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the Free CMSWire NewsletterWeb and mobile e-commerce sites are noticeably deficient in their efforts to build the kind of product familiarity that customers obtain when they view the product in a store. When customers are in stores, they not only touch and hold products, they use fuzzy logic processes to become more familiar with them.
They glance around the general area for similar products that may or may not be directly related in the product catalog, but that serve as alternative or complementary purchases. They ask questions, or eavesdrop as other customers ask questions. They see how other customers react to products and prices. They place the product next to other products to see how well they go together. They touch, pick up, or try on products to evaluate their quality and/or suitability. Perhaps they visit the store more than once to become more familiar with the distinguishing characteristics of competing products.
Some of these processes are difficult or impossible to emulate with current technology. But others are easily within reach using commonly available digital tools.
Product-Matching PK
What do retailers offer through web and mobile catalogs to build familiarity? How do they engage customers through product knowledge (PK) and awareness? A few photos, a brief description, some product specs. Maybe a video. But mobile devices are capable of delivering much more useful information about products to help customers understand them, familiarize themselves with them, and pull the trigger on a purchase.
For example, as pointed out in Usography's recent Retailer UX Audit, retailers can do much more extensive product matching than the typical "You might also like…" They have thousands of store associates who could, over time, go through their product catalogs and create associations between products that from their experience they have found to be good matches for each other. Everyone would gain from internally crowd-sourcing the taxonomy and related products. Or, alternatively they can hire outside firms to optimize the product catalog for intelligent product-matching.
Video PK
Approaches available for building familiarity go far beyond intelligent product-matching. Some sites offer product videos to communicate PK. However, videos could communicate much more information about products than they currently do. Often, the videos are just short online commercials, and don't enable the kind of product familiarity that customers could get by visiting a store.
Crutchfield does a good job of offering PK-rich videos for different types of electronics. Amazon takes product videos a step further by allowing customers to upload video reviews describing a product's features and benefits. Amazon's video review feature has admittedly been slow to take off, and has very few imitators at this point, but the potential for familiarization through such a feature is high. Customers could be incentivized to create how-to videos that train others how to use a product. The brief fame that would result from reviewing a popular product may be incentive enough to encourage participation.
Social Media PK
Product reviews have become standard on web sites. But the social media sphere of influence extends far beyond product reviews, which are more like personal essays than social interaction. The fear that other customers will dissuade purchases is the same argument that was used against product reviews several years ago.
Social media conversations are a powerful way to build familiarity with a product, because they are fresh and genuine. These conversations may not all be positive, but familiarity in the store isn't always positive either. Familiarity builds confidence, and confidence enables purchases. Social features like Question & Answer and Product Discussions are additional ways to allow customers to communicate PK to one another. Such features are becoming more popular, but are still not offered on many e-commerce and mobile sites.
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