Random e-commerce ideas & trends

Random e-commerceideas & trends Marlon Lunch ‘n Learn @vincentmouton

At our company www.marlon.be once in a while, on Fridays, during lunch, we share our knowledge. This slide deck is part of that series. 2

It contains a series of random things I’ve spotted on the internet. And involved webshops. And looked like a great or funny idea. No agenda. No TOC. No conclusions. 3

In essence, this slide deck is all about: 4

Pretty design trends Nifty little usability things Funny features 5

Let’s do things backwards. Let’s start with the last step in your average online shopping experience: the delivery of your package. 6

Shopping on an e-commerce site shouldn’t stop at the conﬁrmation e-mail. You can extend the ‘experience’ way beyond that…. 7

1 Push the ‘experience’ beyond the website 8

I know, I know, a very obvious example Obvious example: Apple. They don’t just design their products with great care. They also design their packaging. 9

Unpacking is really a return to your childhood, isn’t it? Apple packaging extends the experience way beyond the actual shopping. 10

Having great packaging doesn’t require a large design team though. One of our customers has taken great care in selecting their packaging. They decided from day one against using brown cardboard boxes. 11

These boxes are ofsuch a high quality that people don’tthrow them away. Some of their customers collect them, and use them as storage boxes. 12

Apart from really great looking packaging, there’s another way of extending a pleasurable shopping experience. Iyou achieve that by simply taking away all causes of frustration. 13

If you’ve got kids, you’ll recognize this sort of toy… 14

Yes, indeed. The kind of toy that you spend half an hour unpacking. 16

Yes, indeed. The kind of toy that you spend half an hour unpacking. At least. 17

While your kid is jumping around. 18

YELLING. 19

The packaging is a nightmare. The toy is fastened with plastic wires, that in turn are stuck in hard-to-reach corners, While they’re also taped to the box. 20

This packaging is HELL. But there’s a solution to this frustrating experience… 21

Amazon’s Frustration Free Packaging 22

For a premium price, Amazon unpacks the toy, assembles it, and puts it into another packaging. 24

Search for this little demo in YouTube 26

But hey. Talking about Amazon and packaging. Lets be honest, they haven’t got the entire experience right, isn’t it? 27

2 Catalog browsing 29

One of the hardest things when designing a webshop, is ﬁnding the perfect way to present your products. How do you help a customer in ﬁnding the right product? 30

First example: shopping by style. An amazingly simple idea, is to deﬁne a set of basic styles that represent diﬀerent types of customers. 31

“Shop by girl” means you select a type ofpersona that matches your style, or chararacter. 32

Once you’ve selected ‘a girl’, you are presented with all products matching that persona. 33

OK, the really skinnymodels can put you oﬀ, and give you asense of ‘this is notfor me’, but you get the idea. 34

Same idea, but a little bit more, well, cheesy… 35

KnickerPicker helpsyou select the right product, based on your body shape. 36

And they do thatusing short movies of models strutting their stuﬀ. 37

That’s browsing by style, or by shape, or by persona. But browsing by simply using pics, can be done really well too. 38

The Ann Taylor shopallows you to chose the image size. 39

The default size 40

Bigger 41

Huge and classy. Try it out on their website. 42

SunglassHut uses the same grid of large images. 43

Hover over an image, and you get a viewfrom another angle. Smart! 44

And they oﬀer a neat‘Quick view’, right from the overview page. 45

Also: really niceFaceted Browser theyhave here. Love that. 46

Talking about Faceted Browsers, Design By Humans, makes itprominent by putting it on top. 47

An even cooler way ofbrowsing your catalog: BikeByMe has a conﬁgurator, right ontheir homepage. Great idea! 48

That BikeByMe site has a large image right on their front page. That’s a trend, right there! 49

3 The bigger picture 50

Large visuals, huge backgrounds. There are a lot of great examples out ther. 53

Something else… We’re still talking websites, HTML, software, pages. One of the most important things you can do, is adding personality to your website. Make it human! 54

4 Personalize 55

The next screenshot is in Dutch, but you’ll get the idea. It’s the page you see after having placed your order. 56

First of all, they say‘Thank you’. Which is very important. 57

Secondly, they say:‘What are we gonna do for you’ 58

Most importantly: they put a face on their shop. This guy looks real, friendly, human. Take this image away,and this page will have a whole diﬀerent mood. 59

One last thing: a phone number, right there. 60

You can add personalitywith cartoon ﬁgures too! 61

Something else now… What if people don’t buy? 62

5 I’ll be back 63

I’ll give you a few examples of e-mails webshops send out to lure people back to their site. 64

Open 24/7? Obvious! But a good idea to add that. Of course, you Also, remember can only do that the ‘personality’? if you know their e-mail address. That’s what that little owl is doing there. 65

Even better: a sense of urgency! 66

This is the page you see whenyou sign out of Twitter’s site. They use their sign-outconﬁrmation to promote themselves. Great idea! 67

6 Talking about e-mails 68

This is really a great example, ﬁlled to the brim with ‘social proof’ 69

“…goods you’ve recently clicked…” 70

About that sense of urgency from that “Hurry and buy that stuﬀ that you left lingering in your shopping basket” e-mail…. 71

8 Sense of urgency 72

Next up a website that is even better at it. It looks like shit, but there’s this tiny little feature… 74

“3 other shoppers ….” and “… Don’t miss out!” That’s just a great idea. So simple. 75

Did you notice? I did not mention the word ‘social’, and we are already past slide 70! This presentation is realy not up to date, I tell ya! 76

9 Sharing should be easy 77

If there’s only one thing you can do, do this: 78

Make it very easy to share your product(page). 79

Make sure that, when your product page is shared on Facebook (for example) it includes a great picture. 80

Eventually, create an entire album. 82

Also, when tweeting, make sure you include something visual, like a picture, or a YouTube clip. So, not this… 84

This doesn’t get me excited. This should be visual. 85

But this… 86

Don’t ask me what this thing is. I just needed a good example. 87

That’s it for now folks. Hope you enjoyed it! 94

Random e-commerceideas & trends Marlon Lunch ‘n Learn @vincentmouton

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Random e-commerce ideas & trends

by Vincent Mouton on Dec 01, 2011

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Random e-commerce ideas & trends — Presentation Transcript