Change the Rules (Photo by Satish Krishnamurthy, cc-by license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/unlistedsightings/3252766510/, rotated and cropped)

Some of the most interesting innovations in eCommerce are based on simple changes to the context of the customer-store interaction. Private Event Retail, for example, turned on its head the idea that your goal is to be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, and changed “limited inventory” from a weakness into a strength.

In this post I discuss two other examples of changing the game by changing the rules in eCommerce: TurnTo and CureBit. Both attempt to drive consumer behavior more effectively by changing the basic timing of events: one in product reviews and recommendations, the other in deal sharing.

Most retailers ask you to like a product, or write a review of the product, when you are buying it or just after you’ve bought it. (review-your-recent-purchase reminder emails are increasingly common and beginning to verge on annoying, given that not every purchase merits a review).

TurnTo instead provides three core mechanisms which together can change that process in ways which seem to make it much more effective:

• Ask Owners
• Purchase Sharing
• Social Merchandising

Ask Owners lets the person who is actively considering a purchase reach out to those who have actually purchased the item in question. Rather than asking the purchaser for a review at the time of purchase (or with a followup a week later), TurnTo reaches out to the purchaser at the moment someone has a question. This taps into our willingness to help our friends, and connects the need for an answer to a real person, rather than the review which is essentially written without any knowledge of who might later read it.

Purchase Sharing, similarly, tweaks the “share this purchase” model:

Purchase Sharing runs on a store’s order confirmation page. Right after a purchase, it asks the buyer if she is willing to be visible as a reference to her friends when they shop here.

In other words, rather than asking me to broadcast what I’ve just bought, and hope that someone is listening and interested, TurnTo asks for the opportunity to connect me later with a friend who is considering the same purchase.

Finally, Social Merchandizing lets users see which of their friends have made previous purchases from a given store. (They do provide a fallback for smaller stores where users may find no friends have purchased, but still can see what purchasers said, not just what anonymous reviewers said).

Tweaking the implied social contract a bit – so that I’m asked to serve as a source of information for friends looking for help, rather than being asked to help the merchant and future anonymous buyers by writing a review – changes the game, activating people’s desire to help their friends.

Curebit (referral link) – which you may have seen recently covered on Mashable — similarly changes the basic rules of group buying and deal sharing. While Living Social and Groupon create deals, present them to their audience (email lists and web visitors) and encourages people simultaneously to buy the deal and to share it, Curebit creates a deal for you to share after you’ve made a purchase, enabling you to share a discount with your friends and potentially get a retro-active discount for yourself on something you’ve already bought.

The user isn’t being asked to share the deal with friends until the user has already made a purchase. This cuts out folks who are just affiliate link driven, or hoping to get deals free but otherwise not interested in purchase – it basically makes the deal available only to those who were otherwise interested enough to buy it on its own merits.

Where are the other opportunities to rethink the fundamental assumptions we’ve made about how people shop, across channels, in the age of pervasive digital?

Where could a tweak of the rules change the game for you?

I was intrigued by an article in Information Week (“Blogger Smackdown at AlwaysOn“) which concluded:

The debate quickly escalated from a discussion of whether buzz marketing was feasible to whether marketing through blogs even made sense. Online blog marketing firm PayPerPost was savaged by both Jarvis and Weinberger, with PayPerPost’s CEO present in the room trying unsuccessfully to defend himself.

The video from the session is online at the AlwaysOn Media site, though they don’t provide any simple way to link to or bookmark a specific session. Instead, go to this webcast archive page, scroll down to where the session title is, and click on the icon in the video archive column. (Actually, there are lots of good sessions available – including the keynote on “Surviving the Media Disruption” – but beware, the volume varies wildly).

Unfortunately that the conference’s own site seems to be missing out on some of the opportunities social media presents – thy’ve got all this great video content, with significant speakers and good topics, but there’s no way to share the videos – blog, email, download, or embed. In addition, though they show chat from the live event (in fact there’s no way to turn off the chat while watching the archived video – it’s all in one embedded flash player), but there’s no forum for comments or ongoing discussion. When you combine that with the fact that you can’t even link to a particular video, it becomes very difficult (as evidenced by the description above) to talk about and point to the sessions.

