A Convenient Truth

Convenience. We value it more than I think we sometimes realize. We’re willing to pay more for it, and we’re willing to sacrifice quality in exchange for it. So it stands to reason that delivering convenience for our customers can lead to a pretty profitable equation for retailers.

Consider the convenience effect of some of the more popular innovations in recent years:

• Mobile phones. We love our mobile phones,  even though they’re more expensive and of significantly lesser sound quality and reliability than land lines. And now we browse the web on our tiny smartphone screens.
• Digital music. While it’s getting better, the sound quality of digital music is not as good as CDs (and some people say CDs aren’t as good as LPs). And we happily listen to our iPods over poor sound quality earbuds because they’re a lot more convenient than bulky headphones.
• Camera phones. Digital photography with nice SLR cameras is finally nearing the quality of film, but cameras on phones have a long way to go to get to that same level of quality. But it sure is easy to post photos on Facebook and Flickr from a camera phone.
• Diet pills.  OK, these aren’t as widely adopted as the previous examples (yet), but they’re the easy way out for weight loss even though there are some less-than-pleasant side effects. (Hint, you don’t want to sit next to an Alli pill taker on a long flight.) Of course, if you’re not into pills maybe you can still avoid exercise and get some six-pack abs with the Vibro-Belt.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the immense convenience of e-commerce and the effect it’s had on retail. But we cannot rest on our laurels as the desire and demand for convenience knows no bounds.

The threshold for inconvenience continues to get ever lower. We often complain about how many clicks it takes to get to what we’re looking for on a web page. Think about that for a moment. The energy required to cause our index fingers to press a button too many times is irritating. Some might say it’s not the energy, it’s the time. OK, fair enough.  Then the “waste of time” threshold starts kicking in when we are forced to wait three to four seconds for a page to load. We’re busy! We haven’t got that kind of time to waste!

My favorite example of the power of convenience is the Kindle. Amazon managed to make the paper book seem inconvenient. If that doesn’t tell you that just about everything can be made easier, I don’t know what will. People (and I’m one of the them) are willing to drop hundreds of dollars for a book reading device that still doesn’t format as well as a paper book. But it’s so light and so much easier to hold in one hand than a hardcover book. You can lay it flat on the table. You can carry lots of books around easily, which is very nice for a traveler like me. And you can get books in an instant with the wireless connection, which is soooo much more convenient than plugging the device into a PC for a sync. I sometimes feel ridiculous saying things like that, but I’m not going back.  And I’m not alone; people write long blog posts professing their love of the convenience the Kindle brings.

But this post isn’t a social commentary. It’s about recognizing an opportunity to make money.

So, how can we focus our businesses on the convenience opportunity? Here are three places to start:

1. Start with website usability
   We should start with our sites because they are the low hanging fruit. The promise of convenience with e-commerce is high, but all too often we put obstacles in our customers’ way, many of which I’ve written about previously. Where are we causing customers more clicks than necessary? Why are we requiring all those clicks? Is it a lack of planning on our part, or are we putting our immediate priorities ahead of our customers’ needs? Have we overwhelmed our customers with choice? How can we make narrowing our selection easier and quicker? And let’s not forget site performance. How fast are those pages loading?
2. Re-examine the store experience
   We need to continue to think about how our in-store experiences can be easier and more convenient for our customers to shop. Paco Underhill provided some great tips in his book,  Why We Buy. We can also look to a cross-channel strategy to allow technology to provide some conveniences. How can we bring customer reviews and recommendations into the store? Is “buy online pickup in-store” a desirable convenience to offer? How about accepting payment via mobile phone or PayPal in our stores?
3. Consider our customers’ lives – what could make those lives more convenient?
   What’s life like for our customers? If she is a busy mother of young children, can we do more to help her easily put together some nice outfits for the kids (or herself) to free up time for answering emails, paying bills, or maybe, just maybe, giving her time to relax in the bath? Does it make sense to give our customers the ability to automatically replenish certain items at certain intervals? If we think hard, we can probably find ways to improve certain tasks that don’t currently seem difficult. If the book can be made more convenient, there are no limits.

