When it comes to online catalogs, bigger is not better if your customers can't get what they need

By Dawn Rivers Baker

Merchandising on the Internet is still stumbling along, developing at a slower pace than online marketing and still getting in the way of sales. In their efforts to move product, merchandisers are floundering around without stopping to consider either the medium or their potential customers. The result is a certain amount of unrealized potential and a lot of merchandisers who are not seeing the forest for the trees.

In general, according to a report by Forrester Research, there are two fundamental problems.

For starters, online merchants attempt to continually expand product offerings in search of the one-stop shopping experience for their users. In doing so, they operate under the assumption that, when it comes to their online catalogs, bigger is better. To make matters worse, merchandisers are not constrained by the same kind of space considerations that they would have to deal with offline. In a physical store, they would have to justify shelf space with sales numbers. From their point of view, the web offers them infinite amounts of merchandising real estate, which they can fill infinite varieties of product.

Unfortunately for the bottom lines, all this choice makes the user experience of their e-commerce websites fairly terrible. Giving customers choices is a useless concept in the face of so much product that it becomes a painful matter to even know what all your options are.

The fundamental misconception is that infinite product expansion is a good thing, but the reality is very different. For one thing, demographic research has demonstrated that online shoppers don't rate assortment very highly on their list of things most likely to make them buy from an online vendor. Their top purchase drivers, in order, are price, ease of ordering and availability of product information.

Besides all this, the idea of a one-stop shopping experience is born of the offline merchandising modus operandi. As a matter of fact, the entire World Wide Web is a one-stop shopping experience — if you look at it from the point of view that the one stop, for the consumer, is the chair in front of their computer.

Merchandisers who make the infinite product expansion mistake also are not considering the limitations of the Web. It is a poor browsing tool when compared to the offline experience, particularly in the face of a huge product range. The in-store browsing behavior that the merchants are counting on here cannot really be replicated online. It is much harder to trot between virtual racks to compare price, quality and other factors. Since most people don't have high-speed Internet connections yet, load time for all those product graphics is more than many customers want to wait for. And the more product you add that must be compared, the more difficult it becomes to find anything.

Site search tools might be expected to help solve this problem, except that they are not being properly optimized by the online retailers that use them. Poor construction of metadata and other tags make search engines inadequate to the task of helping users find product.

To solve some of the problems, Forrester recommends a technique, which they have dubbed Constructive Merchandising, defined as how to help your customers make the best decision.

The crux of constructive merchandising has to do with separating potential customers into categories based on their level of pre-shopping decision. The three categories identified by this report were

• "Needs-aware" shoppers — who know they want something but require quite a bit of hand-holding in order to figure out what exactly to buy
• "Category-aware" shoppers — who have a bit of knowledge about the product category but need to compare different brands within the category in order to make a decision
• "Product-aware" shoppers — who know just exactly what they want, down to the brand name, model number and color, and don't want to waste a bunch of time getting to it.

Just looking at these three categories of shoppers, it must be pretty obvious that they need to be handled in different ways. Here are some ideas that can be built into your website to enhance your own merchandising efforts.

Use multichannel retailing to handle a huge product base.

Instead of putting your entire catalog of 50,000 items onto your website, consider reserving web space for your best online sellers, putting the rest into a print catalog which can be requested online for free, and giving catalog browsers the option of placing orders online. That way, you offer the optimal way to really browse short of a physical store. And at the same time, you have just enough stuff on your website to interest (but not overwhelm) the more casual surfer.

Use your website content to influence browsers where needed.

On average, online shoppers will visit a site three times before they buy anything. Help inspire them to click on that "buy" button — as well as assisting the lazier online store browsers — with your online content. Even something simple as a "top sellers" link or a "great buy" link on the home page can influence sales.

Configure your site to cater to the different categories of shoppers.