(Ok, so it isn’t that hard for a person to follow the above directions – but the whole point of links is to be machine discoverable and one-click, not “describable in less than two sentences”).

They’ve managed the first part – made the conference content interesting – but have failed the second part by putting up barriers to the conversation. I suppose it is only fair to give them credit for making the video content available at all – when many conferences will only make video available to atteendees or paid subscribers – but a simple tweak or two to allow a specific url to be assigned to each session would make a world of difference.

The heart of the “smackdown”  is the PayPerPost, which  pays bloggers to post about things on behalf of advertisers. As of December 2006, they require bloggers to disclose blog posts which are paid, but this disclosure requirement itself came only recently and after pressure from the community.

What both Weinberger and Jarvis object to – and I share their concern – is that PayPerPost ultimately makes it more difficult to tell true passion from paid endorsement, and more difficult to tell honest recommendations from advertisements. Pay Per Post didn’t invent this problem, but it makes things worse rather than better.

What about ThisNext, whose CEO was also on the panel?

One could argue that they are also blurring the line between passion and paid recommendation: their platform enables people to make recommendations about products they like – including affiliate links through which users are compensated for purchases driven by their recommendations. All affiliate relationships essentially provide a kickback for the recommending user. Is it because they are explicitly in the context of a recommendation – and generally though not universally disclosed – that these relationships are relatively free of controversy?

(In the interest of full disclosure – I’ve had an Amazon affiliate account since maybe 1996 – I’ve made less than $5 from that relationship over that 10+ years).

As social bookmarking, social networking, and collaborative filtering applications become increasingly popular, how will we deal with the influence of marketing dollars?

In addition to folks like PayPerPost, we also need to be ready for  “human powered social bookmarking services” like this one.

Over time, we’ll all need to get much more sophisticated about identifying paid influence in its various forms. Users will need to learn to apply the traditional caveat lector to the all kinds of messages, even those which don’t look like “marketing.” Develoeprs and site creators will need to create new techniques for highlighting disclosure and filtering / flagging paid endorsements from unpaid.

(It’s been published on a number of different CMP properties – the link above is to Dr. Dobb’s Journal).

I think this is a great clear statement of the opportunity:

We know that end users have a high degree of experience in finding and sharing information. Outside of their work lives, they participate in online communities that routinely employ so-called Web 2.0 technologies such as RSS feeds, Weblogs, and wikis that let groups of people create content and exchange insights. Increasingly, users want to apply the same sorts of tools in the work environment, and to easily access data that’s tailored to the roles they play in the organization and the business metrics they influence.

I’ve been seeing this a lot in large enterprises, where business users are frustrated by the gap between what they see as highly usable online collaboration apps and the slow moving, hard to use enterprise collaboration tools they have to use “at work.”

Why is the gap in experience between editing an entry in Wikipedia and trying to change basic information in the average corporate intranet so high?

Part of it is the “rights” problem – who has the right to edit what content – but that cannot be the whole story.

Basically, you install the plug-in in your copy of IE, and sign in to the Weezu servers. Then, while you browse the web, Weezu “watches” what urls you are visiting, and informs you when other Weezu users are looking at the same pages.

In other words, you can see which other Weezu users (those who also installed the plug-in and created a Weezu account) are viewing the same page you are.

In Weezu’s terms (are they using Google Babelfish for the English version?):

Thanks to the Weezu bar, you can see the avatars of all weezunauts who are connected on the same site as you are, and with a single click start to share messages with them. To achieve this, you only need to install the Weezu bar. Once connected on Internet, you will see the avatars of weezunauts visiting the web sites. Weezu works on all web sites around the world and maybe further…

One of the issues I had with Weezu is the design.