Sometimes I think we get so caught up in our metrics and the particulars of our businesses that we forget about our customers’ needs. After all, retail is really a service business. Customer convenience can and should be a key part of our value proposition. When we find ways to make our customers’ lives easier (even by just a little bit) we are providing services and products our customers will be willing to buy — and at prices that are nice for our bottom lines.

What do you think? Is customer convenience the right strategic target for us? What ideas have you implemented to improve convenience?

Why most sales forecasts suck…and how Monte Carlo simulations can make them better

Sales forecasts don’t suck because they’re wrong.  They suck because they try to be too right. They create an impossible illusion of precision that ultimately does a disservice to managers who need accurate forecasts to assist with our planning. Even meteorologists — who are scientists with tons of historical data, incredibly high powered computers and highly sophisticated statistical models — can’t forecast with the precision we retailers attempt to forecast. And we don’t have nearly the data, the tools or the models meteorologists have.

Luckily, there’s a better way. Monte Carlo simulations run in Excel can transform our limited data sets into statistically valid probability models that give us a much more accurate view into the future. And I’ve created a model you can download and use for yourself.

There are literally millions of variables involved in our weekly sales, and we clearly can’t manage them all. We focus on the few significant variables we can affect as if they are 100% responsible for sales, but they’re not and they are also not 100% reliable.

Monte Carlo simulations can help us emulate real world combinations of variables, and they can give us reliable probabilities of the results of combinations.

But first, I think it’s helpful to provide some background on our current processes…

We love our numbers, but we often forget some of the intricacies about numbers and statistics that we learned along the way. Most of us grew up not believing a poll of 3,000 people could predict a presidential election. After all, the pollsters didn’t call us. How could the opinions of 3,000 people predict the opinions of 300 million people?

But then we took our first statistics classes. We learned all the intricacies of statistics. We learned about the importance of properly generated and significantly sized random samples. We learned about standard deviations and margins of errors and confidence intervals. And we believed.

As time passed, we moved on from our statistics classes and got into business. Eventually, we started to forget a lot about properly selected samples, standard deviations and such and we just remembered that you can believe the numbers.

But we can’t just believe any old number.

All those intricacies matter. Sample size matters a lot, for example. Basing forecasts, as we often do, on limited sets of data can lead to inaccurate forecasts.

Here’s a simplified explanation of how most retailers that I know develop sales forecasts:

1. Start with base sales from last year for the the same time period you’re forecasting (separating out promotion driven sales)
2. Apply the current sales trend (which is maybe determined by an average of the previous 10 week comps). This method may vary from retailer to retailer, but this is the general principle.
3. Look at previous iterations of the promotions being planned for this time period. Determine the incremental revenue produced by those promotions (potentially through comparisons to control groups). Average of the incremental results of previous iterations of the promotion, and add that average to the amount determined in steps 1 and 2.
4. Voilà! This is the sales forecast.

Of course, this number is impossibly precise and the analysts who generate it usually know that. However, those on the receiving end tend to assume it is absolutely accurate and the probability of hitting the forecast is close to 100% — a phenomenon I discussed previously when comparing sales forecasts to baby due dates.

As most of us know from experience, actually hitting the specific forecast almost never happens.

We need accuracy in our forecasts so that we can make good decisions, but unjustified precision is not accuracy. It would be far more accurate to forecast a range of sales with accompanying probabilities. And that’s where the Monte Carlo simulation comes in.

Monte Carlo simulations

Several excellent books I read in the past year (The Drunkard’s Walk, Fooled by Randomness, Flaw of Averages, and Why Can’t You Just Give Me a Number?) all promoted the wonders of Monte Carlo simulations (and Sam Savage of Flaw of Averages even has a cool Excel add-in). As I read about them, I couldn’t help but think they could solve some of the problems we retailers face with sales forecasts (and ROI calculations, too, but that’s a future post). So I finally decided to try to build one myself. I found an excellent free tutorial online and got started. The results are a file you can download and try for yourself.

