Sunny Side Up

Consumers want better information from retailer websites

What happened? Zara recently released an iPhone app

At the beginning of every COMM 464 (E-marketing) class, the prof asks the class to share any interesting e-marketing-related news items they’ve come across lately. Last week, the prof started this discussion off by sharing a blog post from e-consultancy entitled Zara releases a pointless iPhone app.

The author, Graham Charlton, was reviewing Zara’s recent iPhone app release, and mentioned that other than showing photos of the retailer’s newest clothing offerings, it provides no actual useful information or services to the user.

Zara iPhone App clothing item (source: eConsultancy)

Some notable missing features (by Graham):

• No listed price
• No store locator tool or contact number
• No product code or identification means

Why should retailers learn from this mistake?

Graham also mentions that the overall feedback for this app has been very negative, with many users giving similar complaints as above. So why should other retailers pay close attention to Zara’s mistake, even if they don’t plan to launch e-commerce initatives? Two useful surveys should help open your eyes:

1. Compete’s Quarterly Smartphone Intelligence Survey

Compete's Quartely Smartphone Intelligence Survey (source: Multivu))

The survey, also referenced by Graham, identified many shopping-related activities that smartphone users find useful to perform on their smartphone. As you can see from the above chart, even if the site does not offer e-commerce capabilities, users still expect to find information that can make shopping in-store more convenient. For example:

• 68% of users look up location and hours of the store they want to visit before-hand
• 52% review product descriptions
• 45% look at 3rd party reviews of a given product

In other words, having a mobile app or even just a mobile-friendly website can be very useful to directing customers to making well-informed and satisfying purchases at your store.

2. IBM’s survey on consumers and expected interactivity with retail outlets

IBM also recently published a survey on over 32,000 consumers about how much interactivity they expect from favorite retail outlets. It found that consumers now have multiple medial channels to access retail outlets from, and expect richer, smarter information from each one.

For example:

• 75% want their mobile phone to tell them the location of the nearest given store
• 68% want their mobile phone to tell them if some product is in-stock at nearby locations

The study also found that consumers expect different things from different media channels, so retailers should tailor their strategies for each one accordingly. And why should retailers bother to do all this work? Well, if retailers do provide greater interactivity and richer information via its media channels, then 61% of consumers would spend more money with the retailer.

Hopefully, we will see more success stories of retailers launching well-designed mobile apps and websites, and less of highly-criticized apps such as this Zara one.