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MoMA's Store Rocks
Wow, I don't usually think of museums as sources of ecommerce inspiration and learning, but the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has a special team you can learn a lot from. MoMA's team excels at ecommerce blocking and tackling such as:
- Great email followups (abandon cart, push emails)
- Great promotion schedule understands DEADLINES and web's constant NOW
- Easy to understand and use navigation
- Great clean lines and images
- Tells great visual stories
Best ways to make money online is to excel at the basics. MoMA doesn't stop there they excel at advanced ecommerce ideas too such as: - Bundled and "this = that" merchandising
- Developing exclusive products and bundles
- Email marketing
MoMA's backend could be better. They take too long to ship, but once their products arrive they are packed carefully and with a sense of how special the order is / was. If you want to learn ecommerce you should follow and visit the Museum of Modern Art.
Canonical URLs Explained
The Yoast post provides an easy way to understand why rel=canonical is a powerful new SEO tag. Yoast has a dog in the hunt. They make a Magento plugin that easily writes the rel=canonical tag into a product page's head.
The explanation about WHY canonical URLs are so important is only half right. We have a million ways of expressing and sharing URLs these days. Without rel=canonical we end up duping content to distraction.
Here's the rub. All ecommerce sites dupe content. They must. When I was a Director of Ecommerce a single product accounted for 50% of our profits. You better believe I merchandised that product into every nook and cranny our site offered. I duped that product and it's content to distraction.
There are other ways to limit duplication including:
* Use of your Robots.txt file.
* Locking content behind a firewall. * Use of blockquotes & rel=canonical tags.
* Rewrite duplicated content so it's not as duplicated (lol).
We included our email output into a folder with a "no follow" line in our robots.txt. You may think such a move is enough. It isn't. Be sure NOT to drive links from spiderable content INTO that folder or you eliminate the effectiveness of the robots.txt.
In the end every ecom site worth it's salt MUST duplicate content. Rewriting sounds like a good strategy, but it isn't. Content = time and time = money when managing million dollar commercial sites. You will be duping content.
Best to use rel=canonical because it shows Google you aren't trying to STEAL anything. Reminds me of what a friend shared about the disavow tool (used to deny inbound links or signal they may be untrusted).
My friend was using the disavow tool daily on his clients accounts. "So you are brown-nosing Google," I kidded him. "Exactly," was his answer. Rel=canonical tells Google you are TRYING to do the right thing and sometimes that is enough.
Burn Down Your Website
Websites are cool and a great marketing aid...until they aren't. If the line of when they aren't isn't behind us we are approaching it. What is a "website" when we share posts on Medium, Scoop.it and GPlus?
Feels like the idea of a website as a MUST GO HERE to interact with our marketing message is hopeless out of touch. Even when we do GO to a website what are we looking for?
FUN, ENGAGEMENT and RELEVANCE.
The typical talking to yourself about yourself marketing that most flog online feels more than dead, it feels dangerous. Google's vote is clear - if your content doesn't create an increasing number of likes, loves, shares and loyalty your website is screwed, blued and tattooed.
Especially if someone in your immediate competitive sphere knows how to THROW DOWN, create community and MOVEMENTS instead of the usual solipsistic crap. Keep talking to yourself while someone else in your business vertical is hosting a party and you will be waxed.
Waxed because what really matters NOW is LOVE. If your win hearts and minds because you are honestly all in and listening hard you get to "win". If you are amazing you create blue oceans and uncontested competitive space for however long the ride lasts. Talking about FUN.
This Haiku Deck discusses the death of tactical web marketing. You can't out email market my team and I, or not for very long. We've been doing this crazy biz since 1999. You can gain an inch and we are likely to come back and take a mile.
https://shar.es/12ekPU
7 Easy To Forget Simple Ideas
As you design your ecommerce store keep in mind these easy to forget but sure to make you more money online commerce tips:
* Sight Lines - visitor eyes go where your models eyes go so point them at something good.
* CTAs - don't be afraid to tell your customers what to do with Calls To Action. * Email - email marketing is the ability to communicate with your tribe without asking permission from a middleman.
* Internal Search - tells you if your navigation is working and what customers are looking for so use data from internal search. * 80:20 Rule - a small set almost always controls a larger set online so find your 80:20 rules and design, merchandise and sell to them. * Keywords - make sure you use keywords in your navigation and use a rewrite tool to show visitors one set of keys and spiders another. * Community - create an ASK (for help) and listen more than you talk and online community will form.
Best In Class From Conversion IQ
The other day I complained about "pretty picture' ecommerce sites that make conversion harder. So much of ecom is ditch digging. Ditch digging to make sure you have things such as:
* Email subscription form (prefer presence to popunders).
