The site debuts a collection of beautiful apparel, displayed simply and attractively, allowing for the clothes to be the star of the site experience. A Look Book lets shoppers leaf through the online catalog, with links to product pages for each of the showcased fashions. Within each product page are multiple views and zooms of the high-end clothes. The site’s Share functionality lets shoppers share their discoveries using email, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and more, ensuring maximum exposure for the young brand.

According to a survey taken by ComScore Inc. shoppers are responding to customer submitted product reviews in much higher numbers than in years past. We have seen product reviews getting love here, but seeing it happen market-wide to retailers both large and small just makes it that much more apparent and important. People shopping on the web are becoming more savvy to the limitations of in-store shopping and using the resources offered to make more informed decisions before taking the bait.

A smaller but still significant amount of people are members of company Facebook pages or using their friend’s Facebook recommendations to shop (6% and 7% respectively) while others still are following Twitter for deals and gift ideas.

“I think we are getting our first real glimpse at the impact social media will play on commerce as we enter the next decade.” – comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni.

There is still a lot of ground to cover but with Twitter opening up the firehose for more 3rd party applications, Google search going real time and Facebook actually starting to generate revenue as ad spending in offline sources like print and television decline, this trend has nowhere to go but up.

“As a mother of two, I strongly believe that style should not be compromised when it comes to your family. But I realized that there is need for inspired, yet accessible, clothing for infants and toddlers. That’s what Little Maven will bring to the marketplace,” says Spelling.

For a limited time, new customers who spend $100 or more receive free domestic shipping along with a copy of Spelling’s latest book, Mommywood. See the site for details.

The site is a partnership with longtime WebLinc client Hartstrings, a leading designer, marketer, and wholesaler of high-quality, better-priced traditional children’s clothing and accessories.

Anyway, I just wanted to post a quick aside about the 3 Wolf Tee meme that has made it off the internet and into the mainstream media (BBC, Washington Post) and some of the more interesting and applicable aspects of this phenomenon.

User reviews and creative content made this product a hit.

By all means, the 3 Wolf Tee seems an exception to the rule for most retail descriptions. Nobody is going to openly ridicule their products or allow reviewers to do so with such impunity, regardless of how funny it turns out. But this particular tee’s sales have put the t-shirt maker’s kids through college in a matter of months, and that’s nothing to scoff at.

It’s easy to write these sales off to the 4chan/collegehumor set and watch as the sales ebb and the meme recedes into the waters of the Rickroll and All Your Base Are Belong To Us, which it will inevitably do, but that is shortsighted and counterproductive. User reviews and creative content have made this product a hit. No matter how you look at it, when it comes down to it, people buy products when they like the presentation.

Whether you use informative product descriptions, social networking, creative reviews or capture attention with potent ads; you must engage your online customers. Use humor, be descriptive, use irony, talk directly to your audience, be human; these characteristics don’t only drive sales, they drive loyalty.

Search Engine Optimization isn’t the only reason for site content.

Although search engine optimization is obviously essential to any ecommerce business’s copy; creative and brand-aware content is equally important. Where would Woot be without their amazing descriptions? Why can American Apparel reference church burning humorously? Why does Haband use cliché slogans and sales lines? These sites owe their success to using creative language geared toward their demographic as an intrinsic element of their branding and site content, and do so very well.

Your content doesn’t have to be funny or hip, (Woot and American Apparel are kind of paragons in these categories) and it often won’t make sense to your business plan to be that way, but your content has to speak to your audience. Reading product specs is about as fun as reading the tag of a shirt and consequently makes shopping about that much fun. Make your products unique, differentiate yourself from the competition and I can guarantee that chicks will adore you, the god’s will smite your enemies and all that is righteous and holy will be yours for the taking.

I’ll link you to the article at the end, but what it basically says is that more and more people are relying on user-generated content to affect their purchasing decisions. I, for one, do this all the time. I scoured Google when it came to getting a case or shell for my iPhone. I looked at Apple’s site, Shopzilla, Ebay, etc and read review after review. What I found was a lot of conflict, especially between the hard case and soft case crowds, but more consistency in the soft case/rubber shell crowd. So when I made my final decision, I bought a rubber shell, based mostly on the reviews I read. I purchased my shell at a store, not online, and didn’t even see this particular one in my search.

