Crate & Barrel: Capitalizing on Testing & Black Friday Data to Drive 2015 Holiday Sales

eCommerce is an industry that grows every year as we become one with our technological society and realize the ability to get whatever we want from our mobile devices.  I explained this to my very traditional grandmother as having a genie in a bottle - whatever I want, whether it's pizza, trash service, or festive decorative pillows, can all be obtained through our magic lamps.

Crate & Barrel is the company that has gotten its ecommerce down to a science.  Rated as the #1 eCommerce Checkout by Baymard Institute (2014), Crate and Barrel uses live and constant testing to figure out what nuances may lead them to generate more sales (Kohnen, 2013).

Figure 1: Crate & Barrel, 2014.

Joan King, E-Commerce Director of Site Management at Crate & Barrel, gave a lecture at the IRWD 2013 web design and usability conference in Orlando last year.  In it, they discussed how to run testing regularly to keep improving upon your ecommerce website's success.  "The answer was in A/B and multivariate tests which is when an element on your website appears different to different viewers" (Kohnen, 2013); then, they ran analytics to see which options led to more conversions.

For instance, "Add to Cart" was put up against "Buy" for a purchase button link on the items' pages.  Checkout buttons were tested in colors like green, red, and black.  Even the navigation system was tested, and found favor with consumers with a more traditional drop-down navigation.

The verdict?  Tiny changes in wording or color increased conversion rates by 20% (Kohnen, 2013).  Looking at their current website, blue appears to have been the color that sold the most items, and the wording "Add to Cart" seemed more appealing to consumers than "Buy" (Crate & Barrel, 2014). 

Also, simplicity went a long way - King also said that when shoppers were given fewer options, they had higher conversion rates (Kohnen, 2013).

Figure 2: Crate & Barrel, 2014.

King's take-away message was to be constantly testing, but not anything that you wouldn't want live on your website for shoppers to see. 

Testing like this should be done for a period of about two weeks to get enough data to see a clear picture of the results (Siroker, 2013).  You can use Google Analytics to do this, or you can use a program like Optimizely, which shows your website as individual elements and allows you to change those elements for testing (Kohnen, 2013). 

As a personal review, I will start out by saying that I'm not much of an online home wares shopper.  I am very much a flea market/yard sale/antique shop aficionado, so I am much more likely to find my favorite throw pillows at a neighbor's garage sale.  However, the simplicity of the website does draw me in to do a little more poking around and see what else they could be doing to reign in their data and use to to optimize sales.

Event tracking is a very useful method of analytics during the holiday season.  Crate & Barrel could easily use it to track the sales and use of their coupon codes during the week leading up to and the week after Black Friday.  Black Friday is starting to wane in popularity as the #1 shopping day of the year for the holidays, as retailers put out earlier and earlier sales to capitalize on the frantic excitement of the start of the shopping season, eager to turn those slow fall sales into profits for the last fiscal quarter of the year (Columbus, 2014).

• Thanksgiving sales went up a staggering 14.3% this year over 2013.
• Average order value on Thanksgiving was $125.25, down 1.8% over 2013 (Columbus, 2014).

"IBM explains this slight reduction in average order value due to shoppers becoming more comfortable and digitally savvy in how they use online coupons and rebates to secure the best bargains" (Columbus, 2014).

Figure 3: Columbus, 2014.

Crate & Barrel has a great opportunity here to use event analytics and consumer surveys or feedback to capitalize on the usage of coupons or rebates in Thanksgiving or Pre-Black Friday sales.  In doing this, they could raise their holiday sales even more!

In what other ways could Crate & Barrel (or similar ecommerce sites) capitalize on this year's Black Friday data using A/B Testing or Event Analytics?

Susan

Resources

Baymard Institute. (2014). Top 100 e-commerce sites. Baymard.com. Retrieved December 8, 2014, from http://baymard.com/checkout-usability/benchmark/top-100.

