For most digital marketers when we think about a term like “conversion optimization” it brings up ideas like one page checkouts, testing new trust marks, button colors and confidence text. While these are important, downright vital, steps every site should go through they’re details and can stop us from forgetting the much more vital question – does the process offer the best experience for the customer?

As businesses outside of the traditional retail space enter ecommerce be it pizza chains, floral shops, or service entities like salons and gyms, these business have brought with them much different purchase process. While most simple adapt the same product -> cart -> checkout funnel, some have stepped outside to build something completely new to match their model. There’s a learning there for product sites.

Take for example the Domonio’s pizza website. While it ends with a fairly typical ecommerce process, the start is a very friendly, simple and yet practical GUI [shown above] that asks a few key questions which come off as practically beneficial to insuring your order gets to you as quick as possible. In truth this is data that Dominos needs to get to make their process work but with a fun presentation, it doesn’t seem so cumbersome to provide it.

By offering a better first step, confidence is established and the customer [speaking from a few conversations here] feels like this is a better step than trying to spell out an address over the phone or the hassle of driving in their car. That seals the deal.

On a very different page you have sites like Nike ID, Ford and even Alienware computers. While they all end in a fairly typical ecommerce checkouts, the product page and selection process are designed around custom creating a solution. Not merely about color or size, these options determine how the product looks and even works. To insure people make it through, each site uses a combination of pictures, dropdowns and simple options through the product page and following up-sell pages offering flexibility. Ultimately much of what’s really happening is upselling to buy another bag, a better case color, or advanced sound system but by presenting the options as part of personalization, it feels a lot less pushy.

These are a few examples of sites that in all reality are fairly logical evolutions on-top of the existing ecommerce process concept, much more innovative solutions are starting to roll out for b2b and niche b2c concepts especially around fashion and housewares…. I suspect more are on their way.

I’d argue that this type of evolution is necessary to just about any business. In the consumer electronics space it’s well known [by the industry] that core products like TVs, laptops, even mp3 players don’t include compontents necessary to get the full product experience. The manufacturer of an mp3 player is not selling headphones, so what they bundle is a cheap solution to let them remain price competitive.  In a TV it’s even more pronounced where a standard LCD comes with composite cables that are about as good as a VHS recording while an HDMI quality signal is needed for true HD picture.

Rather than presenting an up-sell which, to the customer, comes off as accessory peddling, wouldn’t it be better for the shopping process to add the tv and then walk the user through the nearly mandatory options that will make their experience better while offering a range and education at each point?

It’s not just about increasing revenue. It’s the holidays, you order a TV, it arrives and you plan to put it together for the Thanksgiving Day football game but when you plug it in you notice the picture is terrible compared to your current, and 5 yearold, set. You’ll be heading to their competitor to buy cables on Black Friday. Contrast that against your neighbor who had a little more risk of bailing during checkout but finds that the accessory he got is exactly what is needed. Who is going to come back and shop their same website again?

It’s not that what we’re doing now is wrong, it’s questioning if it’s as right as it could be. Ecommerce has evolved because the customer has evolved. It’s not a matter of creating something new for the sake of being slicker, it’s about looking at your business offering, the process people take and asking if the presentation you have meets the expectations.

At the end of the day, good experiences, complete experiences lead to reduced returns, customer service inquiries, and better reviews and viral sharing along to their friends. You can sell more and build an advocate by selling it better.

Reality is that there’s a counterfeit issue online. But this is a reality many brands, including those being copied, are not willing to admit to in public. Without a push from business there’s only a handful of media coverage on the subject about the problem like the one Wired Magazine ran early this year. Without exposure the problem has been allowed to fester, hidden in a back corner, with most consumers remaining completely unaware of the issue.

The truth, a truth which until two years ago I was completely ignorant of myself, is that counterfeit products are everywhere online. The same concepts that make the internet great, that have allowed huge names to spring up from humble starts in garages, have also made it extremely easy and profitable for people to get in the business of selling fakes knowingly and unknowingly. No longer is this an issue limited to the “Canal Streets” of the world, no longer is it about containers of product being sent from far off countries that could be inspected for and stopped, this is now about one package, one order and one ripped off consumer with some of the world’s largest ecommerce sites sitting squarely in the middle.

In the past two years I’ve learned lots about this issue from the legal & brand protection experts at Monster Cable (Dave Tognotti, Camilla Herron) as well as from seminars with law enforcement and other brand owners and the biggest “takeaway” that every expert seems to agree on is that us business people are afraid to talk about the realities of counterfeiting. While many of these realities that exist outside of the control of marketer’s world [like the fact that 80% of counterfeit products are coming from China and that nearly any mass-produced, profitable product we make in our modern economy can, and likely will, be faked] most of the problem pertains to exactly what we marketers do. From SEO optimization of copycat websites to a plethora of auction and classified listings, and even social media campaigns to share “great deals”, counterfeiters are out in the open using our marketing tactics against us and as Frederick Felman of MarkMonitor points out to ClickZ, they’re doing online marketing better than we are [helpful tip: see Google's improved counterfeit takedown program for AdWords].

