E-Commerce Website Must-Have Features

(This article was originally written by Matt Mikaelson for Business 2 Community).

The success of any e-commerce store not only depends on the quality of your products but various other factors also play an important role to attract your buyers. Though there are hundreds of tips and tricks out there, we have outlined some basic yet must have things in this article that you should implement before selling online.

1. Shopping cart and Create account Facility

The shopping cart and create an account options are usually found together on the upper right corner of the website. We can’t imagine an e-commerce website without having a shopping cart function. You can use a simple basket as an icon for the shopping cart, however, it’s up to you if you want to change it and make something that reflects your business model.

Create an account option allows your customers to sign up with their own login and password and make the checkout process easy without entering their information again and again when they shop on your website. Some users may find it difficult to create an account and remember their username and password, so placing checkout as a guest will only require enter their information and go ahead with the order.

2. Proper Navigation

Placing your products into categories helps your customers find the product with ease. If you have an apparel e-commerce website, you can create categories like women, men, kids etc. Avoid over categorization and make sure that they are easy to navigate so your customers can find their desired product quickly and hassle free. You can make further subcategories that can help a user/visitor find the product easily without going through all the products listed on the website.

Always highlight your top selling or most popular products on your main page to let your buyers know in the first place about the items they might be interested in. Don’t restrict your customers only to the product they search for, always show the related products to give them several options to choose from. You must have a page for each product with detailed description of the product, price, inclusive or exclusive of tax, shipping cost or any information you think helps a customer decide to place an order on your website.

It is extremely essential for any e-commerce website to organize and manage its category structure and placement on its landing page in a way that is clear, brief but comprehensive and making a proper sense to a user/visitor. Although it depends on the business model, however the ideal placements for category and sub-category should be located on the left side of website’s landing page where other useful tabs should be located just below the header with a search tool bar facilitation that can help visitor/user acquire information quite promptly.

While searching for a desired information/product, website’s URL plays an additional assistance in navigation if a URL is properly structured, reflecting and adhering to the visitor’s journey on the website like: domain.com/category, doman.com/category/subcategory/ etc. This practice enormously promotes good internal linking and make’s your website links search engine friendly and easily accessible by search engine crawlers eventually making optimization more hassle free.

3. Live chat Integration

Customers expect businesses to offer 24/7 customer support and the best way to fulfill this need is to start the live chat service on your website. Live chat agents can help customers find a product quickly so your customers don’t have to go through all the categories to find the product they are looking for. Your customers can get all the information about a specific product including detailed description, pricing structure refund policy etc. in that one chat box without the hassle of going through the details themselves.

Your customers might close your website without knowing about the special promotions on your website, so live agents are the ones who always make sure to update them about the latest promos. Now the question is, which company you should choose for the live chat? Well, that depends on your needs and requirements, however, the live chat service is one of the best on this planet. They have clients in the US, Dubai, Ghana and in some Asian countries and provide 24/7 service.

4. Payment options and ensure safe payment

Which payment method should you choose for your e-commerce store? Well, there are dozens of payment gateways to choose from apart from accepting credit cards like Paypal, Google Wallet, Square etc. Some payment methods are geographic specific, so you need to research before deciding which payment option to add.

Give your customers a safe e-commerce platform, they tend to leave the website immediately if they find any website vulnerable to security threats. So always set up a secure connectivity by using SSL certificate, establish two factor authentication and do mention your privacy policy in the footer of your website.

5. FAQ section

Your customer may have several questions before they shop on your website. So how would you know what the questions are? Think like a buyer, ask yourself those questions, list them on a piece of paper, answer them and add on your website in the FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) section. It’s like a self-help area to answer some common questions most of your customers might have. Combine your FAQ section with the contact us form, this will help your customers to ask that is not answered in your FAQ section.

6. Call to Action

Call to action on an e-commerce website tells your buyers what to do after they have decided to buy a product. The most common and important CTA on an e-commerce website is to put a “Buy Now” button on every page of your product. However, you can add some other call to actions depending on your business goals like filling out contact us form for more information and placing banners or pop ups to tell buyers about discounts or other special offers. .

7. User Generated Reviews

If you think your products are better than your competitors, let your existing customers tell the same to your prospect buyers. User generated reviews help a potential customers find the negatives/positives and give a true picture of your product. Advertising through your customers is the best method to promote your products and building trust in your brand. Encourage your buyers to leave a review after they buy a product from your website.

Every single product that is indexed on your website store should have a review section/tab and a rating option placed in the product’s decryption that can be viewed by the prospects. However, “write a review” option should only be accessible to registered users/clients only.

8. Writing Blogs

Blogs, no doubt is an essential part of any e-commerce website. You can use blogs to give more information about the products you have to offer. They help you in a number of ways like generating traffic to your website, keep your customers informed about the latest promotions and building your brand image. You can write blogs on various topics like revealing secrets of the industry you are in, your business history, providing solution to a problem your customer is facing or anything you know would be good to engage your audience. Make sure every blog you publish will contribute towards branding of your store and reflect your product’s awareness which eventually will increase your sales.

