Category: Web Marketing

I haven’t been to Target.com in a while, but decided to revisit. Target clearly doesn’t lack the brand recognition or marketing muscle to make this site great, but it seems like it has some shortcomings compared to online competitors. For example, I looked at Kitchen Gadgets. The #5 best selling kitchen gadget on their site today was a 1-quart measuring cup:

This product is a best seller, yet has only five reviews. Two of the five reviews were 1-star, stating that the markers wash off in the first use. Another one said it takes two years for the markers to wear off. And two people loved it. A measuring cup without markers isn’t particularly useful, eh? With only 5 reviews, it’s hard to say whether the experiences of 60% of reviewers are the norm. An online competitor to target.com, Amazon.com, offers a comparable product from Pyrex that has an average of 4.5 stars and 387 reviews. Personally, I would have more confidence in purchasing the Pyrex product based on reviews alone. Yes, it’s $4 more expensive, but measuring cups last forever (unless the markers wear off).

But, when ordering stuff online, the cost isn’t just the cost but the cost plus tax and shipping. Inconveniently, Target.com doesn’t offer a fully loaded cost on their property description pages, or hint at what shipping may be, or how one may be able to avoid shipping costs. Instead, I had to start the checkout process to figure out what it would cost to purchase this item:

Notice on the right where it says:

Shipping: not yet calculated
Tax: not yet calculated

As in, we demand that you tell us who you are, where you live, and your email address before we’ll tell you what it would cost to purchase something from us.

I complied, assuming that once Target.com knew my address they’d be able to calculate relevant taxes and shipping. But, I was wrong:

Here I am at the checkout screen and Target still hasn’t told me what I’ll be charged to purchase this item. They did accurately calculate the 7.775% sales tax rate I’d need to pay to subsidize the Vikings stadium, but didn’t tell me what it would cost to ship the product to my door.

I chose PayPal for checkout because I figured PayPal would probably give me an option to see the full price before Target charged me their mystery figure. Here’s what I found out:

The mystery shipping cost for the $5.54 item: $6.72. That hurts.

What’s even more strange about this is the sale taxes more than doubled from 7.775% to 17.148%. That makes no sense to me. Anyone know what that’s all about?

Between best seller products on a major retail site having only 5 reviews, 60% of reviews of a best seller product being negative, no transparency on shipping or tax before checkout, and jumping sales tax prices, it’s tough to have much confidence in the site.

Now, compare that to Amazon. Here’s Amazon’s most popular 1-quart glass measuring cup:

It’s $3.95 more expensive than Target’s best selling 1-quart glass measuring cup. But:

It has 22 images while Target offers one. Perhaps Target’s customers could benefit from a few pictures of measuring cups with missing lines so they could make more informed decisions?

Amazon’s 1-quart measuring cup has been reviewed 387 times with an average review of 4.5 stars:

Target’s reviews appear to be sorted by date, while Amazon’s are sorted by usefulness based on up/down votes from other Amazon users. The top review of this 1-quart measuring cup has received 154/162 useful votes. It’s more than 500 words long. In a nutshell, it says that it’s a nice measuring cup but not as nice as they used to be.

Amazon makes it clear that you can get this shipped for free if you’re willing to spend at least $25:

They also show that a 3rd party seller is willing to sell this product for $10.95 with free shipping.

Amazon also makes their upsell to Amazon Prime membership ($79 annual fee for free 2-day shipping on most purchases, plus unlimited movie streaming and other stuff) impossible to miss.

I skipped the Prime membership (I’m a Prime member, but I logged out for this demonstration) and took a look at my shopping cart. It turns out that Amazon lets me calculate the shipping/total cost for purchasing this item before I tell Amazon who I am:

A rational person wouldn’t spend $15.98 or $13.21 with shipping on a measuring cup. Especially when Amazon makes it blatantly clear that you’ll get nearly half off on the next $15 worth of stuff you add to the cart to round up to $25 and avoid shipping.

Target does offer free shipping to certain customers, and a 5% discount. All you have to do is ding your credit applying for their credit card, which carried a 22.9% APR:

Amazon also offers a credit card with a lower APR, and points for purchases not only at Amazon, but for anything purchased with the card including bonus points for certain popular categories like gas stations, restaurants, and drug stores.

And, if we’re comparing shipping based on membership, Target’s RedCard users are eligible for free Standard Shipping (3-5 days) while Amazon Prime members ($79 annual fee) receive free 2 day shipping. If I order something on a Tuesday night and it may not show up until the following Monday, it may be free but it’s not exactly awesome compared to having it before the weekend for free.

So, it looks like Target’s a bit behind on reviews, reviews of reviews, transparency on shipping, calculating sales tax, free shipping offers, delivery speed for free shipping offers, and benefits offered to members.

