eCommerce and

Too often, and through no malicious intent, companies lose sight of their customers interests. In many company war rooms, you’ll find brilliant people bunkered in the back of the building burning through notepads and hallucinating from the noxious fumes of dry-erase markers. Fight plans are drafted and pricing structures are in place. But, ultimately, none of this matters if your customers are not on board. You cannot “go live” in a ghost town.

We’ve all had the impossible call with customer service or have wanted to set fire to stacks of unnecessary rebate paperwork (and sometimes ourselves.)  And there are companies that exploit the working poor in order to generate heftier profits. Bad business is all around us - I’m quite sure there are examples of companies you’d like to see fold. But, successful businesses have customers that support their success. Why would your customers want you to succeed?

Prices, the basest of all customer/company dynamic, and ultimately the cheapest (pardon the pun.) Your prices may keep your customer base, but if your service, brand and quality do not provide a similar value, your customers will eventually tire of “selling” their consumer dignity. Your customers will want you to succeed, but only as long as your prices make it worth it. If you know someone who would still shop at Wal-Mart if they raised prices, I’d like to meet them…On second thought, I’m busy that day.

Your brand (see also: Bragging Rights.) Customers are made up largely of human beings, and my anthropology professor told me that despite our best efforts, humans are emotionally dependent creatures. We seek validation and approval from others, if your company is one that connotes status or promotes a definite image, your branding is a reason your customers want you to succeed. Oftentimes, the more lucrative your brand, the higher the value of its emotional “stock.” Need proof? The iPhone has ego-boosted its way through a record-setting recession.

Because you defend them. Backwards right? But it is a rare occasion that customers defend their brand first. Companies defend their customers by knowing who they are, giving them what they want, and improving their quality of life. Defend customers from your competitors who might not have their sustainable interests in mind. Understand their humanity; share it, rather than exploit it.

The “forest for the trees” metaphor is dripping in apropos. All of the ingenuity in the world will not matter to you if your customers don’t.

Little Giant has been hard at work engineering pumps that their most loyal customers have been waiting for. PlumberSurplus.com is your destination for the new Little Giant TSW Sump Pump System and their NXTGen Condensate Pumps.

• Shop.org released their 2009 State of Retailing Merchandising Report this week: 
  • “Specifically, retailers this year are setting the following as priorities for their Web sites:
    Checkout process redesign – 79%
    Improved content on product detail pages – 73%
    Site search and browse results – 71%
    Home page – 60%
    Redesigned help section / FAQ”

• Clickthrough rates can change when language and experience are factored into the equation; if you don’t believe me take a look at this experiment.


• Optaros is offering a complimentary eBook on social eCommerce.  The book "5 Winning Strategies in Social Ecommerce" can be found here.


• Social media is only effective if it’s based on trust, transparency and ethical business practices, luckily I work for a company where this isn’t a problem.  Unfortunately there are still, as I suppose there may always be, companies out there that don’t operate in this fashion.  The New York Attorney General isn’t standing for it, in fact he has fined a company $300,000 for encouraging fake reviews.


• Entrepreneurs are powerfully positive.


• Google announces second quarter 2009 financial results.
  

Little Giant has been hard at work engineering pumps that their most loyal customers have been waiting for. PlumberSurplus.com is your destination for the new Little Giant TSW Sump Pump System and their NXTGen Condensate Pumps.

We were recently able to upgrade our phone system. We had spent time, energy and effort to build a better system under the assumption that it would improve a number of important metrics. More importantly, the new phone system made it easier for us to see those metrics. Consequently, I was able to get better reporting on phone utilization, especially as it related to customer service. One of the first things that struck me was our maximum load. We had gone from 8 lines available to 23 lines available. With 8 lines, extra calls would roll over in to voice mail, creating havoc later in the day as we scrambled to try to call people back. Many times, people would call two, sometimes three or more, times to try to reach us. Also, with eight lines, it made it very difficult for us to make outgoing calls during peak periods. With 23 lines, surely we would handle the load. Not so fast! Over the first few weeks I checked our maximum load on all 23 lines and, on several occasions, we had exceeded our maximum load during peak calling periods! We nearly tripled our call capacity and still had overflow. Thankfully, the overflow is not frequent enough, at this point, to justify another 23 lines.

Alrighty then, what about our connect rate? Given all the customers that try to reach us, to what percentage do we actually connect? I was more struck by this metric than our load. Let's just say it was less than half of what we would want it to be. It turns out, we were literally turning away hundreds of calls a week, probably mostly due to long hold time. Even more striking, our average hold time for a connected customer was approaching 30 minutes! 30 minutes?! Dreadful! Sales customers simply will not hold for 30 minutes to buy something. What made this even scarier was the fact that our mix of callers (known by the queue that they select when calling) was more than two-thirds sales calls. We were turning away hundreds of sales a week. This means we were turning away customers who wanted to buy something (and were probably at the end of the buying cycle) in order to provide support to customers we had already acquired.

