Where are Online Retailers Focusing their Dollars?

The client I currently work with at Rosetta is a very large retailer and of course has been impacted by the economic downturn – hell, who hasn’t been?  Dollars are scarce and projects of all sizes are being evaluated and re-evaluated to ensure they will impact the bottom-line.

I have been spending more time over at shop.org, following the Strategy & Innovation 09 Forum that the National Retail Foundation (parent of shop.org) puts on each year.  Given the economic challenges that retailers are facing, this article on shop.org really caught my eye – Focusing Ecommerce Investing: Smartly Stretching Your Ecommerce Dollars While Still Innovating for Differentiation . It was a discussion with panelist from eBags, Patagonia and Bluefly.

Some similarities I found in each panelist’s comments about their focus -
- filtered navigation (guided navigation is different and somewhat specific to Endeca)
- SEO landing pages (marketing) and SEO in general
- better product content – descriptions, images, videos, make shopping exciting
- increase product lines
- reviews both online and across channels

Things I found interesting or creative -
- plan for 12 months of continued downturn
- email individuals 7-8 times per week
- do short sales at lunch (2 hour quickie)
- users are becoming more savvy and jumping from Google… to the retailer… to a coupon site… back to the retailer – need to understand the fundamental way people shop online better
- good at running reports, need to improve analysis and application

The recap at the end of the article notes a very key point – these are 3 online retailers that have “2 feet on the ground”.  Different retailers are at different points of maturity with their site – this has a very large impact on what they are seeing and also their 2009 plans.   Let’s hope this downturn/recession/depression has a very limited run.

- Bill Weber

photo credit: garethjmsaunders