site failures and anticipation of how these failures will impact online businesses during this season’s shopping frenzy. Nearly one year ago, Internet Retailer reported on major site failures experienced during Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) – two of the busiest shopping days of the season. Often, these outages are caused by the high volume of site visitors during peak shopping times and servers that can’t keep up. Or, they may be caused by natural disasters, power outages or software glitches. When entire sites go down there is tremendous impact: business is lost, customer loyalty suffers and a brand’s reputation is seriously compromised.

While site failures are extremely costly for online retailers, there are also individual aspects of a site that can lose functionality and also impact the online experience for shoppers; for example, site search, the shopping cart, product videos, etc. For these functions, it makes sense to entrust your site to a hosted services (or SaaS – software-as-a-service) provider so you can offload that traffic to a 3^rd party – particularly one that has built-in redundancy in its architecture and implemented business continuity policies, to protect you from these types of failures. For example, SLI Systems has implemented redundant servers in multiple data centers around the world to ensure that if a server goes down for any reason, another will step in to take over.

The Internet Retailer article from last year indicates that according to web performance measurement firm Gomez, Inc. the top 50 retail sites have an average of 97.60% availability, and an average site response time of 2.25 seconds (Gomez also says research shows there is a 2-second “standard” – referring to the length of time the average person will wait).

Like most retailers, you’re probably turning up the volume on your marketing efforts to drive as much traffic to your sites as you can in the coming weeks. But are you certain your site will be able to perform – and respond quickly? It’s not too late to offload your site search to a 3^rd party expert if that’s an area you have concerns about or haven’t looked closely at. Have questions? Feel free to comment below.