OK. Now we know. What do we do? We could hire 10 more reps. Nope. Don't have the budget. OK. We don't have an unlimited budget. What else can we do? We could slow down marketing and sabotage our own SEO to get fewer sales calls. Nope. That's dumb. So what do we do then?! How can I get more work out of existing resources? How can we add hours to the day to get more done?... wait... Eureka! We needed more hours in the day! It was ultra-clear that our call and chat volume was much higher earlier in the day than late in the day. Once the clock gets to about 3:45 pm, things tend to slow down. With reps struggling during our rush periods to perform administrative and follow up tasks, it would be near impossible to be more efficient during regular 8:00 am to 5:00 pm business hours. So, why don't we have some reps come in at 7:00 am, instead of 8:00 am, to finish any lingering issues from the previous day and get a head start on the new day before we start taking calls and chats? We could even perform some proactive functions that prevent customers from calling for support reasons in the first place! Why didn't we think of this sooner?! Oh yeah, we didn't think of it sooner because we didn't have great data to stare at.

The effect of having half of our customer service team come in one hour before business hours has been exponential in its positivity. We still have load issues, two or three times a week, during peak times we exceed our capacity. However, our connect rate has doubled! Our hold time has gone from nearly 30 minutes on average to less than 10 minutes! Interestingly, sales are up, but we have reduced our volume of calls and chats by about 10%. Fewer calls and fewer chats, coupled with increased sales, is a strong indicator to me that we are servicing customers more efficiently. We still have a great deal of growth opportunity, but one simple scheduling decision has drastically improved our ability to service customers and, as a positive consequence, also greatly improved morale in the customer service department. Go team!

Little Giant has been hard at work engineering pumps that their most loyal customers have been waiting for. PlumberSurplus.com is your destination for the new Little Giant TSW Sump Pump System and their NXTGen Condensate Pumps.

I try not to discuss technical subjects in my posts because, being a developer, I understand that most of the stuff I find fascinating just wouldn't be interesting to most of you. But sometimes I run across something that's both useful and understandable, and I have to share it. So I hope you'll bear with me.

Cross-browser compatibility is a major headache for web developers. The web is built on standard protocols like HTML, CSS and Javascript. This is great, because it allows all sorts of different computers to communicate with each other. However, there are many different browsers out there to interpret these standards: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, and many more. And each of these browsers comes in multiple versions. And every version of every browser interprets the standards a little differently. Sometimes that's because the standards aren't clear, but usually the browser is simply in error, or a decision was made not to support the standard. So instead of being a simple job of following the standard when developing web sites, a web developer has to consider the unique behavior of the most common browsers to make sure most users see the website correctly. Usually this is done by developing in a more "standards-compliant" browser and then trying to fix the quirks in other browsers while not accidentally introducing any in the original. It's a balancing act that involves a lot of knowledge of the browsers' inner workings.

Troubleshooting Browser Errors

So, I ran across a strange bug on our website, PlumberSurplus.com, that I knew immediately was a browser problem, but hadn't seen the problem before. There were several "divs", or blocks of content, on a page that were displaying differently in different browsers. In Firefox and Internet Explorer, the page looked something like this:

However, in Google Chrome, the page looked like this:

Obviously, Chrome was displaying the page differently than the others. To understand why, we have to dig into CSS, the standard web language that dictates how pages are formatted. CSS works hand-in-hand with HTML: in CSS, HTML elements are given attributes whose values determine how the elements are formatted. For example, you could take some text in HTML and use CSS to make it bold. In this case, the first div (in red) has a CSS attribute called "display" that's set to "inline-block". That means that the div acts like a solid block, that doesn't wrap or change shape because of things around it, but that it also stays inline, so that if there's text around it, it fits right in as part of the text. We'll revisit this later. The second (blue) div has an attribute called "float" that's set to "right". This means that instead of simply being inserted into the text of the page, the div gets attached to the right side of the page (or the section it's in), and the rest of the content flows around it. The third (green) div has no special attributes associated with it; it's just there to illustrate page flow.