I suppose one could argue design is subjective, but who exactly is the target market for a service which looks like this?:

This is what the Weezu plug-in looks like when it is open – here there is only the user’s avatar because no other weezunauts are visiting the same page at the same time.

Why is the user’s avatar inside the mouth of a giant blue sea monster, hovering near the sea floor in some kind of spongebob squarepants alternate universe? I assume that’s the “Weezuscaphe.”

If you should happen to find another weezunaut, you’ll have the opportunity for a chat:

(I should mention these images are drawn from the Weezu “use” page – I did install and try it out but I never managed to find anyone on the same page as me at the same time).

Other weezunauts’ avatars appear at the left, and by clicking on them you can send them messages.

Why? That’s not entirely clear. Perhaps you want to talk to strangers about the web pages you’re both looking at?

Reminds me a bit of ThirdVoice, which allowed users to leave comments “on” web pages that other Third Voice users would be able to see – except with a synchronous twist, in that the users are there now, or something close to it.

The second issue I had with Weezu is that it’s an IE only experience at this point – though they are working on a firefox version.

Finally, they’ll have an interesting challenge managing the growth of their community.

When it is too small, as it is now, you can’t find any other avatars – you’re just crawling along the bottom of the sea floor all by your lonesome, ” . . . a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

When it gets too big, if it were to catch on among some niche set of users for example, the interface would be overwhelmed by users – at which point it becomes clear that this is just a chat room circa 1996, and plain old IRC might be more effective. It will quickly become “so crowded nobody goes there anymore.”

(OK, did I just manage to quote T.S. Eliot and Yogi Berra in one blog post?)

It might get interesting if, for example, I could set up friend lists – and determine who I might want to chat with if they happened upon the same page. Or, if sites endorsed use of such a plug-in, and made the experience of chatting somehow related to the experience of the site.

Another similar startup in invite-only mode, is Me.dium, which “reveals the hidden world of people and activity behind your browser.” According to Ajaxian, Me.dium offers some similar functionality: “You can see your friends browsing, all with relevance letting you know who is doing similar things, and letting you chat with those people.” I’ve just installed that one, will blog more about it once I’ve tried it out.

When I read that the focus of the article was to answer the question “What are the specific aspects of an online transaction that customers value and use to distinguish one site from another?,” and that the authors had done a survey and some analysis I was intrigued.

Ultimately, though, I have to say the conclusions are underwhelming. As outlined in the article’s abstract:

The results demonstrated that customers’ perceptions of quality and satisfaction with online purchases depend upon three things: interaction with the Web site, delivery of the product and how prepared retailers are to address problems when they occur. Of the three, product delivery has the strongest influence on customers’ satisfaction and future purchase intentions.

In other words, the most important thing is “product delivery.” Not sending people what they’ve paid for, or sending it damaged, or late, has a tendency to make customers not trust a vendor.

Secondarily, “how prepared retailers are to address problems when they occur” is also important. People tend not to like getting stuck in a phone tree, or (worse) sending emails to an anonymous help desk, when a retailer has just messed up something in their order.

Finally, “interaction with the Web site” is important. Sites need to be well designed (“visually pleasing but not distracting”) and easy to use (“Customers want easy-to-use search engines that allow them to find products quickly”). Sites should not be frequently unavailable (“Online retailers need to be mindful that a Web site that experiences problems, thus preventing customers from shopping . . ., is the equivalent of putting a ‘closed’ sign on a brick-and-mortar store”).
Perhaps I was expecting too much from a brief article based on a survey with 388 participants, but when the authors finally conclude that “although indicators of trust in an online retail environment may be somewhat unique due to the physical separation of busy and seller, the fundamental nature of trust remains the same,” I feel I bit like I didn’t get what I ordered.

Is it really that simple? Web users will buy from e-tailers they trust, which means e-tailers who actually deliver as promised, provide good customer service when things go wrong, and have well designed, easy to use, and reliable web sites?

That’s all true, of course, but the devil’s in the details. After all, one shopper’s “visually pleasing” is another’s “distracting.”

