By Corinna Krueger, Instart Logic
E-Commerce from Internet pure plays and physical stores with an online presence is growing rapidly. According to a new Forrester Research forecast, e-Commerce will account for 11% of total retail sales in 2018, up from 8% in 2013.
It’s an arena dominated by large players, but one company stands apart as the clear leader in Internet sales. Amazon boasts higher sales than Walmart, Staples and the next top 10 Internet retailers combined.
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Every retail brand is at war to win eyes and hearts, with every mobile device becoming a combined war zone and POS kiosk. A brand not fighting to engage effectively with its customers can be seen as nothing more than an online vending machine.
Can online retailers battle against the giants?
Some have already tried, but it’s not as easy as it looks. Stealing sales from Amazon or Walmart doesn’t come from having a bigger warehouse, distribution infrastructure or global presence. Instead, online retailers flourish by excelling in their specialty and engaging more visually, deeply and emotionally with their customers.
For retail items linked to emotions, such as home furnishings, fashion or artwork, an Internet retailer’s online brand has the opportunity to influence from their eyes, to their heart, to their shopping decision.
Ultravisual Engagement: A web experience that outdoes “being there”
To compete against the giants, eTailers must make their shopping experiences more compelling than the physical experience of being in a showroom where shoppers have the benefit of touching the fabric, sinking back on a couch and reveling in the presence of beautiful objects. Online, shoppers can’t reach into their tablet and luxuriate in the feel of a fabric. A “better than being there” experience demands images that draw them in and photography that is high-resolution and artistically strong.
All this, along with fast performance, is the secret weapon e-Commerce retailers need to take on bigger competitors.
A fitting term for this is “ultravisual engagement,” and it occurs when a web presence achieves emotional bonding with visitors through compelling images and gratifying performance. Ultravisual engagement requires product images that are large, high-quality and zoomable enough to evoke emotion through hyper-real, visual access to the products.
This has a powerful impact on customers — and triggers a specific response: It motivates them to buy.
As Retina-class displays spread across the marketplace, mundane 200k photos look amateur and uninviting. Yesterday, you could get away with images that were not world-class, but mobile devices today have sharp displays that draw attention to low-quality pixelated images that detract from the digital bonding experience.
Make it better and faster than the physical experience
Achieving an ultravisual engagement for your customers isn’t based just on imagery. Performance matters too. If images load slowly or the site behaves poorly on a mobile browser, the spell over the consumer is broken and their emotional connection with the product is lost. Consumers will leave the site frustrated, abandoning their shopping carts. Plus, unfavorable reviews of your site will only hurt brand reputation.
Web and mobile experiences have to be fast on every device, yet deliver an irresistible, visual, digital experience. The good news is that most of the large e-Commerce retailers have “left some speed on the table.”
According to our recent 2014 Etailing Survey, 98% of online retailers said their web sites were not performing to maximum potential and most are using content delivery networks (CDNs) and front-end optimization (FEO). This is a window of opportunity for retailers that can offer speed and a captivating visual experience.
E-Commerce web sites that are ultravisual, including One Kings Lane, NastyGal, Touch of Modern and Gogobot, didn’t happen overnight. They focused on continuously improving performance and kept a close watch on the increasingly important mobile shopper. With this focus, these retailers have led the implementation of new technologies in order to provide a superior mobile user experience.
When you’ve tried every legacy approach to help performance
Almost every e-Commerce site has taken back-end engineering and front-end optimization to the limit, trying at least one CDN and hitting a wall on performance, especially when it comes to reaching the mobile customer. Today, a captivating user experience in e-Commerce is defined as visual, fast and high on establishing an emotional connection. The biggest battle is the tradeoff between speed and user experience, because high-resolution images take longer to download.
Legacy web acceleration technologies improve web performance incrementally, but they are inadequate for speeding up the mobile user experience. The speed gains have already been squeezed from CDN caching techniques, which were not designed for a wireless world where dynamic applications that are assembled on the fly in the (mobile) moment of need.
The real risk is not in change; it’s in failing to address the mobile user’s hunger for speed
Looking ahead three years, we see e-Commerce originating primarily from mobile devices and wearable technology. Most devices will have Retina-class or sharper displays. Online shoppers will expect web sites to deliver high-quality, compelling images of products without a frustrating load time. E-Commerce operators will take every opportunity to captivate the shopper visually in ways the physical showroom or low-resolution images cannot duplicate. Enhanced imagery enables the shopper to connect with products in ways that won’t happen in a cluttered store display. Consumers may even be able to visualize themselves using the products, navigating visually through the product, inspecting its construction — and every possible option.
Takeaway
E-Commerce operators must create an ultravisual engagement and seek technology enablers to deliver it. There are already clear examples of companies that have made this high-ROI, low-risk transition, which has, in turn, greatly strengthened their brand and the bottom line. To succeed as David against Goliath, eTailers need to “make it more compelling” by being faster and ultravisual.
Corinna Kruegeris responsible for developing and executing Instart Logic’s marketing and communications strategy to drive its business growth and brand awareness. Prior to that, she was Head of Marketing at Cotendo, a cloud-based web and mobile acceleration provider, acquired by Akamai for $268M at 20x in revenue. Before Cotendo, she held Senior Product Marketing and Corporate Marketing roles at Web and mobile cloud testing and monitoring provider. Keynote Systems, Inc. Prior to that Corinna held Business Development and Marketing positions at Siemens. Corinna has an MBA from UC Davis and a MA in International Marketing from Universität Trier, and was a Fulbright Scholar.