Engaging traffic these days needs a tact full approach and further its proper execution carries an essential weight age. Stats proved that adopting to modern blog’s engaging traffic strategies and techniques have dramatically improved the communication process with target audience, hence gagging a good number of traffic to your account. Few of the techniques involved are targeting your content that your audience would mostly like share, participating in the forums and communities where audience is already in abundance, making your blog’s content SEO friendly.

Using Twitter, Facebook and Google plus to share your posts and making new connections, installation of analytics and paying more attention to results, using info-graphic techniques in your blogs, conducting a keyword research when writing your blog, referring to your posts or others in your blogs consistently, guest blog can also make a huge difference, incorporating a state of the art design into your website, interaction on other blogs and leaving reference to your own, enabling subscription vie email + feed and track them, using your email connections and signatures to promote your posts and your blog overall, surveying your readers and adding a value to any popular topic/conversation etc.

Improving Mobile Conversion Rates

(This article was originally written by Jack Ford for SalesCycle).

Mobile’s share of web traffic continues to soar and has recently overtaken desktop, but retailers still face challenges in converting mobile users.

Mobile conversion rates are still lagging way behind desktop. In fact, desktop shoppers are three times more likely to convert than mobile ones.

E-commerce stats from Christmas 2016 illustrate this point. Mobile retail traffic was very close to that of desktop – equal if you include tablets – but sales on desktop are much higher.

It seems that in some cases mobile does all the leg-work before shoppers turn to desktop to make their purchase.

Research from Adobe highlights the top three reasons for this:

• Ease of navigation
• Bigger product images
• Entering payment details

To find out how brands can change this behavior and close this conversion gap, we asked three digital marketing and e-commerce experts for their top tips.

Tommy Walker | Editor-in-Chief, Shopify Plus

Understand context. The environment around a mobile user is inherently busier. Lunch breaks end, Uber rides finish, texts, Facebook notifications, calendar reminders, both the real world and digital environments are conspiring against the mobile user to get anything done.

This is why making things simple, and as “One touch” as possible is paramount. QZ does a great job of targeting “one touch subscribe” for their mobile readers.

This is also why Apple Wallet, Paypal, and other mobile wallets in the checkout are so important; to make it smoother. My message to brands is: help me buy products faster.

But also, ‘mobile users’ don’t live in a vacuum, they’re likely also desktop users, but do you know who’s who? If you did, you might be able to run a retargeting campaign that is delivered via SMS.

If you’re targeting items with multiple visits and sending those to phone numbers – then by making it easier to buy and checkout via one touch options, you’re far more likely to see a lift in mobile buying.

Dave Chaffey | CEO, SmartInsights.com

I recommend three research UX techniques retailers should use to improve conversion on smartphone shoppers.

1. Isolate smartphone visitors in analytics by creating smartphone segments to see whether there are specific pain points on the journey which mean they are more likely exit than desktop. Test improvements against a control using an AB testing tool like Convert.com.
2. Use tools like Usertesting.com or Whatusersdo.com to run dedicated smartphone UX sessions to identify challenges that smartphone users have.
3. For individual pages in the journey like product, category or checkout pages serve tailored questionnaires asking for feedback.

By using these low cost methods you balance analytic and direct customer feedback to address the problems that are killing your smartphone conversion rates.

Ben Davis | Senior Writer, Econsultancy

1. Product page imagery has to fill the screen and every page has to load quickly (get your images optimised, your CDN sorted, and use server side caching).  
2. If you’re a multichannel retailer, make it easy for mobile users to find stock in a nearby store, or to click and collect.
3. Give a guest checkout option, and use chunky fields with as few checkout pages as possible.
4. Do the little things well, such as asking for the user’s postcode and then autofill the address field.

 

The message coming through loud and clear from our interviews and round up of research is the importance of usability. People want to shop on mobile, and retailers need to make the journey as smooth as possible.

It’s interesting to see that a lack of trust isn’t specifically called out by any of the experts or the Adobe survey, and hints at the shift in consumer attitudes from research that reported trust issues as the number one barrier to mobile shopping in 2014.

If brands are now focusing (or should be) on improving the usability of their mobile stores and checkouts, I wonder what the next shift in consumer behavior will be for retailers to keep an eye on?

Amazon's Free Shipping Policy Forces Everyone to Compete

(This article was originally written by Brian Baskin for The Wall Street Journal).

Shipping companies, ranging from startups to the biggest package handlers, are vying to help small retailers compete with Amazon.com Inc.’s rapid expansion of free shipping.

Logistics companies say demand for fulfillment services has ballooned in the past year, as Amazon casts a bigger shadow across the retail world and the shipping market. Retailers are rushing to offer faster, cheaper delivery to keep customers from flocking to Amazon Prime, which promises two-day shipping on millions of items. Shipping companies fear the e-tailer will starve their networks by handling more of its own orders.