* Clearly ECOM - looks like a store with things to sell not content to read.
* Social (easy to find theirs and easy to contribute).
* Content Curation from social / comments / reviews (should feel like a party with people who share love / interests). * Offers, deadlines and a sense of time (of the year today is Columbus Day for example).
These examples from Conversion IQ are closer to "ditch digging" ecommerce websites. Conversion either BUYING or into a list are easier, more clear and so these designs make more money than the pretty picture websites I shared last (http://sco.lt/4ijZIH ),
Japanese web designer Yugo Nakamura has created some cool sites. Great clean lines, white backgrounds, splashing of color, movement both real and implied reminds me of Haring, Warhol and de Kooning. #toogood #webdesgin
Toward A New Ecommerce
The new #ecommerce is beginning to emerge. Curagami, our Durham, NC based startup, is working hard to create new community, merchandising and social media tools to bridge the gap between content and commerce.
This post outlines things every commerce site needs to show quickly such as:
* Is this site SHOPPING or INFORMATION (getting harder and harder to know this right off so want to make SHOPPING obvious).
* Where's my easy to get free shipping?
* Quickly find expected merchandising such as NEW, SALE and BEST SELLERS.
* Are they (the website) open to MY (customer) input (one reason why the sneakers vs. high heels image asks for a story share).
Explain how I used the 8 tips I learned from Vogue (http://shar.es/1nlE2l on http://www.haikudeck.com). Things like the surprise juxtaposition of a women in chuck taylors and picking a fight to support #movementmarkeing are right out of the Vogue playbook.
As always feel free to jump in. Sure we will have a great running conversation on G+: https://plus.google.com/102639884404823294558/posts/fnFpMLkss4k
My favs: Clean Sale (pictured here), Retail Therapy and Kiosk. What are your favorites?
A blog about ecommerce marketing, running an online business and updates to Shopify's ecommerce community.
Marty Note
Ecommerce is hard to make "BEAUTIFUL". The conventions are well established now such as hero, underneath or to the right of the hero is a line of products, nav leads to category pages then to product pages, big search box and so on.
Here are 30 cool takes on convention that don't spill conversions all over the floor, the danger of modifying ecommerce convention, but do create intelligent and NEW feeling ecom web design.
My favorite is Norwegian Rain because their hero tells such a amazing story with so few words. Very difficult to do a group shot like that without looking too exclusive. Like a club that would never have YOU (the visitor) for a member.
I don't get that feel from their image and design. Very cool and NOTHING I would have considered before seeing that a group shot of that magnitude can be accomplished. Norwegian Rain
The 404 page is a standard response code in HTTP telling the user, in effect, that they've clicked on a broken link.
Marty Note
When I was Director of Ecommerce we had a period where our 404 (not found) page was shown so often it got indexed in Google. You don't want that (lol), but you DO want your 404 page to create a sense of missed opportunity.
Your "not found" page needs to create a sense of easy correction and reassurance. Your site (and by extension YOU) are for real. The 404 page that provides a sense of stability, missed opportunity and a clear path to correction can win back what might otherwise be a lost customer.
One way a website creates trust is to manage everything with a sense of commitment and quality. When our 404 page was showing up so much it got ranked I made sure to apologize and share a special offer code. There was a period when that offer was our most popular redemption (again NOT GOOD lol).
A visitor might "fish" your site typing a nonsense sequence to see what you offer. My thought was always HAVE AT IT (lol). For the honest traveler who ends up seeing your 404 (especially if YOU are at fault) having a great design and a promotion code can safe the day.
I'm not sure what to blame such a poor showing on basic holiday ecommerce design on, but this year's November crop is flat, uninspiring and junky.
L. L. Bean usually sets the holiday standard. This year their November offering is marred by an obnoxious animated image that includes their great Free Shipping Offer. I HATE putting such a great free shipping offer on a roll because it is easy to miss in the 5 to 9 seconds most visitors give a webpage before moving on (granted this is BEAN so maybe 15 seconds).
Bean has the tough job of competing with themselves and, in past holiday selling seasons, they define how to create great holiday look and feel. Holiday look and feel can be tough. I like Patagonia's approach - put up snow scenes AND a surfer on a massive wave (hey its Christmas in Hawaii too).
The other faux pas that is unforgivable after all these years is Free Shipping obfuscation. Many leading retailers are going free shipping all orders and some are going the Zappos route and offering free returns too. Of the 37 websites reviewed only 6 earned A ratings on three criteria:
* Free Shipping.
* Holiday Look and Feel.
* Holiday merchandising via categories such as For Him, Her, Kids.
The other big miss is websites who think they are too cool for the holidays (AE.com, Restoration Hardware). Black on black at the holidays is expensively too cool and self absorbed.