In contrast, a few years ago when laser levels were all the rage for the handyman, I went to Sears to get my dad one for Christmas without previous review. I asked a sales associate about which level was the best in my price range and he proceeded to read the product specs off the side of the box. I asked him if he used any of the other ones, or the one he was reading from, and he had not. At this point in my futile quest for information I relied completely on branding and bought a Titan laser level kit which was more than I wanted to spend, but I figured, what the hell, it’s got a nice box and a high price ticket; it won’t be bad. So a week or so later I see my dad with his old bubble-between-the-line level and I ask him why he isn’t using his fancy-pants laser level. Apparently the alignment was off, making it a totally useless instrument.

So what I did was basically throw away my time (I had a receipt so my Dad could exchange it and not waste my money too) on a product because I didn’t have any idea what I was looking at and neither did the sales associate. What the company told me, on the side of the box, was that this product was top of the line, professional, etc, etc which turned out to be a load of crap and, to quote Tommy Boy:

The reason why they have a guarantee on the box is because they know all they sold you is a guaranteed piece of sh*t. Hell, I can take a crap in a box and slap a guarantee on it for you, if that’s what you want.

And he wasn’t lying, at least not about laser levels.

So in the end what was missing in my transaction was an honest reaction to the product in my hand. It would not only have saved me from wasting my time and money, but pointed me in the direction of a better product, and what the E-Tailing study tells us, is that I’m not the only one who feels this way. User generated content is becoming a very real discussion among consumers and retailers need to analyze and use this information if they want to keep customers coming back. The educated customer isn’t going to blindly trust sales people anymore when there are whole sites dedicated to testing, reviewing and rating products. To bring up another elucidating Tommy Boy quote about why we don’t always trust the salesman:

You can get a good look at a T-bone by sticking your head up a butcher’s ass… No, wait. It’s gotta be your bull.

And to tell you the truth, I and many folks like me, aren’t taking their bull anymore.

Social Shopping Study 2007

The day before the download was released; we all got an email saying this:

THANK YOU FOR ORDERING ‘IN RAINBOWS’.
THE LINK BELOW IS YOUR UNIQUE DOWNLOAD ACTIVATION CODE.
PLEASE CLICK ON THE LINK OR CUT AND PASTE INTO YOUR BROWSER TO OBTAIN YOUR DOWNLOAD.
IF YOUR LINK APPEARS AS TWO SEPARATE LINES, PLEASE CUT AND PASTE THEM CAREFULLY INTO YOUR BROWSER.
THE ALBUM WILL COME AS A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s.
MOST COMPUTERS NOW HAVE ZIP SOFTWARE AS PART OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM; IF YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT,
YOU CAN DOWNLOAD IT HERE
PC: http://www.winzip.com/
MAC: http://www.maczipit.com/
IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS DOWNLOADING YOUR FILE, PLEASE CONTACT OUR DOWNLOAD CUSTOMER SERVICE TEAM: downloadinrainbows@waste.uk.com
WE HOPE YOU ENJOY ‘IN RAINBOWS’.
http://cdn1.inrainbows.co.uk/inrainbows.zip?ON=328520-316855-0&
UN=info@weblinc.com&AC=c43c7b9e87089bf4148f5931c33f01f7

Now, most of the listening public doesn’t care one way or the other about the specifics of download quality, but for sound-sensitive Radiohead fans and tech savvy music downloaders, a download at 160 kbps is extremely sub-par, even for a promo, especially when the rest of their catalog is available at 320 kbps. They did give the option of paying nothing, so I guess the idea that it’s no more than a promotional release for the CD and vinyl shouldn’t be too hard to swallow.

Blogs around the world have been having mixed reactions to the bit rate quality, with most saying they are disappointed in the quality, but happy with the album itself (it really is quite good). Many of us are just going to listen to this download until the discbox comes out when we will get the higher quality sound whilst the majority will wait for the discbox to come out and steal the better rated rip from a torrent site. But in the end, how is this feedback affecting Radiohead as a band?

They have revolutionized the way music is distributed, that’s for sure. But by using the aforementioned shady tactics to get people to use this new system and almost forcing those of us who love the depth and richness of Radiohead to buy the CD, it seems in poor taste to release it for any money at all. As most of us know, nearly every album released is leaked beforehand on torrent sites, so Radiohead is essentially subverting this process and making folks pay a buck for it.