A Monte Carlo simulation might be most easily explained as a “what if” model and sensitivity analysis on steroids. Basically, the model allows us to feed in a limited set of variables about which we have some general probability estimates and then, based on those inputs, generate a statistically valid set of data we can use to run probability calculations for a variety of possible scenarios.

It turns out to be a lot easier than it sounds, and this is all illustrated in the example file.

The results are really what matters. Rather than producing a single number, we get probabilities for different potential sales that we can use to more accurately plan our promotions and our operations. For example, we might see that our base business has about a 75% chance of being negative, so we might want to amp up our promotions for the week in order have a better chance of meeting our growth targets.  Similarly, rather than reflexively “anniversaring” promotions, we can easily model the incremental probabilities of different promotions to maximize both sales and profits over time.

The model allows for easily comparing and contrasting the probabilities of multiple possible options. We can use what are called probability weighted “expected values” to find our best options. Basically, rather than straight averages that can be misleading, expected values are averages that are weighted based on the probability of each potential result.

Of course, probabilities and ranges aren’t as comfortable to us as specific numbers, and using them really requires a shift in mindset. But accepting that the future is uncertain and planning based on the probabilities of potential results puts us in the best possible position to maximize those results. Understanding the range of possible results allows for better and smarter planning. Sometimes, the results will go against the probabilities, but consistently making decisions based on probabilities will ultimately earn the best results over time.

One of management’s biggest roles is to guide our businesses through uncertain futures. As managers and executives, we make the decisions that determine the directions of our companies. Let’s ensure we’re making our decisions based on the best and most accurate information — even if it’s not the simplest information.

What do you think? What issues have you seen with sales forecasts? Have you tried my example? How did it work for you?

My Favorite Sites of the Year

It’s the end of the year and the end of an amazing decade for e-commerce. So, in keeping with the time-honored tradition of awarding “bests” at the end of the year, I’m listing some of my favorites sites and site features of the year. I always enjoy discovering new sites and techniques when I read other people’s lists like this, so I hope you’ll find something interesting in my web award show.

The overall best e-commerce site award goes to:

Moosejaw.com

Moosejaw has it all. They’ve done an excellent job creating a very intuitive site that provides lots of options to narrow your selection; you can easily sort by price, color, size and brand. They have lots of what they call “custy reviews” available for their products, and you can even choose a “custy reviews” search/browse results page that highlights recent reviews in the product listing. Moosejaw has a great checkout process that does a good job of guiding the customer through the process, and their error messaging is clear and easy to understand. And no commentary on Moosejaw would be complete without mention of their Madness section, which is full of wacky content that keeps you coming back for more. In a final stroke of branding brilliance, Moosejaw provides free Moosejaw flags to anyone who requests them, and encourages people to take photos of themselves with Moosejaw flags at the height of their adventures, literally, like at the top of a mountain. What a brilliant way to make your customers your greatest marketers. As a final point of support for this award, when I asked people around the office for their favorites sites, Moosejaw was by far the most common choice.

Runner-up

Net-a-Porter

Net-a-Porter shows they understand how their customers shop, and they understand that the self-service experience of the web requires extra attention. They have a prominent “What’s New” section, and their landing pages get right to the products (without lots of “window” signs screaming about promotions). Each item in the listing has an alternate view when hovering over it, which is becoming fairly common, but Net-a-Porter uses and alternate view that features the item being worn rather than just showing it from the back. When you click through to the product pages, there are many more product views and some items have an excellent video of a model walking in the clothes so customers can see how the clothing looks in action. Finally, there are details about how items fit and an invitation to contact a “Fashion Advisor” for more help if you need it.

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Best use of video:

K-Swiss

I’ve always wondered why more sites don’t do what K-Swiss is doing with their product videos. Namely, use them as the primary image for the product when they’re available.

