You’ve got to love these surveys that get published that demonstrate, with stats, that your initial hypothesis all those years ago is now starting to manifest. The trick is all about the timing and riding the wave, launching to market at exactly the right point. Imagine you’re a surfer – catch the wave (trend) and go for it!
The spot in question came via InternetRetailing.net who spotted the survey from LinkShare (no they’re not getting a link as I can’t see where they published the survey!), whose findings indicated that 81% of people are now doing research online before buying a product!. That’s a phenomenal amount of individuals who want validation before making any purchase.
92% of people said they have more confidence in the information online than they do in high-street store assistants. Not unexpected considering the average person giving advice has always had to read the brochure in front of me when I asked about anything more than what was on the label. It also mentions that more people expect to shop online generally as they tighten their purse strings and seek out the best deal for that heavily researched products.
So how are people currently doing this online? Good question damn it!
Of course, most people probably start with Google in the first place.
People like Bazaarvoice are leading the way in implementing user reviews on merchants’ own websites, which adds to the massive pile of general user review and expert review sites out there on the web. Add the wealth of conversation taking place in twitter, facebook, and friendfeed around what products to buy – and you’ve got an immensely fragmented marketplace for this behaviour.
Now if only Crowdstorm can do what it set out to do… is it time to ride the wave yet?
Hurray!
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According to a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, one of the most neglected trends out there is around information-based shopping and purchasing – giving rise to the Info Shopper.
They are suspicious of advertising and search online for virtually everything to get the information they need. 92% of the people surveyed said that they have more confidence in the information they found this way then being spoon fed it. Even for products like vacuum cleaner, 58% of people said they would research it online first and are asking questions such as “how much does this hold before empyting it?” or “is this light enough for someone small to carry it up the stairs?” 70% say they consult reviews and ratings before making any buying decisions.
Looking at this data, you can see that brands and websites need to think of different ways to get people the information and the confidence they need to make their own buying decisions. The WSJ goes on to say that information aggregation sites will become increasingly more important and especially so for helping weave the story and fit into the customer buying decision process.
This is a huge shift going on… think where it could lead!
I’ve just been reading an article in AdAge about how Sephora is simplifying the product review process by letting people read reviews on their mobile phones. In some retailers in the US, they are actively encouraging people to look at products in the store then actively read the reviews about them on their phones. Our old friends BazaarVoice are powering the platform.
So, I completely agree that product reviews from people like you and expert reviews and advice are increasingly more important in making a buying decision, but I’m not convinced this behaviour can be adapted easily for a mobile phone setting. For a start, they have to get our their basic handset and browse to a “mobile” site to enter the product name / code, then filter through the crap results to hopefully find what they wanted, then click it and read some tiny reviews on a small screen – all in a matter of hours!
I’ve seen this try and work before back in 2002, and yes, times have advanced but people couldn’t be bothered then so what makes us think can they be bothered now? Even scanning the barcode of an item is probably not as straightforward as it seems. The only light on the horizon for mobile phone reviews might be through the smart phones like the iphone – but honestly answer me this:
Are there really any downsides to writing down the name of the product you like on a piece of paper then researching and buying it online back at a computer?
These emarketer boys have provided the goods yet again with some interesting data on the top web 2.0 spending priorities for online retailers:
Some sites reporting a 50% jump in sales when they put honest reviews onto their sites. Not surprising really when you consider lots of people want that extra validation into their purchase decisions, especially in this economic climate. Also, see my previous post on where actually these reviews should sit…
Interesting day yesterday as I had a chat with a journalist from RetailWeek and also attended a Chinwag:Live event – all around the topic of how search and recommendation play a role in helping people find what they want. I was actually remarkably quiet during the event, for a change, mainly because my ankle still hurts from falling down a mountain over the weekend – but that’s another story!
So back to the topic – to me of course, my mind applies this in the context of the shopping purchase cycle and how both methods play their part.
First, some definitions of the two approaches:
We all know that most people’s journey’s start with visiting the “big G” and typing in a set of 2-4 keywords or phrases, ranging from “find me the best digital camera” to “places to eat near Covent Garden”. You will click one of the results, visit the page, and then continue your journey from there or hit the back button and try the next result down. All pretty familiar stuff. The argument of the search advocates is that this is all you ever need to find the information you are looking for, no matter where you are in the buying process.
These try and take the concept of search further in having more detailed, vertical information, and having recommendation engines and social interaction to help people in a better way to find what they are looking for. Examples, of course, are Crowdstorm, TrustedPlaces, and TripAdvisor to name but a few. In these sites you either have a lot of information in one place about a product you are thinking of buying or you can interact with the people and the engine to help you actually make the decision process about what to buy.
So the crux of the argument is which approach is currently being used by the consumers and which is the best approach to give them the best experience.
I cover off some of the points raised in the event below:
This one is hard to refute as 95%+ of journey’s start at a search engine and so if you don’t have good content to get ranked, you don’t get the traffic. End of story. Even if your site is good enough to establish a brand and get people coming back directly, even a majority of these people will be lazy and type your name into a search engine. It takes a good 4-5 years before a business is good enough to get people to come directly.
Take the example of typing in “television reviews” – pretty easy to work out what they want but this type of search is tiny traffic compared to words like “televisions” and “sony televisions”. What actually is someone looking for when they type such a generic term – are they looking for product information, ideas to browse around, somewhere to buy it, the best prices and deals, reviews and opinions, or a mixture of all of them… there’s a wide range of possible places to send the visitor to. Search here can really fall down as it really is showing only sites that have designed their content for the search engines and not necessarily relevant content. Take price comparison as an example – how many times have you typed “best price digital cameras” into google and got a range of price comparison sites which you click through to only to find a set of rubbish results. Likewise, if you type “digital camera” into Google – how does looking at one review site or going to a merchant actually help you make that decision? It’s a complex scenario that I don’t think anyone has really nailed yet.