Radiohead knows it is a bankable entity. Their fan base, while being passionate about the sound quality, is even more passionate about the band. So we all got the download and most of us will get the CD. But the bigger factor that affects those outside of the art-rock scene and the crowd that is willing to pay $80 for a band’s release is the manner in which the music was distributed. They created a huge buzz not just for the album, which is their first in 4 years, but mainly for the manner they are selling it in. It really shows the power of a creative online selling strategy coupled with a strong brand. For example, if a small time act tried this, it would pass completely unnoticed but the fact that Radiohead was in this particular place and time (sans label and with a new album to release) and with their particular status among music fans, it was like a perfect storm coming together. They seized an opportunity that presented itself and have pulled it off quite well, even if they somewhat underhandedly “sold” a low quality download as a promo for the real deal later in the year. Just think how much less attention this would have gotten if they hadn’t used the online market to first, create a fervor about an upcoming album, then allowed fans to choose their own price, which no band has ever done before.

So now they are the talk of the music world with more than a million downloads since the 10th, turning the music world on its head by using their remarkable branding power to give notoriously hard to please fans a low quality recording and still getting kudos for it. I’m not sure if it’s just how good the music is, the fact that the disc comes out in December and all the angry fans will just steal it or whether the practice was innovative enough to let it all slide, but there is certainly a lesson about branding and ecommerce here, I’m just too busy dissecting every second of the album to think about it.

*disclaimer: no prizes awarded. strictly for statistical and entertainment purposes only.

The best shopping experiences on the web, however, have the challenge of bringing this tangible interaction online. As web designers, developers, marketers and online merchandisers, we’re constantly faced with this challenge. How do we replicate these in-store interactions that trigger more purchases and return customers?

The answer lies in thoroughly understanding your products, their intended demographic, and their respective in-store customer-product interactions. In this constantly evolving galaxy of eCommerce merchandising, we’ve recently found several brands that have successfully brought their offline experience online. Some have even surpassed this challenge.

Gap’s Best Dresses
Ladies, when you try on a new dress in the dressing room do you just stand there? Heck no! You spin around, twirling in the mirror (while your husband nervously waits, purse in hand, outside between racks of undergarments). Gap’s thoughtful use of multiple videos embedded within this small interactive space replicates this to perfection.

BlueNile’s Build Your Own Engagement Ring
The ability to narrow down the product selection based on current inventory, price, and personal preference, all within a highly usable, intuitive and fast-loading AJAX interface is quite wonderful. I’d rather shop here than in-person with a pushy salesperson whose commission is the main interest. This online experience surpasses the offline experience in more ways than one.

Oneida’s Virtual Table Setting
Customizing your favorite dinner plate design with your choice of fine silverware and your table’s cloth or texture has never been so quick and easy. Another AJAX powered interface that makes shopping fun. (a WebLinc Direct eCommerce solution)

Haband.com’s Duke’s Tips
Haband is one of the largest privately held mail order companies in the US and has been in business since 1925. Convincing their demographic to begin to shop online is a challenge. Their brand is strengthened in part through the personal relationships established through letters and helpful tips from their CEO, Duke. Bringing this extremely valuable customer relations resource from their mail order business to the online world is great way to retain the trust and admiration within their customer base for years to come. (another WebLinc Direct eCommerce solution)

Zappos Multi-View
How many times have you clicked a product’s zoom image only to be frustrated with the meager results? Zappo’s offers eight, count ‘em eight different views of each shoe. They leave nothing to the imagination. To top it off they offer free shipping both ways making it a customer service utopia.

Endless Shoes Sorting
I wanted to buy my one-year-old daughter a pair of pink sneakers in size 5, but for under $40. In just three clicks from their homepage (which took 5 seconds), and one slide of their price-slider widget (half a second) I had in front of me 23 in-stock sneakers than fit my needs exactly. I won’t even mention the ‘free overnight shipping minus $5′ promotion (or will I?) Try doing that at the shoe store while she’s having a temper tantrum. Simply amazing.

