I wasn't surprised to see a recent Verdict Report showing online grocery sales are predicted to grow by a massive 81 per cent by 2014. Alongside this growth I fully expect to see a real ramping up of website activity from all the major supermarkets, and inevitably increased competition as they battle to offer a superior online shopping experience to customers. This is a trend which can be seen across retail sectors. However, the question all retailers need to be asking is - what do consumers actually want or expect when it comes to buying a tin of baked beans online? The answer is not necessarily obvious.
There's a lot of buzz in the industry about the move towards media-rich features and it's a really exciting time, at the moment, for innovation in ecommerce delivery. However, retailers must be careful not to be dazzled by technology for its own sake. Our Brandbank Retail Media Report, which surveyed 2,255 UK consumers, found that, despite the excitement surrounding rich media capabilities, some brands may be compromising their potential sales by being too pre-occupied with including flashy, rich media features.
There is no arguing that rich media is highly effective in certain situations - enabling consumers to see a product in use and from all angles and make a more informed purchasing decision. However, what many in the industry forget is that a high proportion of people still don't have very fast internet speeds, capable of easily accommodating flash-heavy features. This is especially true of consumers in remote areas - many of whom do buy their shopping online rather than making the trip to the closest shop. Thirty-nine percent of the consumers we spoke to claim to have been deterred from buying products after having to wait a long time for images or the website to load. As well as slowing down loading speeds, many of these features require internet users to download additional plug-ins. Unsurprisingly, this is a major turn off when all you want to do is order your products online and go to the checkout. One in two consumers claim they have abandoned sales as a consequence of having to download additional plug-ins.
Putting my creative head on, there's nothing that excites me more than developing an innovative and original ecommerce offering. However my business head tells me that it’s just not appropriate all the time. Talking to people heavily involved in the retail side of things, it’s apparent that, in terms of sales, the most effective features are still the more basic alternative views, conceptual imagery and additional product information.
You'd have thought that having multiple, clear product images and correct up-to-date data would be a given, but I'm still surprised at how often this isn't the case. Of the consumers we asked, around two thirds of them are put off buying products when there's no image or no comprehensive product information. And fair enough - you wouldn't buy something in a shop if you couldn't see it first. As grocery retailers prepare for this online boom in sales, the key issue for them is to try and strike the balance between design creativity and bottom-line sales. The time will come when widespread, sophisticated multimedia features will result in great conversion rates for retailers - and indeed this is already the case in the fashion and technology sectors. However, it's not always appropriate. Rather than using rich-media for the sake of it, retailers need to take a step back and think about how to make their customers' experience as simple as possible.
Rob Tarrant, Brandbank