Personally, I think shipping policies can make or break online retailers. If e-commerce sites can’t satisfy the:

– I need something for a birthday party this weekend
– I plan to cook something this weekend
– I’m running low on diapers
– Christmas is almost here

crowds with cost-effective, reliable shipping, there are companies that do it on a daily basis and are winning a lot of loyalty through shipping that traditional marketing can’t touch.

As soon as a website launches, the new owners start to ask, “Is anyone looking at it?” and “What can I do to get more traffic?” Psychologically, it’s time to make the change from building to marketing.

Or is it?

More likely, it’s time to switch from building a site to building out a site. You probably have a good design but little content on your site on the day of launch, so it may not be the best time to introduce a ton of visitors.

Also, your site most likely hasn’t been tested against real-world users, so there may be things that were overlooked in the design phase that you’d prefer to address before a ton of people visit.

In some cases, sites could start rolling out marketing efforts in stages as certain personas are handled well, or certain types of pages reach acceptible quality standards. For example, an online retailer could start testing pay per click ads for products as the pages reach a certain quality standard (assuming the checkout functionality is also ready for prime time).

For PR and other link building efforts, make sure you have an easy to understand, professional, offering that seems link-worthy. Clearly, day-1 after launch may not be the time when that standard is hit.

If you find yourself in a situation where you have to write an online bio . . . try being human.

If you’re trying to decide whether it’s a good idea to swap links with a casino site that’s completely unrelated to your business . . .

If customers need to be able to find your address in order to visit your store or restaurant . . .

If you don’t need a prospective customer’s fax number, home phone number or blood type in order to start a relationship . . .

If you’d find it rude if someone walked into your cube and start playing music for no good reason . . .

If you think making your logo spin will convince people to do business with you . . .

. . . try being human.

Rohit Bhargava list of most overused web metrics for 2007 includes one that doesn’t seem appropriate for the list: Keyword Conversion Rate:

The Top 10 Most Overused Metrics of 2007 – Part I

Keyword Conversion Rate – When running search marketing, keyword conversion rates are great metrics to point to … particularly when the percentage conversion is high (10% or more). The problem is, these rates are usually on low volume niche search terms. It is a misleading metric that some marketers love to employ to inflate the success of a keyword marketing program.

While it’s certainly true that a marketer could use the success of low search volume terms with high conversion rates to mislead about the success of an online marketing campaign, the fact of the matter is that long-tail search terms do tend to convert at very high rates.

And this isn’t something that should be ignored. Ideally, trends should be mined out of this data. For example, if a company like Amazon wasn’t consistently including SKUs on their product description pages, they may pick up on the fact that very low search terms for long numbers are converting extremely well on their site. With a bit more digging, they may realize that SKUs are driving high conversion rate traffic (which would make sense since someone’s likely pretty close to buying if they’re searching for something that specific).

A smart company would learn from that and immediately build upon that success by making sure to include SKUs on all product description pages, leading to an increase in a small amount of extremely valuable (yet free) traffic to thousands and thousands of pages.

When I hear “low volume niche search terms” I hear “high conversion rate, easy to rank high for, or cheap to PPC advertise on terms.”

Rohit, you stick to the high volume, general, short tail terms that tend to convert poorly. I’ll cover everything else. 🙂

Anne Zelenka over at Web Worker Daily raises some interesting points about how the web would change if everyone installed ad blocking software in their browsers. Here analysis looks at how this would effect content publishers and consumers of published content:

Ad Blocking: A Market or a Moral Issue?

On the other hand, if so many people find ads annoying rather than helpful, maybe we won’t be worse off with less advertising and different online business models. More direct payment mechanisms like subscription fees or per-article micropayments might become common. And those who make their work freely available anyway on the theory that attention is a form of currency will continue to make it freely available.

She raises some great points. If publishers couldn’t rely on advertising to pay the bills, surely things like subscriptions would grow. And an increase in pay per post advertising would probably happen too.

But let’s take a look at a different angle here. What about companies who aren’t in the online media business? What if your company uses the web to advertise a service or product where the transactions really happen offline? If ad blocking gained a ton of traction, would you be able to get your message in front of prospective customers?

I imagine this comes down to how dependent your business in on online advertising. But the point here is to take a step back and figure out how you can become less dependent on online ads to drive traffic to your website where you can share your message with prospects.

How would you do it? Here are a few ideas to get things started:

1. Create remarkable products or services. People will share your company’s story on your behalf for free if you’ve delivered for them.

2. PR: Create stories around your product that make for interesting news. Bloggers and online news sites are always looking for something interesting to write about. Feed them interesting stuff to write about, but don’t waste their time with stories only a CEO could love.

3. SEO: Rank high for search terms prospective customers are typing into search engines.

What else would you include on this list?