No Turn On Red

I was curious to see how retailers are handling and delivering mobile content. I decided to visit a variety of e-commerce stores, on my iPod Touch, and captured the results. Consider this a beginning of the year snapshot of the mobile online retail web – I look forward to capturing these sites again in 12 months and seeing what changes.

A few observations:

6 of the 50 retailers redirect iPhone users to a mobile-optimized website: Amazon, Best Buy, Foot Locker, Target, Victoria’s Secret, and Walmart. Ralph Lauren should be on this list, since they offer a mobile-optimized website, but the server doesn’t redirect iPhone visitors.

Way too many retailers have Flash movies with no non-Flash support. Typically these are promotion pieces and don’t interfere with the navigation. However, the Nike shop redirects the iPhone user to a page that tells them they should download Flash with no way to view the site otherwise. I also have to note Ralph Lauren’s Rugby store and Express, both sites are just about completely unusable without Flash.

Kudos to retailers like Gap and J.Crew who have javascript animations for their homepage promotions. The iPhone user still has a pleasant visual experience.

If you are interested or involved with the design, development, or user experience of e-commerce stores, please visit ecommr. ecommr is a website showcasing the best (and sometimes worst) in e-commerce design, with a clear focus on the individual elements that make up online stores.

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  Abercrombie & Fitch
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  American Eagle
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  Amazon
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  Anthropologie
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  Armani Exchange
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  Best Buy
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  Bloomingdale’s
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  Bluefly

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The twitterverse is abuzz with the fact that Amazon.com is down. Reports of the outage seem to have come in around 1:25 PM EDT. Users trying to reach the site are greeted with a “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” error.

Pretty significant outage for this major e-commerce retailer. My rough estimate is that the site outage costs Amazon 1.7 million dollars in revenue for every hour they are down. Pretty crazy.

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One of my local malls, the Monmouth Mall in Eatontown NJ, recently has seen a number of retailers relocate and remodel their stores: Victoria Secret, The Limited, Express, New York and Company, and Hot Topic. Add in the conversion of a Rampage to Forever 21 and new stores being built (Charlotte Russe, Hollister, and Modell’s), the mall is generating excitement with their newness.

The Hot Topic remodel interested me. It’s been 10 years since they opened in their spot that they were in. The new store has better lighting, better merchandise presentation, more excitement, and it is more inviting to shop in.

Not only did they remodel this store, but this is one of the first 10 percent of Hot Topic stores to get the new, reworked layout.

Hot Topic’s dark Goth stores, which were once a huge hit with rebellious teen shoppers, are getting a lighter, brighter makeover as the retailer struggles to pull sales out of a deep hole, the company’s chief financial officer said Wednesday.

“Based on feedback from our customers and changes in the [apparel] industry, we’re changing the look of our stores,” James McGinty told a gathering of analysts at the Piper Jaffray Annual Consumer Conference in New York.

“People were telling us that the stores were too dark, gothic and intimidating to the average customer,” McGinty said.

(More from CNN/Money.)

Over at Lightheavyweight, Finn is talking about talking about how this new layout ties in with lifestyle marketing. To really capture your marketshare, as a lifestyle marketer, you have to evolve with your clients and adapt through the times.

One can create a great shopping experience and display merchandise well, but if it doesn’t connect with the customers, there will be no business. The challenge with lifestyle marketing is not only to create an exciting shopping experience, but to create one that connects. As Finn discusses, I think Hot Topic has done this.

This new layout is a fresh look for the retailer and a needed change. Adapting as the marketplace grows is not only good business, but it is something the retailer needed to do. The last 12 months have not been kind to them:

What I also like is how well their new website design ties in to the new store concept. Brighter colors, better navigation, better presentation of merchandise. Not only does the new site work well and look nice, but it’s a direct reflection of the thoughts that drove the new store layout. This is a great integrated effort to create a cohesive shopping experience across all mediums. This is something that not very many retailers get right and Hot Topic did.

