“What’s New” in UK Merchandising?

Personalization · By On · 2 Comments

I try to spend at least one week per quar­ter vis­it­ing our retail cus­tomers in the UK. In addi­tion to my reg­u­lar stop for the best Fish ‘n Chips in the out­skirts of Covent Gar­den, I always enjoy hear­ing what our Eng­lish friends are doing to drive their mer­chan­dis­ing initiatives.

First, let me dis­pel any myth that the Europe is still try­ing to catch up to the US as far as eCom­merce goes. Due in no small part to some pretty savvy mer­chan­dis­ing, UK eCom­merce has expe­ri­enced sig­nif­i­cant growth in the past two years (one retailer I know says online sales now rep­re­sent more than a quar­ter of his total revenue!).

So what stands out for me in terms of online mer­chan­dis­ing in the UK? One con­sis­tent char­ac­ter­is­tic I noticed was the use of “what’s new”.

It’s clear that British shop­pers are still very inter­ested in what’s hip and trendy. The British inva­sion doesn’t only refer to music. Whether it’s the hot new train­ers (sneak­ers or ten­nis shoes for us Amer­i­cans) or a recent vin­tage of a South African wine, the Eng­lish shop­per is truly swayed by “What’s New”.

We’re see­ing these prod­ucts pre­sented to the cus­tomer at the top of their pages with promi­nent mer­chan­dis­ing zones that high­light the newest prod­ucts avail­able in the catalog(ue). This not only pro­vides a great con­ver­sion tool for mer­chan­dis­ing, but also pro­vides “stick­i­ness” to your site. While a “Best Seller” will stim­u­late a sale today, a “New” prod­uct will not only pro­vide mer­chan­dis­ing ben­e­fits today (con­ver­sion), but will also act as a cus­tomer reten­tion tool that inspires the shop­per to return to your web site to see what else is “new”. (And hope­fully they will come back soon!)

I am also see­ing quite a bit of tag­ging of new prod­ucts in search results so that if you don’t have the space ded­i­cated to a mer­chan­dis­ing zone, your cus­tomers will be able to scan through either search or browse results to eas­ily find the newest items. You will rec­og­nize these tags as a sim­ple star­burst or high­lighted text on the prod­uct thumb­nails to pop the new prod­ucts on the page.

Tak­ing this one step fur­ther, we have quite a few cus­tomers who have indi­cated to us in their data feed that a prod­uct is “new” or “fresh”. Once this data is in place we can then apply a busi­ness rules to sort the results accord­ingly through both search and browse. The end result is a dynam­i­cally gen­er­ated user expe­ri­ence that pushes your newest prod­ucts to the top of the search results.

So, if you want to boost not only con­ver­sion and sales, but also pro­vide some lift to cus­tomer reten­tion and vis­its, then take a lead from the UK and get trendy.

Cheers!

  • http://www.sitedoublers.com/ John in New Zealand

    Michael,

    Did you see any areas where the UK com­pa­nies were *ahead* of US eCom­merce sites ?

    PS: great blog !

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/mklein Michael Klein

    Dear John,

    Thank you for read­ing my blog and your response.

    I’ve always thought that Europe has been ahead of the US in terms of brand integrity. Per­haps, at times, at the expense of con­ver­sion and rev­enue. What I mean is that for a long time the web was a place for Euro­pean retail­ers to mar­ket your brand in order to drive tra­di­tional retail sales, not nec­es­sar­ily for trad­ing online and ship­ping a prod­uct to someone’s home or office. Many of the UK sites were fan­tas­tic to visit and kept you engaged, but try­ing to actu­ally pur­chase a prod­uct was a chal­lenge. Now with increased band­with, and media tech­nolo­gies such as Scene 7, retail­ers can enjoy the best of both worlds. Clear paths to prod­uct con­ver­sion with an engag­ing, rich user experience.

    I also think that from a Mobile Media per­spec­tive the Euro­pean com­mu­nity has been ahead of us in terms of wide­spread adop­tion to new tech­nol­ogy. Sure the US has pock­ets of con­cen­trated users such as the SF Bay area and Seat­tle, but if you look at the per­cent­age of the over­all pop­u­la­tion, you might be sur­prised to see how fast Ger­many, France and the UK are adopt­ing new technologies.

    Cheers!

    Michael