A very interesting question. The argument is about where should all the juicy reviews, product information, and recommendations actually sit – at the search engine level, at a product recommendation site, a magazine review site, a price comparison engine, or the end retailer? Take an example: If I want to buy a new rucksack right now that is big enough to take around London for the day and very comfortable to wear on the back and under the arms – where do I go? If I type that into a search engine, I’m going to spend hours wading through crap. Likewise, a magazine review site may be interesting but they rarely cover a big range and you need to dig around a lot. A price comparison site is only going to show me a list of them with prices, and a retailer site will often just show me products with images and a price. It’s a little bit of “jump around a lot and try and fit lots of bits of info together”. Now, take the situation where a retailer site such as Webtogs (note: I’m a shareholder), reaches the point where every product has user reviews and ratings, and a whole section for “Expert advice and community” is created to help users, magazine publishers, and even retailers interact and help people in their purchase decisions, directly on the Webtogs site. Would you need to go anywhere else? Surely recommendation, review, and community sites only exist because retailers can’t or are scared to implement this kind of thing? You can argue that companies such as Reevoo and Bazaarvoice help by handling the review capture for retailers, but this is only a small part of the picture.
Twitter was mentioned as a good example of this where someone asked their friends and followers “what digital slr should I buy made by Canon?” and got a raft of good responses. These ranged from actual product recommendations to pointing them to sites and discussion forums where people were already taking about this kind of thing and helping each other out. You also consider social environments such as facebook, blogs, and even traditional emails of course – and the bigger puzzle of how to interact with them. Are we actually trying something which is not possible by bringing all these communication methods together under one vertical site or product?
So one of the main arguments about why recommendation sites can top results from a search engine, is over the degree of trust they can utilise between sources and people. Google uses it’s algorithm to try and work out which sites are the most relevant and trusted by other “website owners” where as recommendation sites try and show reviews and comments filtered by trusted people in the community or network who have something valuable to say and not just trying to game the system. The question then becomes, do you trust reviews on a retailer site when you don’t know who the people are behind them, a site that comes up on Google just because it is in the listings, or do you prefer to know a bit about the people writing the content and why you should trust them. Perhaps we do, as our friends and colleagues are always trusted more than anonymous people. What would you prefer – 2 recommendations from a friend and colleague or 45 reviews from anonymous people? I haven’t found any data to support either side right now but it’s an interesting question nonetheless that needs some answers.
This entire space about how people choose and recommend products and services to each other is much more complicated than I ever imagined, and luckily I’m not the only one who thinks that! I think the issue really comes down to their being so many different ways and methods of researching things online and every type of site trying to work out where they fit into the equation. Should a price comparison site focus on that end step of finding the best price and buying or should they move more into product reviews and community?
Should retailers focus on despatching the goods to the customer and getting a good range of selection, or should they also be providiing reviews and community content and advice to help people make the right decision? Should recommendation sites fill the gaps they leave right now and if so, is it a long term solution? Finally, what about the mighty G – don’t they see themselves as the main gateway to the final destination sites and will do everything they can to own every single journey right up until the final purchase?
As Terry Pratchett once said “We live in interesting times…”
Just a quick post to say the Crowdstorm team are back in action after a good 4 week break – so don’t worry, we haven’t let the blog go to waste. In fact, the next post in a few minutes is a very detailed one about Search vs. Recommendation Sites – hurrah!
I came across a cool tool today that lets you see some interesting stats about your Twitter usage, via: TweetStats
For example, I’m averaging around 26 Tweets a month right now, with Nov being nuts where I posted 73. Mostly I tweet around noon or 4-5pm on wed or thursdays. I was one of the early adopters having used it since Dec 2006! The top people who have often replied to me are @PaulWalsh and @mbites, while the interface I use has been fluctuating with Twhirl probably going to be topping the lot soon:
Now, not stopping there, I wanted to see what the tweet stats of those titans of the Internet UK world @PaulWalsh and @mbites looked like:
As you can see, Paul doesn’t get any work done as he spends his day on Twitter with easily around 700 – 900 tweets / month, spread throughout every day, and even some between 4 and 8am! Dahowlett, aido, and conoro help make up their Irish contingent, and Paul prefers the web interface for twittering.
Now, Mike has a bit of catching up to do, especially as he’s a journalist! An average of only around 255 a month, mostly in the early morning tues-wed. Often just has one-one chats with PaulWalsh and JemimaKiss by the looks of it, and uses Twitterific and the Web to post his tweets.
Ok – must stop now before I get carried away Any Twitter leaderboard anywhere?
Hurray – we’ve finally got our much improved site out there for Crowdstorm UK and Crowdstorm USA
We’re concentrating on making it stable now, ironing out the remaining 67 bugs, and ensuring the speed is high enough. If you see any bugs or want to make some general feedback – use the green link at the top of the page, fill in your comments, then press submit. We’re not making a big fuss about this one as we’ve still lots of things to do to it.
You’ll notice we’re now importing a lot more content in user reviews and expert reviews, and we’ve got a few deals to announce in the next few weeks. Also – welcome to our new Television and DVD Player categories!
Key things still to do:
Lastly, as mentioned above – this is a quiet release and we don’t want anyone blogging it in the current format, if you don’t mind. Ta very much.
We’re getting ready to launch the new Crowdstorm product (V3) tonight and Sobek is currently tweaking the google adwords code while I’m browsing iStockPhoto looking for better images of numbers in circles! Strange what you do late at night…
I liked the image above as it reminds me of the networking effect of people sharing product recommendations with each other.. Right, time for another cup of tea and onwards and upwards..
