E-Commerce

For years now, Garnet Hill, a Franconia, N.H.-based apparel and home furnishings cataloger, has placed follow-up calls whenever customers encounter a problem with the company. Specifically, 24 to 48 hours after a customer complaint, Garnet Hill calls the customer and casually asks how the problem was handled and if it was resolved. Smart and sensitive upselling techniques make Garnet Hill’s customers feel cared about. Liberal employee discounts have its employees wearing the clothing and using the products it sells, so it’s easy for them to personalize the experience. This “touchy-feely” group has products open and laying around so reps literally can get their

Continuing our coverage of the Canadian market begun in Catalog Success’ The Corner View e-newsletter last week (see www.catalogsuccess.com/story/story.bsp?sid=53237&var=story#cornerview ), we came across a new survey released by Statistics Canada, which found that 2006 online sales for Canadian companies reporting them rose 40 percent to $49.9 billion. It was the fifth consecutive year of double-digit increases. More than 19,000 public and private companies were surveyed for the report. The majority of the 2006 sales, about 68 percent, were business-to-business sales. Four sectors account for most of the e-commerce activity in Canada: manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, and both wholesale trade and retail trade. The survey

In a roundtable discussion held on April 11 during a Hudson Valley DMA luncheon in Greenwich, Conn., Hanover Direct Vice President of Corporate Marketing Amy Schilder led a group on the best practices involved in partnership marketing. Specifically, she pointed out that partnerships with other marketing companies require several key components in order for them to work for both parties. Below are several take-away pointers from the discussion in which she focused primarily on Hanover’s own partnership with Sears, in which Sears offers a line of clothing from Hanover’s Silhouettes catalog. * Make sure both partners’ goals are in line with one another. In the Sears-Silhouettes

A recent survey by BIGresearch shows that more and more consumers are doing their own product/shopping research online prior to making purchases. The survey revealed that 89.4 percent of consumers regularly or occasionally research products online prior to buying them in a store. Among the findings by individual product category are the following: 41.1 percent said they’re most likely to research electronic items; 19.8 percent appliances; 19.7 percent medicines/vitamins; and 16.1 percent home improvement items. For more information, go to www.bigresearch.com .

For this edition, I perused several catalog Web sites to see how good a job catalogers do in explaining who they are. Naturally, many consumers want to get a good idea of who they’re doing business with. If your company comes off in something of a faceless manner, some might be put off. On the other hand, consumers take heart in knowing where you’re located, what you’re all about, where you’re coming from and in some cases, who founded you. It’s a fairly easy thing to do, especially on the Web. By in large, I found that most handle their “about this company”

If you operate a dedicated catalog/multichannel business nowhere near the size of Staples, you may think you have little in common with the office products giant. But in catalogs and on the Web, the playing field gets leveled and best practices can be common among many players. During a session at the recent NEMOA conference in Cambridge, Mass., Staples Director of Usability Colin Hynes laid out several ways in which Staples brings customer centricity to its catalog, store and Web initiatives. 1. Research user goals by doing in-store studies, seeing if customers use their catalogs in stores. 2. Design those goals through content maps and page

It’s getting tougher for marketers to achieve acceptable conversion rates and ROI, according to the e-tailing group’s annual merchant benchmarking survey, released April 3. The survey of 167 merchants shows that current conversion rates average in the 2 percent to 3 percent range, but vary from 1 percent to 5 percent depending on category and site evolution. Among the responses garnering the most tallies among those surveyed are the following. *23 percent of respondents employ three to five full-time employees on their e-commerce programs, although the fourth-leading vote-getter was 41 or more employees, cited by 12 percent of respondents *48 percent of respondents have staff spend

Test the following: 1. the title tag 2. the headline (H1) tag 3. the placement of the body copy in the HTML 4. the words in the body copy 5. your keyword prominence 6. the keyword density 7. your anchor text or internal links to that page 8. your anchor text or inbound links to that page from sites that you have influence over 9. the URL structure, including occurrences of keywords in the URL, number of directories om the URL and complexity of the URL (i.e., number of parameters in the query string) Then measure the following: 1. traffic to the page being tested 2. traffic to the site overall 3. backlinks to the page being

Catalogers and other search advertisers are justly concerned about click fraud. Click fraud is when a person (or computer) imitates a legitimate user clicking on a pay-per-click ad, without actual interest in the ad’s target. Like Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography — “I know it when I see it” — click fraud escapes precise definition. To know when a click is fraudulent, one needs to know the clicker’s internal motivation for clicking or be able to prove the clicker was an automated ’bot. Most experts agree that few individual clicks are “good” or “bad.” Instead, investigators assign quality scores that indicate the probability

Before you work out an upsell pitch, resolve the original reason for the customer’s call. If possible, use this original impetus or the specifics of your resolution to craft your customized approach. Find out if customers would rather place their orders online. Then the rep will need to get them to clickthrough to the right links. (Or, would customers rather the rep take care of that for them?) Also decide which screens you want customers to see while reps are handling the processing end. Your reps should have experience viewing different browsers’ characteristics and should know what the different browser screens and screen sizes