If you know smaller websites who know how to do the holidays right please share in comments or email Martin.Smith(at)Atlanticbt.com.
The e-commerce sector has long been known to develop websites that did not put much focus on design. They tend to get very cluttered and bogged down, consistently suffering from not being user friendly.
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People don’t judge a book by its cover, do they?Of course they do.Whether it’s the presentation of your food at a fancy restaurant or the latest Apple product, humans just seem to love things that ...
How Become A Great Web Marketer?
Every time I suggest this idea to B2B content marketers they roll their eyes and think my suggestion stupid. Everyone can learn new ideas, ideas that inform all digital marketing, from creating an online store.
Each day someone asks how they can learn Internet marketing? Hard to sit in a classroom and learn this stuff. Better to DO IT and no better thing to do than use a tool such as Amazon's Associates to create an online store.
Think of how much stronger your personal brand would be if a potential hiring manager could see what you are reading, ask you questions about those books and get to know you long before an offer is made.
We live in a DIY time when 60% or more of the decision about YOU and your company's products, services and brands will be made BEFORE any active engagement (before picking up the phone or asking you to interview).
Given how much scrutiny your brand is under BEFORE you ever meet a prospect be it for a job or to make a B2B sale wouldn't it be a good idea to do something simple, engaging and fun to show how much you know about digital marketing. Let's see say I have two resumes on a pile and qualifications are equal, but one has a link to a blog & a "bookstore".
Which resume gets more engagement? Let's say your B2B Software As A Service Company is up for a big project. I go to your site and see the books that made you. I, as the hiring manager, have read several of them. We have a connection now and who am I more likely to hire?
HUGE benefits for half a day's work and work that teaches you more about how the web really works than every class you are likely to take (unless I'm teaching it of course lol). DO don't STUDY and you will understand one of the most important concepts about web marketing.
Good News & Bad News
As a rare web marketer with more than ten years experience, I created our first site FoundObjects.com in 1999 (gone now sadly), we want to confirm something every likely reader of our online marketing post already knows - the low hanging fruit is gone plucked by previous generations of pickers.
What to do now? Be something online and start today with these "be something now" tips.
No Bait & Switch Parallax Ecommerce Designs PLEASE
Bait & Switch Parallax
Earlier today we shared a Scoop on ecommerce web design trends (http://sco.lt/5bADXl ). CycleMon is a good example of falling in love with an idea, parallax scrolling, and forgetting ecommerce basics such as 1. DON'T MAKE ME THINK and 2. You have 9 Seconds to tell me what you are all about.
http://www.cyclemon.com/mobile/
Cyclemon forces customers to scroll to the bottom of a long list of designs BEFORE they proceed to a Cafe-Press like store. WRONG. Don't be so impressed with your designs you make me spend precious TIME scrolling through ALL of them.
OR if you do so ask me a question. What design best describes you? Cyclemon could use a tag or make their images clickable to clue their customers faster. Don't FORCE your customers to follow YOUR line through the forest of your products.
And, don't bait and switch. When Cyclemon LOOKS one way during the scroll and another after the click they violate the scenttrail rule - whatever is on the other side of a click must resemble and amplify what is on the other side.
Cyclemon violates the rule because they leave the ecommerce to after a long scroll and click. This is like inviting an insurance salesman to lunch. Be more clear upfront and you won't violate the Scenttrail Rule.
Oh and one more thing. The Cyclemon page defined our laptop as mobile. Make sure your sniffer is reading correctly before you expose it to the world or you lose trust and legitimacy both things needed if customers are going to open their wallets.
Marty (Scenttrail) Note: 27 Bad Ecommerce Designs
These CSS Design Award Winning sites illustrate why designers shouldn't be in charge of your commercial website. In a recent G+ post I shared our journey across time, place and money online (Why Time Is Money Online: https://plus.google.com/102639884404823294558/posts/RdjAjWoJTHw ).
It's easy to get lost. We kept trying to make narrative, movie and book-like) logic work on our ecommerce site and it never did. To the extent we told stories we depressed conversions and we conducted these tests before the web was drowning in content.
Not that the web has been fully "content shocked" to within an inch of its life one of the FIRST jobs any ecommerce site must accomplish is loudly and clearly proclaiming their STORE-NESS.
These 27 "pretty picture" designs are find for big established brands people trust, but they would CRUSH a new commercial site. The "store-ness" is confusing. Are these content sites or can we buy stuff here.
Some communicate some "store-ness",but none have the "ditch digging" realities of large, successful ecom sites such as REI.com or Schwan's.com (highest converting ecom site in world). Call-To-Actions are missing (mostly), navigation is murky and not keyword dense and images don't you line of sight rules (viewers' eyes go where people's eyes in your images go).