Figure 1. Crate & Barrel. (2014). Decorative Pillows. Crateandbarrel.com. Retrieved December 8, 2014, from http://www.crateandbarrel.com/decorating-and-accessories/decorative-pillows/1.

Figure 2. Crate & Barrel. (2014). Merrie 12" pillow. Crateandbarrel.com. Retrieved December 8, 2014, from http://www.crateandbarrel.com/merrie-12-pillow/s647139.

Columbus, L (30 Nov 2014). Analyzing Black Friday sales using IBM's digital analytics benchmark. Forbes.com. Retrieved December 8, 2014, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2014/11/30/analyzing-black-friday-sales-using-ibms-digital-analytics-benchmark/.

Kohnen, C. (27 Feb 2013). How Crate & Barrel keeps their website looking awesome: testing. Examiner.com. Retrieved December 8, 2014, from http://www.examiner.com/article/how-crate-barrel-keeps-their-website-looking-awesome-testing.

Siroker, D. (11-13, Feb 2013). eCommerce Testing. 2013 IRWD Web Design & Usability Conference. Lecture conducted from Orlando, FL.

Google, Your Own “Personal Oracle”: Dangerous or Intuitive?

Google’s got the market cornered on the virtual crystal ball.

Between knowing our home, and work addresses and a list of places we’ve been recently, to the people we talk to most often, and knowing our heart’s deepest questions that we routinely try to erase from our browsers and search histories, it’s an understatement to say that Google knows a lot about us. 

Burakfdu, Wordpress, 2013.

Personally, I have a Samsung Galaxy S5 Active that tells me each morning about the things it thinks I need to know: the weather, how far I am from “Work,” when WVU plays next, and updates me on where my recently ordered packages are.  I barely have to think about what I want to know when I wake up and it’s already there, thanks to Google’s…gently prying nature.

It’s too easy, isn’t it?  To sign into a program like Swarm or a Google Play game like Scramble with Friends using your Google+ profile.  To get personal purchase emails, letters, and pictures in your inbox.  To publish and manage your blog, all using your Google profiles.  It’s a mindless process.  What harm could there be in Google knowing what we’re up to?

Andrew Keen said a mouthful in 2007 when he wrote, “Having successfully become our personal librarian, Google now wants to be our personal oracle. It wants to learn all about us, know us better than we know ourselves, to transform itself from a search engine into a psychoanalyst's couch or a priest's confessional” (Keen, 2007).

The article prophesizes about what Google wanted to be in 5 years (yes, that was 2012), and in it, the Google CEO says that he wants Google to be able to answer “question[s] such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' And 'What job shall I take?' (Keen 2007).    It can’t be done without getting to know us.

The future is just that, and is now.  In 2007, Google wanted to offer a tightly knit suite of services:  “personalized homepage, search engine, blog, e-mail system, mini-program gadgets, Web-browsing history, etc. — that together will create the world's most intimate information database. On iGoogle, we all get to aggregate our lives, consciously or not, so artificially intelligent software can sort out our desires” (Keen, 2007). 

According to Danny Dover at Moz.com, Google uses six different ways to collect data (Dover, 2008).

·      Click Tracking – Google tracks ALL clicks on all of its services.  If you use Chrome, then this includes all clicks on all pages that aren’t Google, as well.

·      Forms – Google tracks all information entered into forms, as well as the date and location where the information was submitted.

·      Cookies – Google puts cookies in your browser, which are helpful for things like remaining signed in to Facebook, or preloading other information.  Google’s cookies (for each of its services, including DoubleClick and AdSense) also track your activity.

·      Server Requests stored in Log Services – Every request made of a Google service is stored: searches, submissions to blogs, requests for Google +1s, including:

o   IP Address from user making request. This can be used to geo-locate the user

o   Date, time, and time zone offset of user

o   Language of requested result (in this case, English)

o   Search query

o   Operating system of user

o   Browser of user

·      Javascript – just like the tracking code we’re embedding in our websites.  This tracks activity on our pages, regardless of what browser the visitors are using.