When you arrive at a product page that features a video (which, unfortunately, isn’t all of them) the video launches immediately and shows a model walking in the item. You can easily switch the view to see her walking from the front, from either side and from the back.  And best of all, there’s not sound that could get a workplace shopper in trouble. K-Swiss also features multiple static images of product to ensure customers are getting as much information as possible.

Runner-up

Ice.com

Ice.com is also making excellent use of video and using it as their primary image when a video is available. And they’re getting great results. Ice’s Pinny Gniwisch reports conversion rates jumping a whopping 400% after customers view a video, and return rates drop 25% for products with videos. Video really helps give customers a much better understanding of what they’re buying, which helps to remove one more barrier to purchasing products online. I’m really impressed with the quality of the short videos they’re producing, as well. The folks at Ice.com clearly understand the value of video, and they’re making the right investment to improve their business.

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Most interesting merchandising tool:

Polyvore

Polyvore is not a retailer, but that doesn’t mean there’s not something to learn from or leverage what they’re doing. They call themselves “a fashion community site that lets you mix and match products from any online store to create outfits or any kind of collage. It is also a vibrant community of creative and stylish people.” They have a really cool drag and drop capability that let’s visitors “create looks” from product feeds from many different retailers. Essentially, the visitors become merchandisers, and they’re looks are posted to be voted on and commented on by the community. The best looks rise to the top. There are some really amazing collections, and of course each product has a buy button. Polyvore is now making their technology available to retailers, as can be seen in Charlotte Russe “Design Your Outfit” section.

Runner up:

Hunch

Hunch is also not a retailer, but as with Polyvore, there’s lots to learn and leverage. Hunch describes themselves as “a decision-making tool that gets smarter the more you use it. After asking you 10 questions or less, Hunch will provide a concrete result for decisions of every kind.” Basically, they ask you a series of questions and then provide product recommendations that match. The general concept is not new, but Hunch’s implementation is the best I’ve seen and it gets better the more it’s used. They’re using the community to build and refine the question sets, and they’re covering a massive range of topics. The whole experience is really addictive.

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Most proactive:

Restaurant.com

Poorly written error messages are the bane of the web and a shameful way to lose sales, as I’ve previously discussed. But even well written error messages can be annoying because they come after the fact. Restaurant.com has taken a proactive approach in their account creation process. As a visitor enters a form field, a small box appears to the right giving the user detailed descriptions about what’s expected to be entered and, when appropriate, giving the reason why it’s important. Try it out to see how helpful it is.

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I could go on and on about lots of great features on a lot of different sites, but the seven above really stood out for me as great examples worth checking out.

But there are tons of great sites I haven’t even seen.

What sites stand out for you? I would be grateful if you’d use the comments section to share your favorites with the rest of us.

Amazon is hunting for you this holiday season

The holidays are hunting season for Amazon, and they’ve got your business in their sights. Over the years, Amazon has consistently proven to be extremely adept at
maximizing their competitive advantages and creating innovations to
shore up their disadvantages. And the holiday season is the time they most leverage their advantages to grab more market share.

But here’s the thing: many of Amazon’s advantages are shared by e-commerce operations of all
types, but Amazon seems to be quicker to recognize and capitalize on
those advantages than everyone else.

This morning, I pulled up the Amazon home page and was greeted by yet
another letter from Jeff Bezos announcing Amazon’s latest brilliant
innovation. This time, it’s “Frustration Free Packaging” – just in time
for the holiday season when those of us who are parents still haven’t healed the scars from last year’s unbelievable frustration with trying to release our kids’ new toys from wicked constraints that would have defied Houdini (all while the kids are jumping up and down with excitement to play with the new toys).

The secure packaging we’ve been fighting with is designed for physical stores to allow for attractive displays while at the the same time preventing theft. You can see all gory details in this patent filing for toy packaging. But the need for that type of packing in an e-commerce warehouse is moot. So, why not push manufacturers for “e-commerce packaging” that is designed to protect items in shipping but allows for easy removal from the package? Amazon’s size probably gives them an advantage in pushing for this type of action from manufacturers, but many of today’s biggest multi-channel retailers certainly have massive pull with manufacturers and probably could have pulled this type of thing off either individually or collectively — had they thought of it.

