Inspirational Shopping

It's a funny thing online - people shop differently. Marketers used to think that the best solution to make people buy online was to virtually bludgeon them with the opportunity. BUY NOW! buttons proliferate, blinking text proclaim of sales or special offers. Shoppers are hit over the head with opportunities.

But that model, says Palm VP of eMarketing Steve Franzese, takes the "wow" factor out of browsing and finding that special item and that special bargain. It takes away the joy of finding something on your own. At the same time, you don't want your shoppers to move around your site completely undirected. That's a good way for them to get lost. There's a happy medium in there somewhere, a position in which shoppers are encouraged to browse and find but still directed to options by your personalization and filtering software.

Steve Franzese calls it Inspirational Shopping. We call it smart selling.

Browsing vs. Finding/Men vs. Women

An unusual thing about buying online is that you have the technology to find exactly what you want. But this sometimes doesn't make for the best shopping experience.

"I call it the male versus the female approach to shopping," says Franzese. "I don't want to over generalize, but men typically don't like to shop. I know exactly what I want. Just get me in and out as quickly as possible."

In fact, that was the model for online shopping back when the web wasn't graphics-friendly.

"I didn't need to see a picture of an airline ticket from San Francisco to Boston," says Franzese. "I knew what I'm buying. Travel was a logical service to migrate to the web because it's a pure commodity - what are my flight options, what are my pricing options, how many stops, how many direct flights, etc. It lends itself very well to this male approach to shopping - get me in, get me out, that's it, don't bother me."

But shopping, as Palm has discovered, can be about more than just finding that one item.

"It can be an experience, it can be browsing. Merchants understand that. Think about what I like to call inspirational shopping, what I'll call the end of aisle or end cap displays. I see paper plates on one end-aisle display on sale and on the adjoining aisle it's hamburger rolls. I become inspired. I say, 'I'm going to have people over this weekend.'"

Even if you didn't go in there thinking you wanted to barbeque, you've been inspired by the display. That's what online merchants need to aspire to.

Inspiring Shoppers

Your goal, then, should be upselling. If customers come to your site to find one item, you shouldn't make it difficult to find. But also be ready to inspire them to buy more. "What we've learned is the mass merchants, the department stores, and even your good old 7-Eleven stores know a lot more about buyer behavior than the most sophisticated online retailer. The reason that 7-Eleven puts the milk in the back of the store is they know that's the most popular item, and they want you to be exposed to everything else in the store," says Franzese. "It's that opportunity to inspire the shopper that is missing from a search box on a website. It assumes you know too much, and frankly if you look at what shoppers do in stores and compare their lists to what they actually bought, what they buy exceeds their lists."

So how do you make an online store inspire your visitors to exceed their own personal "to buy" list? "One of the things we're thinking about is moving our search box to the bottom of the page," says Franzese.

Palm also organizes its software offerings by topic.

"If you go into our store, right now our software connection, which has just be re-formatted, is a place where our site visitors can find out about over 8,000 software applications that are available to be downloaded from our website. That's mind-boggling. Whether you know what you want or even if you just know the category, you can type in 'education,' and you'll probably see several hundred education applications," he says.

Customers can easily search for an exact package needed. But if they like, they can simply browse instead.

" We have the software arranged by hobbies, by areas of interest, by profession. We're starting to merchandize the content in ways that people might be inspired to look at it and say, 'I didn't know you had special software specifically available for people interested in aviation or people with this particular hobby or that particular avocation.' We're trying to be a lot smarter about how we present what we have for sale throughout the site," he says.

Upselling Online

Palm's other coup is using collaborative filtering to suggest add-on items.

"You come to the site to buy a particular device, you select it and put it in your shopping basket. Voilà, like magic, accessories, cases, all sorts of related merchandise appear at the bottom of the page to up-sell and cross-sell to you. Any one of a number of collaborative filtering engines can do this for you," he says. "We've seen our average order size increase by almost 10%."

A salesperson in a store would do this upselling for you - "You want fries with that?" But in the absence of a salesperson, technology can take over. The whole point is to make a shopping experience that inspires the shopper to buy more than he or she intended. You're not trying to trick the customer; you're trying to inspire him or her. There will always be customers who want to come in, get one thing and get out. But for those looking for more of an experience, you should be ready to provide it.