The rapid rate of adoption of technology has had a major impact on the retail sector, and many businesses have been struggling to keep up with the demands of their customers. Here’s how not to disappoint them.
Technology has very real and tangible effects on the general population and I believe we are experiencing some properly disruptive social, technological and economic circumstances in our lives at the moment.
As consumers we adapt to that change pretty rapidly but as retailers, as companies, as organisations, we’re a lot slower to pick up on that pace of change and that makes for a really interesting situation. At the moment the consumer is very much driving the agenda, driving that change and the retailer has to follow. The customer is gaining control in how they want to shop and how they want to engage with retailers. As Cor Molenaar says in his book Shopping 3.0, “You can’t sell to customers on the internet anymore. Customers will buy from you”. The balance of power has shifted.
What’s driving this change? Consumers are switched on and always online, always connected, with better communication links, fourth and fifth generation mobile networks, and the imminent arrival of the NBN – how we find information and how we communicate has been transformed.
This connectivity has changed so many things: it’s changed the way we watch TV, it’s changed the way we look at photos with our friends and it’s changed the way we shop. And as connectivity increases so does the number of devices that we use to connect.
And it’s more than just devices too. Pinterest is a company with only 16 employees which became the fastest site in history to break through the 10 million unique visitors per week mark. Earlier this year it drove more referral traffic to retailers than LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+ combined. comScore reported the site had 11.7 million unique users and was responsible for 3.6 percent of referral traffic to retail sites.
So what does this change mean for consumers and what does this mean for how companies can sell products to customers?
This commoditisation of internet access has changed everything. Internet connectivity is now, even before the advent of the NBN, a commodity. This accessibility has changed the way we communicate and it’s changed the way we form our opinions.
Customers will buy from you on the internet but you can’t sell to them. The customer may well have been in your store but are they going to your website? They may have seen your ad but will they use your mobile app? The key for retailers is how to get customers to go from your catalogue, to your store and to your website to make a purchase.
The top five things I’ve learned over the past 12 months by talking to and working with Australian retailers are:
1. Data is the new rock and roll
Google Analytics is a free, easy to use service and the findings are extremely valuable. There is no reason why a business shouldn’t be using it. Once you have even a small collection of data (it doesn’t need to be big data), the opportunities to use it to drive new marketing initiatives, or even automate them, are endless. And the data you collect about your customers increases the potential to build customer relationships and increase customer value.
2. Stay home on Christmas
I’ve spoken to plenty of retailers who are in the office on Christmas Day putting their Boxing Day sale markdowns in the system. It doesn’t have to be like that. Technology exists to support the way you want to work rather than force you to work in the way the technology demands. Put your price changes in the system today and set them to be active at one minute past midnight on Boxing Day.
3. Step away from the server
And what I mean here is get your eCommerce site away from the IT department. You don’t let the building maintenance and property guys run a physical store so don’t let the IT guys run your online store.
I’m still amazed by how much IT involvement I see in eCommerce. IT people love complexity. Customers don’t. Complexity is the enemy of profitability.
4. Search means more than Google
When a customer visits your site they are looking for the search box to be prominent and to work well, if’s its not there or if it doesn’t work then they won’t be there for much longer. So get simple search working well and use the terms that your customers are using in your product catalogue. Don’t know what they are? Well go back to the data and look at the searches that customers are doing on your site that deliver no results.
5. Customer service rules
The option to reserve online and pick up in store – click to collect – is only going to get more and more popular, especially in metro areas in Australia. The idea that you can shop online during the day and pick up your goods on the way home has a convenience going for it that I think we will see apply to lots of categories: grocery essentials, gifts, fashion and apparel. Get confident in your stock levels – add a bit of a buffer – integrate it into your eCommerce store and away you go. Offer your customers the flexibility and convenience that they want.
The service contract that you have with your customers has to be flexible. And your systems and platforms and IT have to support this flexibility. There’s a great interchange in The Social Network when pretty early in the development of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin asks Mark Zuckerberg, “When will it be finished?” and Mark says, “It won’t be finished, that’s the point. The way fashion’s never finished.”
That is very much the point. This is never finished. eCommerce, serving customers, will never be finished. It’s always evolving. The best thing you can do is to be flexible, to be agile, to be able to respond to change. You won’t get everything right all the time and you will disappoint some your customers some of the time. But use customer service to help you.