Since these three different categories of shoppers will have different requirements in order to have a satisfactory shopping experience at your retail website, you will need to configure responses to those needs into your website design. Needs-aware shoppers will need information about product categories before they need information about specific products. But category-aware customers will need that product information right away, and they will need to be able to access it in a way that makes comparison shopping fairly painless. Product-aware browsers will need a search tool that allows them to ask for exactly what they want — and get it. The default here — that is, what users get when they arrive at your homepage — should be for the needs-aware shoppers.

Evaluate the merchandise in your online catalog using a "sales per eyeball" ratio.

When figuring out what is selling, use a ratio that tells you how much money you make in sales for each 1,000 unique visitors who view that product or item. Even if you sell the kind of stuff of which you may only have one copy available — such as with used books or collectibles — take a look at how many people look at that item before they buy it and how many people look at items from each product category compared to how much you sell in that category. Products that have a high sales volume per thousand eyeballs should get prominent page space and top billing.

On the other hand, don't give up your prime real estate to clearance items.

Traditionally, clearance and on-sale items are the stock that has been sitting around in inventory, selling sluggishly or not selling at all. Don't put that stuff on your homepage. Slow moving inventory is moving slowly for a reason, and it doesn't make sense to show it off to potential customers as their first exposure to your online store. Instead, save the top sellers for the front page and create a separate "bargain basement" section for the clearance-hungry shoppers.

Figure out what makes buyers buy.

Read everything you can get your hands on about shopping behavior in your industry and within your specific niche. And make sure you keep one eye on your own website data, so that you can evaluate how your specific customers shop. Do they like to shop mostly by category? Do you have a lot of abandoned shopping carts, implying that they are being frustrated by the purchasing process? Is your product seasonal? Have you managed to tap the gift buying market? The more you can find out about your potential customer's behavior, the better you can design your site so that potential customers can be converted into paying customers.

And, finally ...

Configure your search tool so that it can be used to let shoppers create their own shopping experience.

And how do you do that?

You can create those nifty and convenient little links that you sometimes see on retail websites saying things like "shop by price", "shop by brand" or "shop by age group." It's not even all that hard to do. I'll use FreeFind as an example, since it happens to be the website search tool that I am familiar with.

If you look at the code you are given when you sign up for FreeFind, you will see that it is basically a form that accesses the search script hosted by FreeFind. The form has a series of hidden input fields, and then it has an input field for "text." That is what creates the text box into which your site user types their search terms.

But, if you alter that field to pre-define the search terms, you can customize the search. So, let's say that you want to let your customers search by price. Change the input tag from

        INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="query" SIZE="20"

to this

        INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="query" VALUE="low-price"

Now that you have customized the search term, you have one more thing to do. Go a little further down the form, to where the input type is defined as "submit." Change the value for that to whatever you want the button to say, such as "Low-priced items," or "Under $10," or whatever. (You'll probably also want to completely remove the "submit" field with the "site search" button.)

Once you have done this, you will need to go through your product pages and put "low-price" in the metadata of the products that fall within that category. When the user clicks on the button, the search engine will read that metatag, and the search will turn out the pages required.

And, viola! You have a way to let people shop for low-priced items. (I've created a simple sample page that you can take a look at by clicking here; the sample page will open in a new window. It works, too; I don't have those meta tags in my pages but if you take a look at the articles these pre-defined searches turn up, they make sense.)

You can do that with "medium-priced" and "really, really expensive" and "children's cheap stuff" and "women's outerwear" and "hats with feathers" and ... well, you get the idea.

There are more complicated ways to do this, using javascripts to create text links or drop-down boxes but the method used here can be tackled by even the most coding challenged, without having to hire people to do it for you. And even if you use some other search engine for your website, you can probably find the relevant tags in the code you insert into your webpage and adapt it to these instructions.

The bottom line here is this: the more you can do to factor your customers, their shopping needs and their buying behaviors into your website's design features, the better merchandising job you will be able to do. Practicing constructive merchandising, while it won't replace the helpful sales person with the smiling face, really can be the next best thing to being there.

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