SEPTA (www.septa.org)
The mass transit organization serving Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties is currently using an old table-based site that doesn’t conform to any web standards. Their site is littered with font tags, missing alt attributes, inline styles, and empty p tags for spacing. As for accessibility, SEPTA provides no support for users with disabilities via their web site, although SEPTA is required to provide transportation assistance to people with disabilities within their service areas.

SEPTA does do a great job at providing people with useful maps, schedules, travel alerts, and up to the minute train status.

Throughout the entire family of SEPTA web sites the designs are inconsistent, hard to use, and worst of all – non-compliant with web standards.

Recommendations: CSS Redesign, standards-compliant content management system, Section 508 compliance and information architecture.

Philadelphia International Airport (www.phl.org)
Where to begin… Table-based, invalid DOC-TYPE, font tags, and inline styles make up this debacle of a web site whose only redeeming feature is that the site does have an ADA compliant text version of the site – but even that version didn’t provide a valid DOC-TYPE or a language attribute. The information architecture of the web site is disconcerting and the presentation of content is compact and poorly organized. Although Philadelphia International Airport’s web site doesn’t comply with web standards, the site does offer a lot of useful content. Travel preparation and flight information is readily available and accurate. Terminal and parking maps provide visitors with helpful tools to find there way around the airport. They also have a section devoted to Art & Exhibitions that provide information about the artists, the exhibits, and detailed pictures of the work.

With these recent expansions and upgrades made at the Philadelphia International Airport I would expect an upgrade to their web site. By developing a web standards based web site, they could offer more user-friendly ways to deliver their important and highly desirable content.

Recommendations: CSS Redesign, information architecture, standards-compliant content management system, more intuitive search.

Commerce Bank (www.commerceonline.com)
The beloved, open every day Commerce Bank is a favorite among many in the area. With convenient locations, a wide-array of products & services, and amazing hours you would think they could do no wrong. Well, they have. It’s the typical lineup of wrong doings: Table-based layout, missing DOC-TYPE, use of deprecated elements, animated GIF’s, scrolling stock ticker and news, empty/missing alt attributes; I could go on and on. On some computers, the stock ticker actually crashes the browser and causes the screen to flicker. I didn’t even bother validating. Their online banking web site is a whole other mess of web standards non-compliance. At the very least you would hope that the web site would work cross-browser, but alas, it does not. Using their online banking web site in Firefox looks like 52 card pick-up, with elements aligning randomly. That being said, Commerce Bank does an amazing job with the brick & mortar establishments. I wouldn’t bank anywhere else.

Always expanding and loved by all of their customers we can only hope Commerce Bank comes to their senses and undergoes a complete overhaul of their web sites.

Recommendations: CSS Redesign, standards-compliant content management system, Section 508 compliance, information architecture, Search Engine Optimization.

Tower Investments (www.towerdev.com)
These urban developers have designed some amazing properties and turned troubled neighborhoods into hip urban communities with retail shopping and luxurious living spaces. But although their properties are chic and trendy, their web site is outdated and non-compliant. Flash based web sites, like Tower Investments, are impossible to use for disabled users, therefore excluding them as potential clients. By adopting web standards and Section 508 recommendations you open up your site to all visitors, instead of just sighted visitors. Flash is an amazing tool, and has its place on the web, just not as a primary tool for web site development.

Recommendations: CSS Redesign, standards-compliant content management system, Section 508 compliance, information architecture, Search Engine Optimization.

Amoroso’s (www.amorosobaking.com)
The beloved baking company, famous for fresh hoagie rolls, delivers a stale web site. The table-based web site fails at delivering standards-compliant content by using inline styles, tables for non-tabular data, and the ever present spacer.gif. The web site also uses a fluid or 100% wide layout, which is not necessary when the content being presented would easily fit in a fixed width layout for 800×600 screen resolution. Although when the site is resized for 800×600 screen resolution the browser scroll bars are activated due to the content area being too large for the resolution size. Also, fixed width font sizes are used throughout the site and don’t allow text scaling in certain browsers, making it difficult to read. Overall, Amoroso’s web site fails at meeting almost every web standard, but where their web site lacks, their products do not. Amoroso’s is still Philadelphia’s favorite roll, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Recommendations: CSS Redesign, standards-compliant content management system, Section 508 compliance, information architecture, Search Engine Optimization.