E-tailers certainly do need to get the basics right consistently bad logistics on delivery will kill an e-tailer no matter how good their website – but e-tailers will differentiate long-term based on how cost-effectively they can deliver, how they innovate, and how they acquire customers.

There’s a tour of the new features or you can go directly to Toyland and start creating your wishlist by voting yes or no on the toys.
Some interesting functionality inside women’s apparel (highlighted in the tour) which hasn’t been leveraged throughout the site yet, including an add-to-cart that doesn’t interrupt the shopping flow and live color swatches.

Worth a persual even if you’d never admit to buying clothes from Walmart.

Two excellent examples of how rich internet applications (in this case Flash based) can revolutionize the shopping/merchandising experience on the web.

Both are from Ikea, and not available (so far as I can tell) in English. (Not that their regular e-commerce site in the US isn’t delightful, but it seems a bit less playful than these).

You’ll need Flash installed (apparently “Laddar” means “Loading” in Swedish) and you should have your speakers on, for the total ambience.

If shopping were always this fun I might even buy things.

At SearchViews, the epitaph was: “Launched as part of a back-to-school promo, the entire project is an embarrassment – and an excellent example of How Not To Build A Social Network.”

At Militant Geek, it was described as a “crass attempt at showing the kids how ‘wid it’ a place Walmart is” and Walmart was described as “putting its social networking tail between its legs” in closing the site.

Mashable‘s version has WalMart’s MySpace Clone Dead on Arrival, claiming that:

It’s pretty much universally agreed that TheHub was a complete failure. Aside from the fake profiles and unabashed attempts to make users buy WalMart gear, WalMart screened the content and emailed a user’s parents to check whether it was ok for them to sign up. There’s nothing wrong with trying to build a safer social network (both Piczo and Mashable sponsor Multiply are having a go), but this was a little too much.

Worse than the attempt to screen content (which one can easily see as a risk-averse but understandable move given the age of the target audience and the furor over MySpace-as-pedophile-target that’s been all the rage most of this summer) in Mashable’s view was the fact that WalMart “totally misunderstood what’s cool these days.”

Mashable’s correct to note that the “failure” of The Hub “doesn’t mean WalMart was wrong to pursue social networking as a marketing strategy,” it’s just that “Making WalMart cool is a big challenge and one that probably shouldn’t be tackled by out of touch marketers riding skateboards and listening to Avril Lavigne.” (Ouch, take that, Sk8er Boi.)

So why do I detect such glee at seeing WalMart fail in this endeavor?

Is it just the long standing fear and resentment many have toward WalMart itself? (See WalMart is Pure Evil).

Chris at Shotgun Marketing Blog imagines this interchange between “social networking bloggers” and WalMart:

It’s not about just having the tech tool to “connect” with the community and going out and trying to be something you’re not. You’re not MySpace and you’re never going to be. You just be yourself. A monopoly that destroys small towns and is slowly unraveling the American economy . . .

But how would the WalMart of this version go about “being itself” in a social networking way? In this view there’s really no way WalMart could “succeed” except by staying on its current path.

I think that there’s more fueling this little dancing-at-your-funeral party. Isn’t there a bit of compensation for all the media frenzy around social networking – perhaps this is the start of the backlash? There have certainly been other failures in the Social Networking space – but none of them were large enough targets to pin the banners on.

I prefer to think of The Hub’s failure (if, frankly, we can even be sure that it was considered a failure by those who funded it and set its success criteria) as a baby step by a large (the largest!) discount retailer in the right direction. Perhaps they faltered in finding the right balance between control (good to control for safety, bad to control for “on brand message”) and flexibility, perhaps they mis-aimed from an audience and content perspective (what Mashable calls not knowing “what’s cool these days”). The point is, they see the direction that e-commerce must take and is taking toward interactive, participatory, social collaboration and they tried to take a step in that direction.

What other major *multi-channel* retailer (not Amazon) has made such an attempt?