And, of course, Amazon has been the trailblazer for many of today’s e-commerce innovations, including customer reviews, affiliate programs and recommendations. So, you might say, let them bear the costs of the innovations and we’ll just capitalize on them after Amazon has proven the way.

While that strategy may work sometimes, it’s fraught with risk because Amazon doesn’t often relinquish market share once they’ve gained it (particularly if they hook customers into Amazon Prime), and they tend to gain that market share during the holiday season. Check out their quarterly results in the “North American Media” category over the last 22 quarters in comparison to Barnes and Noble and Borders:

You can see it’s the fourth quarter where they gain market share. They don’t gain much in the other three quarters, but they certainly hold on to a lot of the share they gained the prior holiday season.

So, what can the rest of us do about it?

For starters, we might want to put innovation on the front burner. Yes, there are costs and risks associated with innovation. But the costs of doing nothing or simply following the crowd might be greater. And successful innovations don’t always have to be earth-shatteringly new, whiz bang technology. They simply need to solve problems better than current solutions.

I believe the most successful innovations have at least one of the following characteristics:

1. They create convenience for consumers
   We love convenience, and we’ll sacrifice quality and spend more money to get it. I’ve talked about this previously in my post “Predicting the Future of Retail.”
2. They create efficiencies for businesses
   Efficiencies allow us to make more money faster, and we love that. Given the unusual shapes some toy packaging can take, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Amazon’s Frustration Free Packaging is also alleviating frustrations in their warehouse and giving Amazon added efficiency in the supply chain.

It’s important to carefully examine our businesses to truly understand where we have advantages and disadvantages. As is the case with packaging, these advantages might not always be immediately obvious. We really need to dig deep to understand the problems our customers and businesses are facing and then carefully look for ways to solve those problems by leveraging our inherent strengths. In this process, we need to listen hard to our customers to understand their needs. Steve Jobs once famously said, “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” He’s right. Customers often can’t give us the specific solution, but if we listen properly they can describe their problems well enough to give us the basis for developing effective solutions.

Innovation usually takes time and money. What can we do this holiday season?

There are lots of little things we can do to improve the experience for customers who come to our sites this holiday season.

1. Truly look at our sites from our customers’ perspective.
   Go to Google and click on one of your search terms. Is the experience what a customer should expect? Try taking a different path on your site to a product than you normally do. How is the experience?
2. Get more product front and center
   Physical stores pack the front of store and end caps with gift ideas. How well does your site parallel this sort of technique?
3. Review your error messages
   A poorly written error message is a shameful way to lose a sale. Go through your site and intentionally generate errors. Put yourself in your customers’ seat. Are those error messages clear and easy-to-understand?

While it may be too late to implement huge changes for this holiday season, it’s certainly not too late to pay attention to customers’ needs and start thinking about what can be done for next holiday season. We can carefully consider our advantages and think about how we could better leverage them next year. And we can carefully consider our disadvantages and think about how we can better mitigate them next year. I’m confident Amazon’s already actively considering their next moves.

What do you think? What tips do you have for retailers for this holiday season? What types of innovations do you see coming?

The Prizes and Perils of Free Shipping

Shipping charges. As customers, we HATE paying for them, and we LOVE getting them free. In fact, our feelings about shipping charges are so strong that we highly overvalue free shipping. We’ll spend money we didn’t plan to spend on products we don’t need in order to avoid dumping cash into those awful shipping fees, even when that incremental spending is much more than the shipping charge.

So, free shipping promotions are a powerful tool for retailers. But, if we’re not careful, overuse of free shipping offers could lead us down a path where free shipping becomes more an expectation than an attractive benefit. At that point, we’ll be left with the huge costs of subsidized shipping without incremental sales to support those costs. And that ain’t a pretty equation.

