eCommerce Weekly Roundup Issue #9

The North Media eCommerce Weekly is a hand-curated newsletter from the team at North Media compiled every Sunday to bring you the best in eCommerce. To get this via email, sign up here.

Pay attention to these 5 things when building your omnichannel retail strategy (Read more)

If you think about your retail strategy as one-dimensional, chances are you’re doing it wrong. The reality is, your customers (and potential customers) will come in contact with your brand through a variety of channels. An omnichannel retail strategy doesn’t just consist of the two broad categories of brick-and-mortar and online, but also includes mobile, location, device and beyond. To find success across these platforms, it is essential to deliver a seamless and consistent shopping experience regardless of how your customer comes in contact with you. This is much easier said than done. To deliver a seamless experience, it requires constant monitoring and auditing of your brand’s various touch-points.

Most companies will spend millions on open new retail locations but neglect hiring one person to manage their online website. The result is understaffing in the online division leading to poor customer experience across devices and channels. When was the last time you updated your legacy ERP? Poor transfers of information on your business’s back-end show in-accurate real-time in-store inventory on your website which can cause confusion and frustration on your customer’s end. Going through your website’s mobile experience is also critical. A poor mobile interface can lose your customer’s trust and consequently their sale. Finally, keep your management’s goals aligned across all divisions and you’ll instantly begin to notice omnichannel growth.

Nordstrom set to launch retail stores with no merchandise (Read more)

Here’s Nordstrom’s simple hypothesis: a focus on consumer experience rather than pushing product sales will, in-turn, result in higher sales growth. As the retail landscape continues to change at rapid speeds, Nordstrom believes that it is increasingly important to deliver a unique shopping experience to your customer rather than throwing as many products as possible in front of their face. To test this theory, Nordstrom is trying something different by opening stores without any inventory. The first of its kind store is set to open on October 3rd and will be 3,000 square feet instead of their usual 140,000 square foot stores.

Although the new store will have eight dressing rooms where shoppers can try on clothes, the stores won’t actually keep inventory for purchase in stock. Instead, they will be pulling merchandise from other mall-anchored stores and from its website. The store will attract shoppers by offering personal stylists curating outfits, in-store bars that offer juices or wine, manicures, and on-site tailoring. The trend of shifting focus to the consumer shopping experience has been tested by other retail giants including Sears and Target. It is a concept applies to online shopping as well, what measures are you taking to improve the shopping experience on your online-store?

Are you making these 5 common eCommerce mistakes? (Read more)

You’re already aware of how important SEO is for driving organic traffic back to your site. SEO efforts help capture users that are in the information search stage of the buying process and therefore are more likely to convert should your shop appear in search results. Unfortunately, SEO isn’t always black and white and can be confusing at times. So much so, that puzzled marketers tend to turn to industry leaders for direction. In this e-commerce educational piece, columnist Brian Weiss notes that big e-commerce players are often making critical SEO mistakes that should be avoided by onlookers. Brian goes into detail in search-result impacted areas such as faceted navigation disasters, how site speed may soon factor into Google’s ranking factors, the importance of having a crawl path to have a chance to rank for competitive queries, how having conflicting tag signals on their category pages and tagging structures are suboptimal and how short, clear and concise URLs tend to rank better. SEO is the digital marketing area most likely to be avoided with most having low motivation to learn, but with a little time investment, it can do wonders on your bottom line.

Your marketing channels are getting a new addition: voice agent (Read more)

“Hey Alexa, I’m tryi`ng to make my world famous guacamole and I’m out of Avocados, please add some to my grocery list” — you. “Sure, Whole Foods currently has a sale on Avocados, buy two get one free, would you like me to order some?” — Alexa. Maybe not completely accurate but the conversation will go something along those lines and that’s the idea behind voice agent as a marketing channel. According to research firm Gartner, within three years voice agents will handle about a third of all web browsing and marketing automation platform Resulticks plans to be at the forefront of that movement.

The platform essentially aims to understand customer profiles and brands’ marketing goals to voice interaction through integrations with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, Apple’s Siri and any other player that eventually enters the space. Brands will utilize Resultick’s platform and offer targeted discounts matching a consumer’s profile. Although the use cases are endless, the concern for Resulticks lies in whether their system will win over systems directly integrated within the personal assistant devices. For instance, Amazon already has a profile of users and may decide to push their own products at various opportunities, rendering Resulticks’ offers ineffective. Regardless of how this channel plays out, it is clear that voice agents will be a real play for marketers in the foreseeable future.

Online shopping continues to grow into the forefront of holiday purchasing (Read more)

According to the North Pole Times, Santa Claus will be replacing all his reindeer with drones to deliver his gifts this year. That’s right, gone is the sound of hooves on your roof, Saint Nick has been reading too much TechCrunch. In related news from several thousand miles south, consumers are increasingly turning to online channels to do their holiday shopping. According to a recent Walker Sands poll, 41% of more than 1,600 consumers surveyed reported buying all, or a majority of their holiday gifts online last year. Here are a few more important stats that stand out:

• 44 percent of the high-frequency online shoppers report they are likely to make a purchase on a voice-controlled device in the coming year.
• 78 percent prefer to use a desktop, 48 percent a mobile device and 24 percent via a voice-controlled device.
• 40 percent said free shipping was the top motivator for shopping online
• 33 percent said they would be willing to pay up to $10 shipping charge for same-day delivery

Online retailers should already begin gearing up for the holiday season. User experiences on both mobile and desktop should be optimized and delivery times should be clear. And most importantly, shoppers are very last-minute (thanks for the gift card uncle Tom), so it is critical to offer express delivery options. As is evident in the poll, shoppers are willing to pay more to make sure they get their gifts on-time. Brace yourself, the holiday season is around the corner!

Nestle and Blue Bottle Coffee match up (Read more)

In merger and acquisition news that surprisingly does not involve Amazon, Nestle decided to pick up a majority stake in Blue Bottle Coffee. Blue Bottle is a coffee retailer located on the West coast and has developed a cult-like following by hipster coffee lovers. Nestle acquired a 68% stake in the coffee company, paying up to $500 million at a $700 million valuation. Before the acquisition announcement, rumours involved Amazon having interest in investing in a coffee startup as an opportunity to expand its Prime footprint.

Similar to the direction retail is heading in, Blue Bottle Coffee invests heavily in in-store customer experience. In fact, some have compared walking into a BBC shop to walking into an Apple Store; clean, minimalistic look with great service. The company believes that being backed by a well-capitalized parent like Nestle could allow them to compete on the same level as Starbucks. Wondering if Blue Bottle Coffee is your cup of tea (or coffee)? Well if you’re open to paying $6 a cup it just may be!