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As retailers increase online sales and compete with traditional brick and mortar shops, the line between ecommerce and brick and mortar continues to blur.  While Paco Underhill seems to have made great strides in understanding the consumer behavior within a brick and mortar store, we have much learning left to do.

However, we can certainly take most of what Paco has learned, apply it to ecommerce and watch for positive results.  While most of his studies occurred within the confines of a physical store, the behavior of a person within the online shopping experience should be similar.  The 'browser' exists in both the online and physical store - the shopper who just walks around and buys nothing.  The consumer who purchases a single specific product and leaves exists both online and at your store.  So, the people shopping are similar and the tactics to upsell and cross sell are similar, but the traffic patterns are very different.  Why?  Because your online store reaches a much greater audience than a physical store.   

Consumers visiting your online store from locations around the country (or world) is both good and bad.  It's great because you are able to reach a much larger audience, thus potentially sell much more product.  It's bad because the assumptions you had about your brick and mortar customers no longer apply.  While consumer behavior is similar, your customers are no longer bound by geography.  This means the 'Winter Coat' promotion you had scheduled for October does not apply to any consumer outside of the North Eastern US, or Eastern Canada.  If 75% of your web traffic is from outside of this region, you are missing your mark.  Retailers would never do this in a physical store, so why do it online?

In the online world, you have the power to show each customer that walks in the door a completely different store.  While no one has perfected this concept, we can certainly use some tricks to help us better target our customers.  Leveraging this idea, we can show customers in our geographic area the 'Winter Coat' promotion, while showing the remainder of users a non-climate specific promotion.  This is a very basic example of 'personalization', which takes something we know about the consumer and uses it to customize their online experience.  This is a tricky, but powerful concept in ecommerce that really differentiates it from brick and mortar retailing. 

Although, you can also apply some degree of personalization to a physical store.  Imagine being able to change the end-aisle display for each and every customer that walked by with a product in hand?  In theory, you could if you used RF security tags on your products.  Your end-aisle display could be smart enough to detect someone walking by with a 'blue shirt' and display a promotion for matching ties.  Sure, it's not a cheap solution, but as RF tags are included in more manufacturing models (hard goods and food), it becomes more of a possibility and an interesting one to think about.

Now that I've introduced the subject, I realize I meant to discuss the difference between Flash and HTML carts.  I suppose I got a little distracted...  :)  I'll save that for later.

Posted at 06:17 AM in General | Permalink