Real ecommerce needs a few things to be successful that most of these sites ignore, miss or don't know such as:
* Email subscription forms (email list = your most profitable channel because YOU OWN IT, don't believe BS about email marketing being dead mobile is making email marketing different but dead =nope.
* AN OFFER - see REI.com's "daily deals" or Amazon's ability to sell any and everything.
* Great navigation balanced between seo and customer engagement.
* Images mapped to produce CLICKS where merchants want them.
* Every image, click and share creates analytics and data so part of what you need to map into an ecom design is WHAT DATA YOU NEED. Can't figure out what actionable thing I would know after a month's traffic on these designs.
* Sense of TIME and PLACE (what season are we in? Where are these sites?).
* TRUST and that comes from other people (testimonials, curation of User Generated Content and NONE of these have anything like that so unless they are major brands they won't pass the trust test with many shoppers).
* TRUST MARKS = didn't see a VISA or MC logo either. One way to create trust online is to align with brands and marks people already trust. Those badges look like ugly scars to designers and they help make merchants millions.
* Content - we love VISUAL MARKETING but some context such as the context one satisfied customer would share is a must.
* Design = Trust - we grant that these sites look amazing and looking amazing helps with creating trust, but junk 'em up a little and make more money.
That last bullet reminds me of a story from my P&G tenure. My boss Russ Mills taught me to never leave a display too neat. "People won't disturb a display that is too neat," he explained. These ecommerce designs are too neat for me (by half). If you aren't a major brand ignore every one of these 27 "inspirational" ecom web designs.
PS. Favorite has to be the example in the picture above. Not only do we chop people in half we ask visitors to kiss their behinds (lol). Opposite of the welcoming atmosphere I want to create on my ecom sites (lol) back when I was responsible for millions of online sales yearly. At my core I remain an online merchant, but I don't miss not sleeping and sweating sales numbers from now until Valentine's Day. Don't miss that at all :).
Designing Tomorrow's Ecommerce
I'm writing a blog post for Curatti that will go live at midnight tonight that discusses the "best practices" of "Tomorrow's Ecommerce". I'm also writing a Curagami blog post (also published at midnight) about how social shopping will change Tomorrow's Ecommerce.
Tomorrow's Ecom Current Best Practices (Curatti tonight)
Tomorrow's Ecom Social & Mobile Web (on Curagami now)
The Haiku Deck that bridges both of these posts is linked above and here:
http://shar.es/1nkJef
As we publish each post we will link them here.
Ready For Holiday 2014 Ecommerce? 5 Summer To Dos
Design Beauty As Online Strategy
Beauty has a problem online. Imagine a line with pretty pictures on one end and makes money / converts on the other. As website design travels away from the balanced center out to either pole something is given up.
Beautiful sites often feel solipsistic and self referential. Commerce sites feel transactional and much like an not very special commodity. As visual marketing commands more and more of our attention, efforts and communication arresting imagery is important.
You can't sell someone who doesn't stop long enough to know who you are. Is beauty an effective strategy in and of itself? No. Is commerce an effective strategy in and of itself? No. Truth lies in the magic promise of a balanced approach as these 10 examples of somewhat practical beauty share.
My favorite and the one most centered between those two poles?
Juliana Bicycles - I don't typically like group scenes that aren't open to the viewer as they can send an exclusionary message. This bicycle site doesn't because of the magic of place pictured and the ancient desire to warm next to a fire with friends.
Would NEVER have thought Juliana Bicycles hero could feel so beautiful, friendly and inviting breaking several key rules - but it does.
Awesome Responsive Design Website Designs for Inspiration. Selection of Awwwards winning Responsive Design websites. Fluid grids, flexible images and media queries are the three technical ingredients for responsive web design
Little doubt enterprise crowdfunding will play an important role in ecommerce next year. As the first Ecommies shared on Curatti.com Ecommerce is stuck in its own mud (http://curatti.com/is-ecommerce-stuck-in-the-mud/ ).
CrowdFunde is a new tool that helps add crowdfunding to any website. Crowdfunding is about to explode thanks to the SEC ruling in late October to allow equity crowdfunding. Enterprise crowdfunding is about to explode too and eCommerce will be changed by the addition of a new low cost, high return marketing channel that reminds us of what email marketing used to be before everyone started curating email with mobile devices, driving open rates down even as the size of many lists increase.
This CrowdFunde infographic shares color, growth and tribal acceptance information proving ecommerce is ready for a change, a crowdfunding, and social, mobile, gamified change.
5 Ecommerce Checkout Tips - How To DESIGN For More Conversions Next Year
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