So it looks like what's happening is that the first div is forcing the second div down in Firefox and Internet Explorer, but flowing around it in Chrome. Let's do some tests to find out why. First, let's get some text in there to see better how the content flow works. Here's how Firefox looks:

As you can see, the first div is right in the content flow where it's supposed to be, and the second div is sitting on the right as the content wraps around it. Looks good so far. Here's Chrome:

This looks pretty much the same except for one subtle change. The second div is one line higher than in Firefox. Why is that? I've colored the text to demonstrate. The black text is all before the floating div. The blue text is actually after the floating div, but since the div floats, it wraps around it so it looks like it comes immediately after the previous text. So the difference between the two browsers is this (and this is important, so I'm setting it out):

In Firefox and Internet Explorer, a floating div floats below all previous content. In Chrome, a floating div only floats below content that is directly above it.

W3C (Wide Web Consortium) Standards

So, which is correct? For that, we turn to the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, the standards body that determines the specifications for CSS. Now, just as there are several versions of each browser, there are also several versions of CSS. The main version of CSS in use for some time has been CSS2.1, but recent browsers have begun adopting parts of CSS3 (which is itself still in development). However, for our purposes they are identical. They give these rules for positioning floats:

4. A floating box's outer top may not be higher than the top of its containing block. When the float occurs between two collapsing margins, the float is positioned as if it had an otherwise empty anonymous block parent taking part in the flow. The position of such a parent is defined by the rules in the section on margin collapsing.
5. The outer top of a floating box may not be higher than the outer top of any block or floated box generated by an element earlier in the source document.
6. The outer top of an element's floating box may not be higher than the top of any line-box containing a box generated by an element earlier in the source document.
8. A floating box must be placed as high as possible.

Those rules are somewhat technical, but the two most important ones here are six and eight. Rule six says that a floating div can't be higher than any line of content that came before it. Rule eight says that, unless another rule conflicts, a floating div should be as high as possible. So, looking at the pictures again, it looks like Firefox and Internet Explorer both line up with the bottom of the previous line of text, whereas Chrome lines up with the top. That means that Firefox and Internet Explorer violate rule eight; Chrome is indeed in the right.

However, now we need to know what to do to fix the issue so that all the browsers display the same thing. There are two ways to do this: we could fix Firefox and Internet Explorer to display correctly, or we could "fix" Chrome to display the same as the other browsers. In this case, I actually wanted all the browsers to put the floating div below the first div rather than to the side, so I chose the second option. My fix was to change the first div from "display:inline-block" to "display:block". This took it out of the content flow and pushes everything after it to the next line, like so:

That includes any floating divs below it, so now the second div is positioned the way I want it (as in the first picture) even in Chrome. Since there wasn't any text on the page in that section, it didn't interrupt the content flow. If there was text there, I would have had to find a way to keep the first div as "inline-block" while pushing the float down; possibly by moving the floating div itself lower in the content flow.

If, on the other hand, I had wanted to make Firefox and Internet Explorer work the way Chrome does, allowing the floating div up beside the first, I would simply have to move it to just before the first div in the content. That way it wouldn't be below the div at all: it would be first, and the div would "wrap around" it by staying to its left. Both solutions are relatively easy once you understand why each browser is behaving the way it is, but it took some digging to do that. I wasn't able to find anyone else detailing this discrepancy, so I hope this post is helpful to you web designers out there, and for the rest of you, chalk it up as a glimpse into the life of a developer.
 

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I was struck recently by a video I watched on Fora.tv, Google's Vic Gundotra: Mobile Phones as Answer Machines. In the video, Vic Gundotra describes how he was having lunch with a friend and his four year old daughter. His friend asked him a question and he replied, "I don't know." His daughter piped in, "Daddy, where's your phone?!" At first he thought nothing of it, but then he and his friend realized that his four year old had surmised that when information was needed, one could simply pull out a phone to obtain it. Remarkable! I have a two year old, and even he has displayed what I perceive as a shift in thinking about information retrieval from my generation to his. We were recently watching "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" on TV and I said to him, "You and I are going to go to the store." He got in the car, climbed into his car seat, and asked me for my iPhone. He turned it on, unlocked it, and started the YouTube app so that he could continue to watch "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" clips in the car. Naturally I had to search for the clip, but I am amazed that he is aware of this resource portability.

Until I owned a "cloud-enabled" phone, I was skeptical of the mobile revolution. Sure, I have recognized Generation Y as the text message generation, but until recently I hadn't seen the utility in being connected to cloud applications via a sensory-based platform. My 49 year old father-in-law once proclaimed to me that online shopping would never overtake physical retail shopping in overall revenues. Though I am sure people will still want to go to the grocery store to make sure their melons feel ripe, I'm not sure I believe that the shopping experience or buying decision process will look anything like it does today in 20 10 5 years. More and more, I use the cloud to make buying decisions. What's more, I find myself diving ever-deeper into my phone while I'm shopping in physical retail stores. Whether I'm doing price comparisons, or reading product reviews, or searching for similar products or services, I find that I'm more inclined to trust information found from reliable sources in the cloud than I am information found at a retailer's store. 

