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what's new for Online Retail 2005?
It's nearly 5 months since Online Retail 2004 was published - thanks for all the
praise and compliments about it. Although I wasn't too surprised by the
report's most widely publicised results (e.g. that keyword search fails to find
over 50% of the products on e-commerce sites) there were still surprises in it
for me. The huge variation in how promotions were deployed within sites was
astonishing simply because I expected this relatively simple issue to have been
optimised by the bigger retailers. Probably the biggest eye-opener was the
degree of mismatch between the customer journey provided by e-commerce sites
and the natural decision-making processes going on inside the mind of the
customer - they're miles apart! But what a fantastic opportunity to improve the
customer's online experience and make dramatic improvements in sales at
the same time.
So there's lots to be done to improve the online retail environment, which
brings me to the issue of the next benchmarking report - Online Retail 2005. I
am hoping to do this report somewhat differently from the last one - this time
around I want to get involved in discussions with retailers much earlier in the
research process. To inform these discussions, what I want to start exploring
now is:
-
which aspects of customer experience are you most concerned with?
-
which aspect of e-commerce functionality (e.g. search, personalisation) is
going to be your highest priority for next year?
-
were there particular findings from last year's report that you would
particularly like to see updated?
-
are there any emerging technologies you're seriously looking at (e.g. rich
media, Ajax)?
If you have any immediate thoughts then drop me an e-mail. I'll be posting a
couple of thought-provoking (or possibly just provoking!) ideas here over the
next couple of months. Let me know if you'd like me to email them to you.