Strands Blog

As many of you know now Apple just launched the long awaited iPad tablet device about an hour ago. Watching the blog updates from the keynote event it looks like Apple’s new device has extreme potential for retailers.

Here’s the stats:
9.7 inch display
Touch screen
1.5 pounds, .5 inches thick
1 ghz apple A4 chip, 16 to 64 GB flash storage
WiFi 802.11n
Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR
Speaker, Microphone, 30-pin connector
Accelerometer & Compass
10 Hours of active battery life, 1 month of battery life on stand by
Earth-friendly!

Here’s possible potential:

In-Store:

Store representatives could enter a few details about you into the iPad or swipe your frequent loyalty card and help you find products you will like. A recommendation engine would be a perfect addition to this process searching profiles both online and in store to recommend relevant products. This application would also help the store rep know the customers, favorite, sizes, brands, etc making the shopping experience for the customer seamless.

Shopping & Sharing On The Go:

Mobile commerce is slowly picking up, think of the possibilities that a larger screen provides. Not only can customers shop from retailers websites on their iPad’s while on the couch and lounging around. Sharing features such as Facebook and others will add a social shopping component that will allow shoppers alike to take their favorite new clothing item, device, etc and show their friends.

Shopping Apps:

With 10 inches of surface area the iPad provides a great deal more space to create innovative apps for shopping. iPhone apps are the latest craze among retailers, many apps that have been released are basic apps that display the retailers product or catalog and allow a purchase. The new SDK and larger screen provide amazing potential for very interactive shopping apps.

Consumer adoption of the iPad will be a large determinant of the potential of new shopping, but if iPhone and iPod are any signs of Apple’s ability to jump from early adopters to the mainstream I think the iPad will be a big hit. What are your thoughts? Do you think the iPad will make an impact on the way we shop today? Comment below or tweet at Strands Recommender on twitter @strandsrecs

How many times have you seen websites that you visit everyday with messages like: what is your favorite color, brand, size, thumbs up, thumbs down and more seemingly annoying stuff. We all have the same reaction when asked to provide an opinion or assessment. Whats in it for me or GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE!

In most instances, sites do not incentivize users enough or provide a true purpose to how the time and information provided by the customer will help. The result is typical users just move on.

Why is this you may ask? generally it seems that the recommendations and their mechanisms are a secret, but an open secret. The user is not conscious of the fact that the site they are visiting has a recommendation system and does not bother to interact with it. If the website adds feedback mechanisms, where they are asked to make a review, or votes by stars, hands, and an endless list, the user loses interest, without realizing that they are loosing a good opportunity to get something back.

One site that breaks the mold is Amazon. The question is why do people bother to vote in Amazon and no where else? Because they know how it works and know the results they will receive. They know that the recommendations help them make educated purchases.

The figure below shows sites where users felt recommendations were a beneficial element, and almost required part of the user experience. It is interesting that customers know that recommendations are useful in e-commerce, but they don´t know about the benefits of recommendations in web searches, entertainment and media, or even social networks.

By:UX Expert Afshan Kirmani
Published: March 23, 2009

Every day we want more things fitted to ourselves, customized to suit our needs, but we are generally lazy as humans and don´t feel like doing anything to get it. Why don’t sites follow the Amazon model and openly say or infer that they need to know your tastes?

Implicit behavior on a site is very useful, and surprisingly it can be tracked and understood. Some recommendation systems such as Strands Recommender are able to learn a customer’s brand preferences, colors, sizes and context automatically as they interact with the site. The goal is making a customer’s life much easier and the experience seamless.  Explicit feedback such as ratings, reviews, etc are very powerful and  can direct you toward what you want faster. But users need to know how to use explicit feedback to obtain better result from it. A combination of implicit or learned feedback, when paired with implicit feedback can significantly improve the speed of their experience and ease of finding what they want.

Customer’s general stubbornness is hard to beat because their time is valuable, but with good motivation and explanations, even the most stubborn will provide feedback.

What do you think do websites do a good enough job of explaining why their feedback mechanisms are important? Or are we as consumer’s just averse to providing feedback without some incentive?  Or both? Send us your comments below and tweet at us @strandsrecs.

