4 Ways to Improve Your Ecommerce Customer-Return Policy (Entrepreneur)
“Convenient return policies are key to developing customer loyalty, but many ecommerce retailers continue to make the process far too onerous. Too often, they bury their return policy deep in their website and load it with technical jargon. Many also fail to give shoppers a reasonable amount of time to return merchandise.”
Finish Line loses $3 million in sales with its new web site (Internet Retailer)
“Switching to new e-commerce site technology Nov. 19 backfired for Finish Line Inc. and cost the multichannel retailer of shoes and apparel $3 million in sales in the third quarter, Glenn S. Lyon, chairman and CEO, said during an earnings conference call Friday.”
Little details—and mistakes—can add up for online shoppers (Internet Retailer)
“Humans’ short-term memory can handle only about four items of information at a time, yet many web sites bombard consumers with extensive category lists, perhaps with 20 labels , says Tim Ash, CEO of landing page optimization firm SiteTuners. Moreover, just 2% of consumers actually invest the time and energy to use advanced searches on web sites, he says.”
One Comment
Wow, the Demandware story is interesting. You rarely get to compare things apples-to-apples like this.
Demandware is OK, but their base functionality in terms of information retrieval quality is mediocre in my opinion. Their spell check is 2-step. I’m not impressed with their overall keyword-search quality, either. SEO — I won’t even get started. That and I’m not sure why they’d do this when Demandware typically takes a percentage of your sales. Maybe that has a little to do with why their revenue is somehow up but performance down? Hard to parse this. It could also be lack of up/cross-selling tools.
I’m frankly not surprised they switched back. I’m not sure which eCommerce platform it is (could be custom and I haven’t investigated deeply), but they look to be using Endeca for their search and navigation. My analysis is simple. This was a foolish move, and the fool that decided to switch from what they had to Demandware should be fired (or hire me to evaluate his next questionable decision). Even if I’m wrong about all of the above, they then had no control over their application, as their entire application is SaaS!
Strike 2. No control over your destiny. SaaS has a habit of causing that problem. For a large B&M like FinishLine, this is an unacceptable decision. Demandware has crocs.com in its portfolio, I see — which is no doubt a bullet point that Demandware used to seal the deal, but Crocs isn’t FinishLine. Crocs is a manufacturer that dabbles in selling online. Finishline is a retailer with serious merchandising needs.
Walmart switched away from Endeca, for example, but it wasn’t for any other reason (in my opinion) than to have even more control over their destiny. So they also obviously didn’t move to a SaaS platform.
They moved to an even more custom platform where they can write their own ranking algorithms based on technology they acquired from a company founded by the same engineers that built Amazon’s A9 search platform. In other words, Walmart has the capital to invest in a completely custom merchandising/search/nav platform and probably didn’t like that their other customers had the same access to the same technology as they do if they made the same purchases. I don’t think they were _unhappy_, they just wanted more control.
Finishline isn’t Walmart. They were doing fine with their previous decisions and in my opinion this was a step backwards in terms of control and quality. Kudos to them for at least admitting they made the mistake and taking the fix to the finish line . . .