Rohm and Haas (www.rohmhaas.com)
The international specialty chemical producer, Rohm and Haas, breaks all the Web Standard rules. By combining table-based layouts with invalid CSS, missing DOC-TYPES, drop-down menu’s that break Section 508 accessibility standards, and others, they offer pages that possible investors and/or clients are not able to access. Their imagery and text color combinations also pose many problems with visitors who are color blind and/or have other vision problems. It amazes me that a global company of this size doesn’t deliver standards-compliant content, when their reach extends to all corners of the world.

That being said, the imagery and content on the site still delivers a consistent message and provide tons of important information to the end user.

Recommendations: CSS Redesign, standards-compliant content management system, Section 508 compliance, information architecture, Search Engine Optimization, Multiple Language Support.

QVC (www.qvc.com)
The television shopping channel, QVC, has an ecommerce web site that generated $1.09 billion in 2006 and they are ranked #14 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. Their total revenue for 2006 was $7.07 billion with online sales accounting for a little more than 15.4% of their total revenue. The web site is currently a table-based non-compliant web site which is a Section 508 nightmare. From missing alt attributes to blue text on a blue background color the site is in desperate need of an overhaul. If the site were standards-compliant this mega online retailer would be able to open up their online business to many more customers; then couple that with the addition of a multiple-language support system and this site’s international use would exponentially boost.

Quality, Value, Convenience. QVC definitely delivers upon their name with their web site, even if it is lacking web standards. The product imagery is presented gracefully and the site is constantly being updated with new and featured products which shows that QVC takes the time to deliver what they stand for.

Recommendations: CSS Redesign, standards-compliant content management system, Section 508 compliance, information architecture, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Multiple Language Support.

M.A.B. Paints (www.mabpaints.com)
Founded over 100 years ago in South Philadelphia, this family business has been a favorite among professionals for many years. Their slogan, “On Time As Promised, Or We Pay,” defines their loyalty to their customers. By supplying hundreds of stores throughout the country, M.A.B. Paints has a responsibility to their customer base to provide standards-compliant content on their web site. Currently, their site is using my all-time favorite gaff, frames. Needless to say, there’s a long list of problems with the web site. M.A.B. offers a retailer portal, most likely to provide their retailers with up-to-date inventory, pricing, and order tracking. I can only hope that their retailer portal does a better job at providing standards-compliant content, but I have my doubts.

Being in business over 100 years proves the strength of M.A.B.’s brand recognition and strength. In addition to their strong values and core principles, I believe that M.A.B could exponentially increase their business by offering a more compliant web site.

Recommendations: CSS Redesign, standards-compliant content management system, Section 508 compliance, information architecture, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing.

PhillyCarShare (www.phillycarshare.org)
I am a huge advocate for car sharing and cleaner emissions for automobiles and I tip my hat to this great organization and commend them on their efforts thus far, but their web site is far from par. I am aware of the funding issues when it comes to non-profits and funding non-program initiatives but developing a standards-compliant web site isn’t something that costs extra. The basic standards-compliant web site can even be developed, in some cases, faster than a non-compliant, table-based web site. Needless to say, PhillyCarShare’s web site could benefit enormously with a web standards re-design.

Recommendations: CSS Redesign, standards-compliant content management system, Section 508 compliance, information architecture, Search Engine Optimization.

Philadelphia Management (www.philadelphiamanagement.com)
If you’ve lived in Philadelphia for more than a year you’ve probably come across this name. Philadelphia Management manages more than 4,600 residential and countless commercial properties, arguably making them the largest property management company in Philadelphia. Their web site makes the cut by breaking all the fundamental rules of web standards. Missing DOC-TYPE’s, table-based design, deprecated elements, and one of my favorites – spacer.gif. They, like many other sites mentioned, also use a fluid or 100% width layout, which is not necessary for their content.

They do a tremendous job, however, of providing detailed property information for their visitors as well as providing detailed photos of the property. Many property management companies do not take the time to provide this level of information for their visitors. With such a wide array of possible visitors Philadelphia Management needs to bring their web site up to speed with web standards and offer more accessible content for the end user.

Recommendations: CSS Redesign, standards-compliant content management system, Section 508 compliance, information architecture, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing.

By the way, if your company happens to be on this list, we’d love to offer you one free hour of consulting. Just give us a buzz.