That said, strategic use of free shipping incentives can lead to incremental sales and greater brand loyalty. We’re probably all familiar with the various “free shipping when you spend $X” offers that are out there, so let’s consider some of the more innovative strategies in use today for free shipping:

Free shipping as part of the business model

Zappos really uses free shipping on purchases and returns as a key component of their business model. They encourage people to order multiple sizes of the same pair of shoes and return those that didn’t fit (or those they just didn’t like, for that matter). Free shipping removes a key disadvantage Zappos has to physical retailers, and in fact even provides an advantage for customers who can try on shoes in the comfort of their own homes.

Zappos’ CEO Tony Hseih has said Zappos is a customer service company not an e-commerce retailer, and free shipping is a big part of their customer service strategy. He’s also said Zappos looks at customer service as a marketing expense, which I think is an interesting perspective that might help the cost make business sense.

But free shipping both way at all times is not a sustainable business strategy without trade-offs. Zappos is not the low price leader in their category by any means. Even with their higher prices, public filings from the recent Amazon acquisition of Zappos exposed their relatively low profits as a percentage of sales. Zappos has certainly built a powerful brand with a loyal following so it looks to me like they’ve made the trade-offs work, but theirs could be a tough model for others to follow. I’ll be curious to see if the model continues to work within the Amazon business model.

Speaking of which…

Free shipping as a loyalty program

Amazon Prime is one of the more brilliant loyalty program innovations to come along over the last several years. For an annual fee of $79, customers can get free 2-day shipping on many key items and free standard shipping on many more. Again, this is a case of a pure-play e-commerce retailer looking to mitigate one of its disadvantages to physical retail. Amazon sunk some money into this program by giving away a lot of free trials, but they’ve since hooked people in to the fee. A recent Piper Jaffray analysis estimates Amazon Prime’s membership at 2 million people and growing at 24% annually. And once you pay $79 to get free shipping, you’re going to make the most out of it. Piper Jaffray found member spend growing from $400 annually to $900 annually!

But this again is an expensive proposition that wouldn’t be sustainable for most businesses. The $79 will help to defray some of the free shipping costs, but as with most paid loyalty programs that I’ve studied, customers don’t renew their memberships unless they’re getting a positive return on their investments. And Amazon, as a general merchandiser, can provide customers with enough product choices that they can visualize making enough purchases to get their money back and then some. Specialty retailers may not be able to offer a similar program on their own; although, I keep thinking there might be an opportunity for some third party to aggregate a bunch of retailers into a program in a way that might work. (Maybe that’s a future post.)

Free shipping as a store traffic driver

The previous two examples were pure-play retailers using free shipping as a way to mitigate a major disadvantage they have to physical retailers. So how can multi-channel retailers leverage the advantages they have with their multiple channels? Free shipping to stores is one way. When I was at Borders, we offered unrestricted free shipping to our stores as a cross-channel strategy in order to leverage the selection and experience of Borders.com combined with the convenience of picking up the order in our stores. Originally, we thought it would appeal mostly to urban dwellers who didn’t want packages left on their doorsteps, but it turned out to be a hit all around for people who just didn’t want to pay for shipping. Wal-Mart does something similar with their Site-to-Store program. And Borders just took it a step further with their recently announced “in stock guarantee” for their stores that offers free shipping to home for customers if the Borders store is out-of-stock on the item the customer came in to purchase.

But businesses offering free shipping without purchase hurdles often depend on additional future purchases to make the offering profitable. For example, we ran a lot of analysis at Borders on the free shipping to stores offer. We determined we needed X% of people to buy $X more in-store when they picked up their orders for the offer to make financial sense. With the new offering, it appears Borders is counting on pulling some market share from Amazon with the promise of books available right now in their stores.

There can be little doubt that free shipping is a powerful offer, but we have to be careful how we wield it. Someone recently told me that effectiveness of fire lies in prudence and intention. Used in a positive manner, it can provide great warmth and light but when used in a negative manner it can cause great destruction. Since I like overly dramatic metaphors, I’m going to compare free shipping to fire. Let’s be careful out there.

What do you think? Should we be concerned about free shipping becoming an expectation? How do you use free shipping strategically?