It will take a while to get this concept off of the ground and really reinvigorate the business, but the seeds of growth and change are there for the long run. Watch out for Hot Topic (again).

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The New York Times is reporting that, today, the trade organization Shop.org will release a report saying that, in 2006, apparel outsold computer hardware online while still offering tremendous room to grow sales:

In 2006, revenue from skirts, suits and shoes reached $18.3 billion, surpassing that from PCs, printers and word-processing programs, which totaled $17.2 billion, according to a report to be released today by a major trade group.

The surging popularity of clothing on the Web defies predictions that fashion — which is hard enough to buy in stores, with the aid of sales clerks and fitting rooms — would be difficult, if not impossible, to translate onto the Internet.

[...]

Consumers are still largely reluctant to buy clothing online, at least compared with products like computers. In 2006, they made only 8 percent of all clothing purchases on the Web, compared with 41 percent of computers, 21 percent of books and 15 percent of baby supplies, according to the Shop.org report, which was prepared by Forrester Research.

This is great news for apparel retailers and very good news for e-tailers (does anyone still use that term?). Since the overall saturation percentage is still low, online, that means retailers still have tons of room to grow their interactive marketing.

With the rise of web sales, I hope that more brick and mortar retailers further their commitment to e-commerce and continue to realize the power of the Internet not only for sales, but also for a means to interact with consumers.

More from the New York Times (see: Less Risk Is Seen in Buying Clothes Online).

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Best Buy’s new flexible schedule for corporate employees and their plan to roll it out to retail operations.

A Consumerist reader has is having problems with the Banana Republic website and gets the runaround from customer service.]

Lots of commentary on Wal-Mart moving into India and their chances of success.

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Federated Department Stores, the parent company of Macy’s and Bloomindales, has announced that they are investing $100 million into their online operations.

Of course, not all of it is going to fancy flash widgets and outsourced Indian php developers:

Most of the $100 million will be spent on a 600,000-square-foot distribution center in Goodyear, Ariz., that will be the main West Coast shipping point for Macys.com. Construction will begin this spring and take a year.

Some will be spent in San Francisco to support technical upgrades and infrastructure improvements. It is on top of $130 million being invested in such improvements in 2006-2007, including a 600,000-square-foot distribution center opening this month in Portland, Tenn.

Over a million square feet of distribution space should help Macys.com very nicely (see: Macy’s to invest $100M to build online store operation). They want to grow their online business to be a billion dollar slice of their overall sales.

I do. I’m expecting huge things from Macy’s online division this year. I think Federated has a chance to lead all retailers into the new social media revolution. Afterall, they did a test run of IconNicholson’s “Social Retailing” concept at Bloomingdale’s in NYC last month (see: Bloomie’s woos young shoppers with social retailing).

Bloomingdale’s may be known as a fashion destination, but that doesn’t mean it can’t reach out more to teens and young adults. So in a recent test at its flagship 59th Street Store in New York, it offered an interactive sales-floor mirror that let shoppers view themselves in outfits as well as comments—and images of alternate garments—sent to the mirror by their online friends.

If the shopper likes the looks of a dress suggested by a friend, she can touch the mirror to make the image of the dress appear life-size, then stand in front of the of it to virtually try it on.

Voila—social retailing. If web-based social networking can work wonders as a marketing and branding tool, online social retailing just might do the same for in-store retailing, says Tom Nicholson, CEO of IconNicholson, the company behind the “Magic Mirror.”

“We see this is a way of bringing the power of the web into stores to support customer sales,” he says.

Back in January, I got to see this concept first hand at the NRF Expo and let me say, I was floored. I think that IconNicholson has developed a very brilliant concept – a way to bridge the physical shopping experience with an online buddy list. It’s a costly project, but I think that a retailer is going to score a home run with it in 2007.

Macys could get their billion dollars in sales if they keep doing what they are doing. Invest in infrastructure, better order fulfillment, and stay on top of trends in technology.

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