Now Google has put into a few short words what we’ve struggled with for years…. We help our clients win the Zero Moment of Truth: that time before they even go to a store, before they have decided what they want to buy or what company they need to contact…

It’s a great read and goes to the heart of what we’ve said for years, “if you think people aren’t searching online for products or services like what you offer, you’re wrong and someone else is getting their buisness. Business you could be vying for but aren’t.”

Download this free book, it’s well worth your time: http://www.zeromomentoftruth.com/

Lack of Understanding of User Behavior Hurts Sales

Site usability is only one part of the problem. Most luxury brands assume (falsely) that people only shop their brands because they already know and like them. There’s almost no appreciation for, and understand of, the way users search. This lack of understanding hurts these businesses which are not competing for the bulk of searches – generic searches.

After looking at the Stuart Weitzman site, I searched for “shoe trends 2011” looking to see what’s in style this season. Not surprisingly, not one “brand” website was in my search results, paid or unpaid. But since I had already searched Stuart Weitzman earlier, Google served up lots of ads for stores selling Stuart Weitzman shoes, many at discounted prices.

They’ve basically conceded that I will buy elsewhere. Why?  They’d never take this position in a brick and mortar store. They don’t expect me to walk into a department store’s shoe department with only the goal of shopping their brand. They want to get me to buy their brand while I’m there looking for shoes. Any brand of shoe. They hope their styles will stand out and I will opt to try on one of theirs instead of a competitor.

Yet online they’ve basically said, if you’re not looking for us specifically, we won’t prompt you to consider us.

We’re not picking on Stuart Weitzman (I picked them because they happen to be one of my favorite shoe brands). They are no different than most other luxury brands in that they look at their website from their brand positioning first and from the consumer’s perspective second (or not at all). The two can co-exist.

Leaders in Fashion Seem to be Followers in Ecommerce

Luxury brands, no matter how avant-garde their style, seem to be afraid to lead when it comes to ecommerce.

It is very possible to build and market high end websites that are useful and usable. A huge hurdle seems to the “me too” factor. Or perhaps more aptly, the “the others do it so it must be right” factor.  We once had a client’s website developer tell them they needed to use bigger pictures because that’s what every luxury brand does. Never mind that for their particular products, bigger pictures wouldn’t help a user at all and would seriously hurt their site’s usability.

Eventually a major luxury brand will build a site that is on brand and as useful in moving merchandise as Gilt.com and Zappos.com. And they will understand the value of marketing to people who may not have, at that exact moment, searched for their particular brand but rather a generic product line that they sell, like shoes or handbags.

Until then, we’ll just have to keep shopping last year’s products online. Or wait for them to go one sale on Gilt.com and buy them at a discount.

It’s been well documented that luxury brands are late getting into the ecommerce game. It wasn’t until after the recession hit in 2008 and many high-end designers found their products relegated to discount bins in well-known upscale department stores, that they started getting serious about the online space.

The problem isn’t that they’re late to the ecommerce world, the problem is they are bringing their glossy magazine mindset to their websites, and in doing so, they are building sites based on how they want their sites to function, without considering how users want to shop.

Flash heavy sites, light on usability

Most luxury brands break many, if not all, usability rules. They create sites that look and feel like look-books, not ecommerce sites.

These sites are largely flash driven, with big glossy images, pages that load slow, often have their own “unique” brand specific navigation and are anything but easy to use. Once a user figures out how to get to the product level (no easy feat on many of these luxury sites), the information provided is so basic it’s almost not useful at all.

Don’t believe me? Compare the experience of looking at Stuart Weitzman shoes on Zappos.com, versus on StuartWeitzman.com.  On Zappos.com, we have easy filtering of products, fast page loads, navigation that matches the mental models we expect from ecommerce sites, and detailed product descriptions and reviews. All of this is accomplished without “cheapening” the brand at all.

On the company site, we are subjected to big, bold flash pages that are utterly useless to a user. The user has to go 4 clicks in (clicking “shop the site”) two different times on different pages, just to get to shop a “default” style of shoe. The default is set to pumps. If we want to shop flats, or something else, we need to click again. Web sites aren’t the same as brick and mortar stores, and users don’t have the same expectation or attention span when shopping online. In a flash (no pun intended) users can find the same brands and products elsewhere.

Site Usability is only one part of the problem. In Part 2 – we’ll go over why even those brands that have usable sites are still missing out on sales.

In Google Analytics, you can review traffic and sales from mobile devices. The critical factor is making sure to account for iPads. For many businesses, iPads make up a large percent of what Google considers sales from mobile devices. But the thing is, while iPads are definitely mobile… they aren’t technically considered mcommerce because you can shop a  website as though you were on your regular laptop. The experience is the same. So, it’s not like trying to navigate a site on an Android, Blackberry, iPhone or other smartphone where the user really needs either an App or a slimmed down site that’s easier to navigate on a handheld device.

To get a true sense of revenue from mcommerce, you have to pull out iPad traffic and sales. Once you look at those numbers from 2010, triple or quadruple them for 2011. Then you’ll have an idea of how much traffic you can expect, and the kind of revenue it may generate. In looking at the estimated increase in traffic, would your revenue increase appreciably if you provided those users with a true moble experience? What if a better mobile experience doubled your conversion rates? Is that enough to justify the investment?

Once you’ve done this quick overview, you can get a sense of revenue from mobile and you may decide it’s worth the investment now. Or you may decide that for the remainder of 2011, you want to focus on growing sales for the website as is and that mobile might need to wait another year.

We’ve been waiting for ages for AdWords to automate some of the things that we can set up in advance – like making an ad with a special offer live on the day of a sale and then pausing that ad when the day is done.

Well, today they announced this very feature! We don’t use many automated tools here (we think generally speaking that automation works in Google’s favor), but we’re excited about this feature. No more staying up until midnight to turn on promo ads!

To read more about it, check out the AdWords blog:   http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/12/adwords-rules-and-so-can-you.html