·      Web Beacons – I’m quoting this because I can’t believe they need a dirty trick like this to get information: “Google embeds small (1 pixel by 1 pixel) transparent .gifs into many of its checkout screens. Just like the javascript, a user downloads the invisible image and sends information about their computer to Google” (Dover, 2008).

Wow.  Doesn’t seem like just your eBay purchase for a Christmas Gift anymore, does it?  Here’s a complete list of all the personal information that Google admits to collecting from internet users (MOZ.com, 2008).

It seems as though the world got a bit nervous for a little bit, especially when Google Street View really started to collect data in a heavy way – Germany even fined Google for “Systematic, illegal collection of user data” (O’Brien, 2013) but then really began to worry when Julian Assange revealed the link between the company, its founders, and the U.S. Government (RT, 2014). 

This year, consumer feedback service Servata asked 2500 internet users in two surveys how they felt about the National Security Agency (NSA) collecting user data, and then about Google.  Respondents were more worried about Google’s data collection (on a scale of 1-10, they averaged 7.06 for the NSA, and 7.39 for Google) (EndtheLie, 2014).

For a long while when I started college, I was more than happy to share any kind of information services like MySpace and Facebook (and even all the way back to AOL Instant Messenger) asked for.  It shaped my open relationship with the internet through my early twenties and made me comfortable with sharing more about myself than my parents were, that’s for certain.  When I became a public figure as a television news and weather reporter, it made sense to make a presence online that was well-branded…but I suddenly became very cautious about what information I had online.  After three years of having my persona shared with a million households, I was ready to recede from the internet – and almost did fully, back to the bare bones of what I needed to run the City’s social media. 

Over the last year, I’ve become a little more lenient again, having realized that this is just the norm.  This is where we are now.  I’m not uncomfortable with my phone telling me where my packages are each morning, or letting me know what the score was of the Reds game I missed or who they play next, until I hear about huge data breeches or hackers getting access to gmail passwords. 

But…isn’t that the way we feel about our home security when our neighbors’ house gets robbed?  We certainly are more aware of it, but it’s the risk that comes with owning a house with things in it. 

What experience with Google has shaped the way you feel about the trade off of your privacy for your own “personal oracle”?

Burakfdu. (Mar 2013). Google Privacy JPG. Burakfdu.Wordpress.com. Retrieved December 1, 2014, from http://burakfdu.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/google-privacy.jpg.

Dover, Danny.  (24 June 2008). The evil side of Google?  Exploring Google’s user data collection. Moz.com. Retrieved December 1, 2014, from http://moz.com/blog/the-evil-side-of-google-exploring-googles-user-data-collection.

EndTheLie. (24 Oct 2014). Google data collection worries more Americans than NSA. EndTheLie.com. Retrieved December 1, 2014, from http://endthelie.com/2014/10/29/google-data-collection-worries-americans-nsa/.

Keen, A. (12 July 2007). Is Google’s data grinder dangerous? LATimes.com. Retrieved December 1, 2014, from http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-keen12jul12-story.html.

MOZ. (2008). User Files: Google User Data.  MOZ.com. Retrieved December 1, 2014, from http://moz.com/user_files/google-user-data/SEOmoz-Google-User-Data.pdf.

O’Brien, K. J. (22 Apr 2013). Germany fines Google over data collection. NYTimes.com. Retrieved December 1, 2014, from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/technology/germany-fines-google-over-data-collection.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

RT. (24 Oct 2014). ‘Google grown big & bad': Assange reveals company & its founder’s links to US govt. EndTheLie.com. Retrieved December 1, 2014, from http://endthelie.com/2014/10/29/google-data-collection-worries-americans-nsa/#qzdG9pLIxQhGYDZ5.99,