You hear the buzzwords every day in the office, on the street and in the latest hip hop and country songs: Blog This, Social Media That, Retweet It and Follow Me. What does it all mean and is Twitter applicable to your growing E-Commerce business?

The short answer is YES.

Why Twitter?

1.) Provides transparency inside your company:
When people buy from you online or in your store, they believe in the story you are trying to telling them, that is why they are buying from you in the first place. Most likely they will never see who is running your company, the employee’s that make the magic happen, how your product was made and so on. Customers want to know that there are real human beings behind the curtain, not robots. Twitter is a perfect mechanism to open a dialog with your customer base and show them your true personality.

2.) A feedback mechanism for your customers:
A customer’s worst nightmare is to dial the dreaded 1-800 number and speak with someone who has no connection to the product, company or their native language.Twitter provides a perfect mechanism for your customers to submit feedback and for you to solicit feedback on products, customer service

3.) An open forum for customer conversations:
Whether your business is big or small it’s hard to stay on top of customer chatter about your products. Not only is Twitter great to solicit feedback from your customer’s, it’s also a great tool to listen to what your customers are saying about your product. Listen in on the conversation and you might find a new product, feature or customer you may have missed.

4.) A new targeted marketing channel:
Twitter is a perfect place to build a new community of followers that you can direct special offers to. When you build your following, reward them with special offers only for Twitterers. The beauty of Twitter is that your followers can forward specials to their friends growing your customer base.

5.) Improves your Google searches:
Twitter is now crawl able by Google. If someone talks about your company or products on Twitter, when your customer’s do a Google search, tweets will now come up in the search results.

How to get followers:

1.) Email newsletter: Easily add a “Follow Us On Twitter” link in your emails. Another good way to get a higher click through rate is to add “For Special Offers”, or if you want to take it further give away a gift card to the 500th follower, etc.

2.) Your website: Adding a banner to your home page, or even a form for a customer’s Twitter name during sign up/registration is a great way to acquire information.

3.)Other social media: Add a Twitter link on your Facebook, Blog or Youtube page.

Tweeting Tips:

1.) The more the merrier: If you do decide to tweet, which I highly recommend you do, make sure you tweet often. Twitter is just like a blog, if you only tweet once a month, customers will loose interest. Tweeting something valuable daily is suggested.

2.) Add value: Make your tweets valuable. While it’s cool to know Shaq is taking a shower, your customers want to hear things that are meaningful and either pull them closer to your brand or start a dialog with them.

3.) Pics & videos: Link to pictures and videos. Twitpic and twitvid are great tools that allow you to link to pictures and videos from your Twitter account. Both video and images provide an even higher level of transparency with your customers.

4.) Multiple accounts: As your company grows, you may want to create multiple Twitter accounts, e.g. one for your customer service, another for possibly the CEO, CMO, etc. If each person has an interesting story to tell and generally they are inaccessible to the general public, a Twitter profile will help increase the transparency into your company. Tony Hsieh’s the CEO of Zappos, most people will never meet him in real life, but he always responds to his tweets.

A Few Noteworthy Twitter Pages:

Metroparkusa: www.twitter.com/metroparkusa
Heels: www.twitter.com/highheels
CycleGear: www.twitter.com/CycleGearsales

A Few Noteworthy Twitterers:

Express: http://twitter.com/ExpressLisaG
BestBuy: http://twitter.com/BestBuyCMO
Zappos: http://twitter.com/Zappos

Embrace social media and let it work for you. Feel free to comment below and add in your feedback on how successful Twitter has been for your E-Commerce site. Tweet at us @strandsrecs on Twitter too. Stay tuned for more tips to help your small business grow in 2010.

As many of you know this week was CES and many new, cool gadgets were released including 3DTV, 4G and Project Natal. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 team has been cooking up a new hands free controller device called Natal that is slated to revolutionize the console experience. Unlike the Wii, and PS3 the Natal does not require a remote of any kind and instead your body becomes the remote. As you’ll see in the video below shopping was one of the interesting applications demoed outside of just gaming for Natal:

Not only is Natal a very cool concept, it also helps to solve a few problems many online shoppers experience as well as encourages community based shopping.