Ecommerce has made it easy for anyone to open a shop and sell, well anything. Throw in trusted names with open marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, Buy.com, Craigslist and many, many others and you have the perfect storm for creating confusion. There’s a reason eBay has created an entire educational center on counterfeits — the issue is growing and all marketplace sites all face the same two realities:  they don’t see goods or sellers to know what’s real or fake and, like it or not, counterfeits sell — selling is what makes them money.

Without getting too far down the rabbit-hole it’s very apparent from the numbers that counterfeiting is impacting business and consumers. Online counterfeit sales will cost businesses $135 billion in 2011 according to brand protection service MarkMonitor.

Of course these are not all benign knockoffs either: a fake heart medication won’t help prevent a heart attack, a copycat surge protector may explode when tripped in a storm and even a fake video game that falls apart has a very real implication as consumers lose real money. Regardless of the issue, all of these fakes are costing brands customers. When a product fails today we flock online to review it and the fake products get reviewed just the same as the real ones.

We as marketers, ecommerce experts, social strategists, or whatever your specific function may be, get the openness of the internet but the hundreds of millions of people don’t. They don’t get that no one is reviewing every site; that the Visa/MasterCard/PayPal logos can be downloaded by anyone; that the web is essentially the Wild West and that while it’s great to be free, freedom in this case comes with the ability to deceive. People aren’t going out seeking fakes, they’re looking for deals and getting sucked in by a problem they don’t even know exists. A simple Google search shows the thousands of forum posts, yahoo answer questions and pleas for help that have sprung up when our customers find this out the hard way.

The bottom line reality is that fakes have moved away from the shadowed world they were sold in for hundreds of years and become so prevalent, so easy to find that the odds you, the reader of this post, have purchased a fake item are extremely high and I doubt you know about it. We’ve got a counterfeit problem.

So now that the stage is set on what the issue is, it’s time to talk about the marketing and consumer approach that needs to be taken to solve it. And for that I’ll transition you over to part 2 of this post.

Questions? Totally Disagree? Or have a real world stories you’re willing to share? Please post them here or email me. Everything will remain as anonymous as you want.

While average order values are a commonly used tool for getting around measuring cost of goods they’re no substitute. Assume for example that your average order for the last year was $100 with a profit 40% margin leaving you $40 to cover marketing and other variable costs. On the surface a mid-year for a new product campaign with a $10 cost per acquisition and a $9 free shipping discount would seem quite profitable but not when we add a few more data points. Most retailers see a strong spike in both conversions and average order size around the holidays and events so mid-year average orders are probably lower than that $100 goal. Furthermore your new product may break margin rules and sell for an introductory price further lowering your ROI. Combine the two and that $40 buffer quickly turns into $30, $20, $10 and well you get the idea.

And of course it’s not just about seasonal events and margins. Offers change your order size and mix in many ways… free shipping with a $99 threshold may seem like a great way to get more orders but let’s build off the first example some more to see what really happens when you measure a promo gross. Assuming you already have a campaign that costs $0.50 per click, a 4.5% conversion rate and charge $8 for shipping for orders would have to move to over 5.5% or a full percentage point to cover the impact of the discount. On the other hand rolling out free shipping with a lower qualifier like $49 may drive your conversion rates through the roof but tank your average order size pushing your margins into the floor as you spend every free dime delivering a small order. In both cases your topline income would likely increase with more orders but again, more does not always mean more profit.

Of course most etailers have all this data at their disposal, it just requires going over to the product database here and there. But you already know what I’m going to say – and no that really doesn’t cut it. When you have to use multiple data sources things get overlooked or put off; a campaign that seems good on the surface doesn’t get delved into for a few days after which money’s been lost and decisions have been made. Only when the data is available in a central place does it truly become actionable and reliable and reliable is exactly what you need to make the next step decision.

So how do you do this? It’s actually fairly simple. Most enterprise reporting suites except secondary commerce metrics like product cost, shipping amount, tax and discounts all through their base tag structure with no need to build fancy import routines. More basic analytics may not tolerate secondary cost data but by computing the net result on your end before the data is put into a tag you can achieve the same result. Either way the analytic provider integration is pretty simple. What’s more complex is trying to bring raw product costs into your ecommerce system. In an ideal world this data should flow right out of your ERP/ Inventory system and to your site but that’s just not the reality for many businesses. A second solution is a simple update process to bulk modify records with raw prices at a regular interval (i.e. weekly). When even that isn’t available it gets down to manual updates and keeping up on them. No matter which integration phase you fit into it’s worth the effort and time to make it happen – and don’t stop half way, it’s better to use gross numbers than to have the wrong net figures anyways.

Once you have everything packaged together and can get that true top to bottom result set you’re ready to really rock and roll. Now instead of looking at campaigns against a big margin percentage you can start looking at both net and gross, pre-campaign cost and post and make decisions about what’s good for growth and what’s good for revenue and do so without waiting weeks to reanalyze every order in another tool.
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