The RichRelevance Analytics group recently conducted a series of studies for several of our larger, premium retail clients to explore customer behaviors and identify the greatest opportunities for optimization. The results of one such study*—which I am sharing here today, revealed some pretty astounding insights for this particular customer’s online shoppers.
Home page “schmome page.” The home page is for all intents and purposes the premier online brand presence for a merchant. It gets rendered more than any other distinct URL within the merchant domain and is often the gateway for the most loyal customers. Yet with only 4% of inbound sessions and 1% of total page views, you now know why that home page promotion didn’t do so well. These numbers paled in comparison to the search page, which was the landing page for almost 40% of all sessions followed by the category page at 26%, which narrowly edged out the item page at 25%. The lesson here? A simple UI or merchandising enhancement of virtually any dynamic page template will always be a more efficient allocation of resources than investment in the home page.
Though I don’t work at Amazon anymore, I am still a big fan of their business and all of their products. As a proud Amazon Prime member, if I need a single 99 cent black pen tomorrow, I can get it via next day air! This Black Friday weekend, I thought I’d reconnect with my former ‘Zon Komrades by snooping on their website (also known as shopping).
One of the most interesting things I saw over the Black Friday weekend was the pricing strategy of Amazon. I added a few TVs to my cart and then just observed their price changes over the course of the weekend. How? Amazon made it easy whenever I logged back in to track pricing changes for the items still in my cart. Although I am sure my timing wasn’t exact, I was able to generally watch the rise and fall of pricing as well as product availability.
The naming of Amazon.com as the top-performing brand in the US by market research firm Millward Brown is truly a watershed moment for e-commerce players who have neither the long standing history nor seeming reach of many traditional multi-channel retailers. This ranking applauds those who have toiled night and day to build a rich, rewarding and relevant experience for online shoppers and demonstrates how much power this relatively new channel has in not just supporting but creating brands. What’s particularly interesting is that among the top ten performing brands in this study, six are products (e.g. Tide, Tylenol, Huggies), three are services (FedEx, WebMD, UPS) and only one is a retailer: Amazon. This is crazy—how is it that an e-commerce pure play trumps national retail chains that boast web sites, sales people and physical footprints?
June 25, 2009 will be remembered in many memories as the day Michael Jackson died, but for those of us working the front lines of Internet infrastructure June 25, 2009 will be the day our servers and the patience of millions of users was tested with the news of Michael Jackson’s death. Here at RichRelevance we were prepared, and easily managed increased traffic across several of our customers, including Sears.com and Walmart.com.
“There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.” – Archibald MacLeish
This quote aptly describes my objective in writing my most recent article—“Lessons Learned From Amazon”—about my experiences as Amazon.com’s head of data mining and personalization. It was great to review and articulate some of the main learnings I came out of Amazon with. What were some of our best decisions? Worst? What we did we learn? The wisdom I obtained from the experience—the good, the bad, and even the ugly—has been invaluable and truly applies to all etailors no matter the size.
MultiChannel Merchant published the article this past week. I’ve included the full text below.