Sizing & Fit Problems Solved

There are a few issues with shopping online if you haven’t bought from a store before. Fit and look. Natal solves both of these problems by mapping your body and matching it with the appropriate size online. In addition to ensuring a perfect fit, Natal helps you pick the perfect look by allowing you to try on an outfit and see how it looks in a 360 view on your own body.

Recommended By A Friend

Another cool concept in the video is the ability for your friends to suggest clothes for certain occasions as well as build outfits. This provides the opportunity for retailers to upload their catalogs and allow shoppers to pick and chose outfits and share them. Also with Xbox360’s recent addition of Facebook to the console’s offering I can see some pretty interesting opportunities here for community based recommendations.

With a user base of over 39M users, the Xbox360 console is morphing into a family entertainment device that holds some great promise for some amazing shopping experiences. What do you think about Natal? Would you use it to shop? What would you like to see in a shopping experience on a console? Comment below or tweet at us @strandsrecs.

Here’s a sneak peek at what Natal will look like when its released later this year:

The US News 2009 Retail Chain Winners & Losers are in, drum roll please… topping the list of winners was Aeropostale with a sales increase of 10% and coming in dead last,  Abercrombie & Fitch with a sales decrease of 19% for the year. Others in the winners category were Ross Stores, Costco and surprisingly Saks and Nordstrom’s. Losers sharing the bench with A&F included American Apparel, Hot Topic and Wet Seal.

Many of the retailers on the list who are losers in 2009 were cleaning house a few years ago, the question arises: Are some retailers not focusing enough on the customer experience?

Aeropostale: has a much better grasp of their customer’s experience on their site. It’s very easy to navigate, the marketing messaging to the user is clear and they have a generic merchandising approach that generally works for each item viewed. One lacking functionality on the site is ratings & reviews and also any form of personalization.

A&F: I have to admit that I worked at A&F for a year and value their store experience and atmosphere they create, but their online experience leaves much to be desired. The site is cluttered with branded marketing messages, their detail page, search and checkout pages are very basic, lacking reviews, previously viewed, any form of merchandising and also personalization.

While this is only a basic sample of the retailers who were involved in the report, it becomes evident that a lack of focus on the customer experience on your website can lead to diminishing sales and unhappy customers. Stay tuned for our weekly blog postings on ways to get your website in top shape for 2010, starting next week!

What are your thoughts? Are retailers losing touch with the customer experience? Who are some other retailers who need to step up their game? Post your comments here or tweet at us @strandsrecs.

We are excited to announce that specialty retailer Metropark has chosen Strands Recommender to power their intelligent up/cross-sells and personalization. As a fast growing specialty retailer Metropark was looking to automate their merchandising process and boost sales during the holiday season.

After looking at numerous recommendation providers, Metropark chose Strands due to our quick implementation, easy to use merchandising interface, detailed reporting and also our reasonable pricing.

Currently Metropark is utilizing Strands Recommender on it’s product detail under “May We Suggest” and will be adding email recommendations and shopping cart up-sells soon:

Metropark is one of the many retailers who have taken advantage of our Standard Pricing plans, which start at $249/month and provide a similar feature set to our premium customers at an affordable price. It’s a great way to improve your merchandising, sales and learn more about your customers buying behaviors. As your revenue grows, you can always upgrade to our premium service.

We’re happy to announce, that as of today, we’re working with the fast growing start-up Kedin.es to offer personalized recommendations for their great service. Kedin is similar to US based Upcoming.org and Going.com as it provides users with a rundown of the latest concerts, art exhibitions, athletic races and interesting events in their cities.

To continue their growth, Kedin was looking for new forms of differentiation and personalization was key to their strategy. Kedin was impressed with Strands ability to drive increased engagement and customer loyalty on similar sites such as 11870.com and Blip.tv. With these goals in mind, Kedin was able to implement Strands in two functional areas of their site:

1.) Personalized Events Page: Once a user creates a profile, Strand’s automatically begins learning about their tastes and preferences and makes relevant suggestions.

2.) Related Events: Strands learns from all visitor’s behavior on the site and suggests related events in their area.

If you’re visiting Spain or already live there and are looking to bring out your inner socialite visit Kedin.es. Also visit our website for more information on how recommendations can dial up your social media site.