Observations about design, code and the world of commerce.
0 | Add a Comment The GartnerGroup estimates that by the end of 2012, there will be 150 million people using mobile devices to purchase goods and services worldwide.
An ABI Research study predicted that shoppers will order $2.2 billion in physical goods via mobile devices in 2010 and by 2015, $119 billion worth of goods and services will be purchased via a mobile phone.
0 | Add a Comment There were some key findings in the study that can give you a view of where your peers are feeling pain, and where they plan their investments.
80% said online growth as critical to their overall business in multi-channel environment, and were not satisfied with their current site’s user experience.
33% will invest in a new ecommerce platform and redesign.
40% not satisfied with their site’s ability to drive AOV and Conversion rates, and 68% looking to increase both.
62% of Mid Market companies looking to improve their user experience.
0 | Add a Comment With over 10 years of ecommerce expertise Gorilla has experience in a wide variety of multichannel retailers. Clients range from retailers that started out as a small eBay store to grow to multi-millions per year in online revenue, to Fortune 100 companies with complex channel rules and vendors. Many of these companies have strategic relationships with resellers of their products, especially if they are brand manufactures.
During Gorilla’s in-depth project discovery phase we are often involved in discussions with clients to determine if they should start an online B2B channel to complement their existing B2C online channel. Most often this is accomplished with a dedicated login off the B2C site that displays an entirely different catalog, pricing and perhaps fulfillment processes for their vendors. More extensive B2B sites have their own look and feel, domain name, and customer segmenting.
The question of “What has worked well in your experience?” frequently is heard in the board room. While the determination is client specific and ultimately comes down to a cost benefit analysis, these questions will help you steer the conversations internally and with your ecommerce agency.
1. Does your ecommerce platform support B2B or spinoff “micro”sites? Having a platform that has the functionality of separate sites, catalogs, and login specific views inherent in the system will eliminate the need to recreate the wheel. Keeping costs down and having a quicker time to market.
2. Do you have complex pricing rules for resellers? To put it simply, if every one of your 1000 vendors have specific pricing that changes frequently, there will need to be significantly more discovery to translate the rules into an automated ecommerce program. A less complex price rule of “resellers get 20% off the catalog” would be more cost effective to implement.
3. Where are your vendor relationships managed? If your vendor relationships are managed by an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool you will need to consider an integration of that data into your ecommerce platform. Effort for this could vary depending on ERP and ECP involved.
4. Do your B2B Customers have different shopping habits than your B2C customers? This will help you determine if your B2B site would need a completely different look and feel or if you could reuse B2C design. If your B2B customers buy the same products, just in higher quantities, then design re-work could be minimal. However, if your B2C customers are buying faucets while your B2B are buying whole bathroom solutions, site usability and design will need to be taken into consideration.
5. Do your customers want B2B? This may be a simple question, but if you have a small number of vendors and a well defined process for filling B2B orders currently, it may not be advantageous to take up a B2B component at this time. When taking B2B into consideration you would also have to factor in the opportunity cost that the funds could go into such as marketing and upgrades to your B2C channel.
Comments Off The world of ecommerce has many parallels to your traditional brick and mortar retail stores. The terms cart, checkout, and customer service all have been borrowed from retail land and transported into your webstore.
In Gorilla’s experience there is one common aspect that lags behind your traditional stores’ shopping experience, catalog product organization.
I’ll take you through an example.
If you were in a sporting goods store and you wanted to buy a pair of mesh basketball shorts. You know first to go to the apparel department, bypass the ski jacket racks and go to the basketball section. Now when faced with 5 or so racks in front of you, what do you do? Do you want Nike shorts? You would search by brand and ignore the Reebok side. Do you want a color that matches your intramural team’s logo? Scan the hangers and look for Kelly green shorts. Are you on a particular budget? Start at the clearance rack and make your way around reaching for the price tags as you go.
In an ecommerce world this flow would be as simple as clicking:
Homepage>Apparel>Basketball>Shorts>Green>Less than $30 – In a matter of seconds you have completed the same process – makes sense, right?
Even though this seems like second nature to all shoppers in store, many ecommerce sites, especially those on legacy ecommerce platforms (3-10 yr old) have not thought about overhauling their catalog structure to include faceted (drilldown) navigation, or are simply limited by the platform.
Faceted navigation on ecommerce sites has been proven to:
For more information on how to improve your site’s navigation contact sales@gorillachicago.com for a free consultation.
ecommerce faceted navigation
0 | Add a Comment Frog Design is taking a bold move to position itself for the new wave of Smart Grid enabled devices and technologies.
Anyone who can recall the days when nightly television stations signed off to the National Anthem will also recall how simple those television interfaces were. At most, early television controls consisted of a a knob to turn the power on, another knob to adjust the volume, and a dial to change the channel to a handful of preset stations. Today’s multimedia remotes seem more like a NASA mission control lab by comparison.
Tomorrow’s Smart Grid-enabled appliances will offer tremendous control over how we use energy and infinite ways to customize our technology environments to operate more efficiently and behave according to our preferences — That is only if it’s easy enough to do so. It’s no easy task to make the complex appear simple. Kudos to Frog Design for recognizing an opportunity and positioning themselves accordingly.
August 26th, 2010 | 
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