I can’t see you but I want to be nice to you.
A dipstick survey of most retailers’ online stores reveal an attempt to get the customer quickly to the merchandise, help them to easily choose, to easily get better views of the goods, and then to help them checkout faster. Check out any retail site and the pattern is: Search of items, add to cart, (add more to cart), proceed to checkout, login/register/continue unregistered, address details, payment details, (attempts to cross sell and up sell), order confirm, thank you screen.
Customer experience is enhanced in some cases by making this process non linear, where the customer is allowed to do things in any order and the ability to hop between steps. Some sites let you edit the cart from any page, some sites show you the cart contents at all times, some show the order total. Sites strive for efficiency and many do achieve that objective. The experience is further enhanced by achieving true multi channel visibility, allowing customers visibility to inventory in their local stores, allowing them to reserve and pick up. This still does not get into warm fuzzy feeling territory.
So the question I have is how does a site make me feel nice about the shopping experience. Is being efficient good enough? While working with a few large retailers recently, I could not figure out an answer to this question. In your experience, what have you seen retailers do in this space? If we think efficiency and convenience is all there is to it as far as the online experience goes, then that is not really a differentiator, because every good retailer is already there or will get there soon. So how do retailers give customers a nice feeling online? Does this matter at all, or will this be the next evolution for online retailing?
