Timberline Interactive

Well-known ecommerce retailing expert Lauren Freedman of the e-tailing group released an Online Chat survey, in cooperation with inQ, an ecommerce chat provider. The study assessed how 31 retailers and telcos use online chat technology to sell.

Christophe Cremault, senior vice president of marketing at inQ, said "We determined key dimensions of human interactions with online shoppers that are critical to inQ's customers' or live chat's success. We wanted to measure to what degree these dimensions have been adopted across the industry, and commissioned the e-tailing group to conduct a survey." InQ refers to these as "human interaction metrics," and tracks them as part of its HI Metrics service.

"One of the most surprising -- and disappointing -- findings when I conducted these chats was how seldom a chat culminated in the agent asking for the sale," said Freedman. She added "When a consumer is engaged in a live chat, the merchant should be opportunistic and when appropriate ask for the sale. You wouldn't expect to visit a retail store and not have the associate encourage you to buy the merchandise you had just tested or tried on. Not doing so is missing an enormous opportunity and in today's retail climate getting the sale is imperative."

Here are some key findings and suggestions for improvement:

• Chat is not located to sell. 88% have chat on customer service pages while only 42% offer it on product pages.
• Too-low usage of proactive chat. Only 15% leverage this technology.
• Offering alternative or better products occurs too infrequently. Average rating of rating 1.7 out of 5.
• Insufficient encouragement to buy. Average score of 2.7 out of 5 means a substantial number of potential sales are ignored.
• Unacceptable response time. 39 seconds average is below par, especially when half the sites surveyed connect in 3 seconds or less.
• Near-perfect customer service. With one exception, everybody did a great or excellent job at answering the initial question.
• Technology works (mostly). With a couple of exceptions that required (unsuccessful) downloads, the technology does not seem to be any issue.
  

For a complete copy of the HI Metrics report, or to learn how inQ's HI Metrics differ from the industry at large, email Lisa deSouza at ldesouza@inq.com.

We are now beta-testing a new feature for TI Commerce: an automated system that identifies abandoned carts and generates customer-service emails to the customer to convert sales that would otherwise be lost.

Abandoned cart emailing programs can be a huge boon to online retailers. On average, about 50% of visitors that begin an online transaction abandon their cart before completing the order.

Many orders are abandoned out of simple confusion, distraction, concerns about security, or other factors that can be responded to in a well-crafted customer-service message. Estimates vary on how much gain is to be had from abandoned-cart recovery:

• Lighthouse Depot reported about 5% conversion from their abandoned cart program (Internet Retailer)
• Marketing Experiments reported over 4,000 recovered orders for one customer
• Limoge Jewelry converted over 13% of abandoned cart emails into buyers (Hacker Safe study)

The Timberline programming team put together the solution, in response to client demand and guided by their particular requirements. Using custom html email templates with a low-key and friendly "can we help you complete your order?" message, and supporting the outreach with toll-free telephone or online chat access are among the best practices we recommend.

We'll be updating Timberline clients on this new feature in the weeks to come, or contact Bud Reed at 802-388-8322 x 201 for more information.

Forrester Research recently forecasted ecommerce revenues in coming years, painting a picture of slowing growth. Forrester sees the online retailing space adding a steady $30 billion in sales every year for the next five years. In percentage terms, that represents a flatter growth curve than the past several years, when annual growth rates generally exceeded 25% a year.

According to Forrester, 2007 online retail sales reached $175 billion, a 21% increase over 2006.

Here are the firm's forecasts for ecommerce revenues:

2008: $204 billion, up 17%
2009: $235 billion, up 15%
2010: $268 billion, up 14%
2011: $301 billion, up 12%
2012: $335 billion, up 11%

As obstacles to online retail sales growth, Forrester pointed to some advantages of brick-and-mortar shopping, like its social aspect, and the ability to see, touch and try items. Forrester also identified the highly targeted nature of online shopping (which it called "spear-fishing") as a limiting factor for ecommerce revenue.

Nielsen Netratings announced the top ten websites, based on sales conversion rate, during the fourth quarter 2007:

In our efforts to maximize speed and our users experience we are continuing to improve our infrastructure. In the last two months we’ve added 2 new database servers running SQL 2005, and a total of 4 new web servers :)

As our customers needs grow we feel it’s crucial to make sure that we continue to upgrade the hardware and add to our backbone to balance the load. Hardware upgrades are often a safer and cheaper way to get a quick improvement in performance, and pave the road to being able to handle the new technologies we are implementing :)