I wonder… how will cloud-connected customers affect eCommerce and vice-versa? More specifically, how will this affect PlumberSurplus.com, OutdoorPros.com, and any other venture we decide to undertake? Well, in order for us to be able to make an impact in mobile, we have to know what success looks like in order to understand whether or not we can execute in an easy and scalable way. With this type of marketing in its infancy, how can we really measure this? 

I came across this article today, Search Giants Encounter Challenges in Mobile Ad Market.  In the article, Frank Reed discusses a company that starts off with mobile ad campaigns running on five mobile Internet networks. After only one day, the company pulled Google and Yahoo campaigns because they were not effective. Frank cites two reasons as the primary hurdles for behemoths like Google and Yahoo in the mobile ad market: "First, the ads that are run on their traditional platform don’t often translate or fit well in the mobile environment... Secondly, the position of the ads on a mobile device will not correspond to the ‘top of the page’ and ‘right hand column’ look that is now ingrained in everyone’s way of seeing and reacting to the ads." These seem like relatively easy problems for resource heavy organizations like Google and Yahoo to overcome over time. However, it's a good indicator to me that mobile advertising isn't mature (certainly not mature enough for a small business like ours to throw money at).

In order for us to be able to be effective in mobile, I think three things need to happen. First, testability. We need to be able to stare at an anticipated baseline of performance and easily test and measure performance. Second, match ad campaigns to targets. Mobile advertising seems like a moving target at this point. This seems pretty tough to do. Finally, figure out how to take advantage of the sensory aspect of today's mobility. Phones have eyes, ears, skin, they know where you are, they know where you've been, they know who your friends are... how do we leverage these to create an experience that leads a customer to buy?

No matter what happens, at this point, I'm pretty convinced that the way my son finds information and shops when he's my age will be very different than the way I do those things now. I can't wait to see what happens next.

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Lately over here at the Surplus we’ve been focused on a lot of internal development to better streamline our processes, interactions with customers and suppliers, and other types of projects that add value to us as an organization but remain invisible to our customers. However, we have been looking ahead to this year’s development projects and have plans to do a lot of work on what we call “Customer Experience”.

With this focus, I’ve been poking around, looking for ideas and the technologies that may support some of the cooler features we may want to implement. In a post Web 2.0 world, we are looking for things that really add value to the customer, not just every cool little gadget, widget or flashy thing that might look cool.

One topic that has been particular warm in the online developer community as of late is the pros and cons of the new interactivity features as well as the tools used to develop them (read: AJAX, JQuery, javascript). In an effort to make the web work much more like a desktop application, developers are using more and more sophisticated techniques to push data back and forth without the user noticing. This provides much more real time feedback to the user, as well as adds a lot of functionality and makes interacting with the internet a lot more convenient with fewer time-wasting page reloads.

Take, for example, a familiar concept I’m sure you’ve seen and used yourself, what we call the “Product Selector”, where a user can choose a high level product they want to purchase, such as a bathtub, and using various slider bars, checkboxes, and other mechanisms, narrow down the result set to see the products that match their filtering criteria. BlueNile.com has used this for their diamond search for a long time. Product selectors like this are often very helpful and kind of fun to use. It increases customer retention and gives customers the ability to really find what they are looking for, or better yet, shows them a range of products that meet their criteria. However, there are drawbacks to the product selectors, including the inability for Google to crawl your products that are only accessible through the selector, the inability to have direct links to filtered results, and the ability to build a tool that the customer finds intuitive and helpful.

One big problem web-developers face in this post web 2.0 world is finding the balance between cool and functional. There is a fine line between enhancing a customer’s experience and frustrating the heck out of them. What is intuitive for a developer may seem obtuse to a customer (I’m pretty sure the developer is right though).

You can make a web page take you through 5 steps to create an account, choose your options, confirm your purchase, and agree to the terms, all in one single, seamless AJAX-enabled application. That is, until they realize they want to ship it to Aunt Gertrude instead, click their browser’s back button, and lose all the information they’ve entered, frustrating them to the point of abandoning the process.

Many of these new technologies break the expectations of the browser’s back button and bookmarks. Often these technologies can completely block search engine’s ability to find relevant data on your site. Often a page refresh or other unexpected action can cause the user to lose their place and what they were doing.

As a fan of emerging web technologies, I am looking forward to tackling some of these challenges in the coming year. However, I will be sure to be on the lookout for the unexpected consequences of clever web development.

So stay tuned, keep hitting F5, and look for some new features coming soon!