Engage-Digital

Today we have more choice than ever before. More choice in almost anything we can think of to consume and this is generally regarded as a good thing.

I’m of an age in which my parents were alive during the Second World War and they remember rationing and less choice. The mantra in the UK at that time was “mend and make do”, something that has been dusted off recently as we all struggle with the harshest economic climate since the First World War. Back then being paralysed by choice wasn’t an issue.

The web has had a very significant impact on the level of choice over the last 15 years or so. We have more choice than we know what to do with across such huge range of areas from the media we consume, to the way we search for places to live and holidays to go on, entertainment and means of communicating with other people.

Given the human imagination it would be fair to assume that our capacity to absorb choice would be almost unlimited; they say “if you can think it, it’s probably been done”. Amend that to “if you can think it, it’s probably been done and you can find out about it on the web”. As a group the human capacity for choice is practically unlimited but individually, I think not.

So Google has played a key role in all of this. It’s mission statement being to.. “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Whether it’s organised it or not is another matter but it has certainly made it much more accessible.

What it means for the retailer

Dial that back now and consider the much smaller universe of an online store. One of the benefits of ecommerce is the lower costs of doing business. These come about as a result of lower overheads due to stock being held in cheap warehouses in business parks and on trading estates instead of held on more expensive shop floors. That also means there’s a lot more space available – Amazon’s warehouses are enormous – and that in turn means a huge selection of stock that can be sold through the online store. So we come back to ever increasing choice for the consumer and how to wade through it especially if you’re shopping online.

What it means for the punter

The fact is, if you’ve decided take up running you’ll probably want a pair of running shoes but if you arrive in an online store and you’re presented with a choice of over 200 different pairs of shoes, being faced with such a huge range may actually be more of a hindrance than a help; back to the paralyzing  tyranny of choice. The end result for the retailer being a no sale situation.

Just as Google has tried to do with the world’s information the key for the retailer is to organise and make stock more easily accessible. More than anything else this will help the customer, more than beautiful product shots,  clever copy or fancy widgets and tools, if a customer can’t find what s/he’s looking for and narrow it down to a manageable choice then there is no deal.

What it means for the website’s store developer

Success means that navigation and organization are co-dependent. Tools like Omniture’s Merchandising, Fredhopper, Endecca or Celebros will all help with both organisation and narrowing down the product search through the mechanisms of both free text search and more importantly guided navigation but there is still the most important job to be done of categorising and tagging products so they can be easily filtered by the customer using these tools.

The point here is not at all about the technology but about the need to create a framework which will do as much of the decision making for the customer as possible with the end result that the final decision, the one to buy, is as simple and straight forward as can be.