They see a lifeline in going after smaller customers, ranging from retail startups to midsize national chains that can’t afford to match the billions of dollars Amazon, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other major retailers are spending to speed delivery.

It is a shift in strategy for companies like FedEx Corp. , which until recently tailored their e-commerce services mainly to giant retailers needing to quickly process thousands of shipments a day. Now, they are betting even tiny online storefronts will pay for access to nationwide networks of warehouses, trucks and planes that can whisk online orders to customers’ doorsteps in less than 48 hours—even if Amazon’s growing same-day delivery service remains out of reach for most.

“There is no universe where you can beat Amazon’s shipping prices,” said Stefan Weitz, chief product and strategy officer at Radial, which handles online orders from about two-dozen warehouses and clients’ stores. “I don’t have to beat Amazon. I have to get close enough to provide a service level to my customers.”

Sterling Partners, a private-equity firm, formed Radial about a year ago by acquiring eBay Inc.’s e-commerce solutions unit and merging it with another online shopping services provider. The company works with national chains, including Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. and PetSmart Inc. Radial uses sales and other data to determine where to keep inventory, so it is the warehouse in Jacksonville, rather than Minneapolis, that has plenty of sandals to ship to shoppers in Miami. The company is one of the largest shippers using United Parcel Service Inc.’s ground service, allowing it to offer lower rates to retailers, a spokeswoman said.

In February, FedEx said it had started a new service managing fulfillment for smaller retailers. The company can pack merchandise from up to 400 sellers in a distribution center in Indianapolis and, soon, a second facility in southern California, said Ryan Kelly, a senior vice president at FedEx Supply Chain. A technology platform will distribute inventory across different locations, allowing customers to reach 98% of Americans via two-day ground shipping. FedEx previously offered that level of service mainly to department stores and other big customers that needed multiple warehouses for themselves, Mr. Kelly said.

Newer entrants include startups like ShipBob, which runs fulfillment centers in Los Angeles, Chicago and Brooklyn, and Red Stag Fulfillment, operating out of three facilities in Tennessee and Utah. These companies pool orders from hundreds of customers to negotiate lower shipping rates than the retailers could get on their own.

Just north of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood, ShipBob, which opened its first warehouse less than two years ago, stores merchandise from over 300 retailers in rows of neatly stacked white plastic bins. Workers walk the aisles, plucking out jars of artisanal mustard and organic conditioner, which they hand off to packers who prep the items for shipping.

ShipBob in February more than doubled the size of its Brooklyn warehouse and plans to open a fourth facility in May as some of its customers’ sales take off.

“We help them to grow, and they help us to grow,” said Kieran O’Leary, director of operations at the Brooklyn warehouse.

Amazon pioneered many of the tactics these companies are using. Fulfillment by Amazon, started in 2006, today ships items for third-party sellers of all sizes out of all of the company’s 149 fulfillment centers world-wide, including 75 in North America, a spokesman said.

“Amazon is rewriting the book on fulfillment,” said Satish Jindel, president of research firm SJ Consulting Group Inc. “They do it from A to Z—they get you the visibility, make sure the product is available and take care of the order.”

LOGISTICS REPORT

Get the latest news and analysis on logistics and supply-chain issues via a daily newsletter, at WSJ.com/Logistics.

Many sellers are wary of handing over fulfillment to Amazon, which is selling more products under its own brand.ChannelAdvisor says Amazon handles less than 3% of client orders not placed on the site. Radial, ShipBob and others promise in marketing materials to help smaller retailers meet the higher expectations for shipping set by Amazon.

Peter Wong said he hired Red Stag to level the playing field with bigger sellers online. Mr. Wong is chief operating officer at SwimSpray, which makes a spray that removes chlorine from skin and hair. He said negotiating directly with big delivery companies was “embarrassing” because SwimSpray didn’t have the order volumes to secure steep discounts. Companies that didn’t specialize in fulfillment couldn’t ship orders out reliably.

“Ultimately, what [Red Stag] allowed us to do is focus more on selling rather than focus on how do we get something from point A to point B,” Mr. Wong said.

Sustainable E-Commerce Packaging

(This article was originally written by Lisa McTigue Pierce for Packaging Digest).

With a win-win-win strategy that includes partnerships throughout the supply chain, the world’s largest online retailer is collaborating with the industry to optimize packaging design for ecommerce.

In an exclusive interview, Brent Nelson, senior manager, worldwide packaging, Customer Packaging Experience (CPEX), tells Packaging Digest about the company’s business model, the Amazon Packaging Certification Guidelines and how teamwork will solve many of today’s packaging challenges for ecommerce marketing.

Nelson will be speaking at the upcoming SustPack 2017 conference (Apr. 24-26; Scottsdale, AZ), along with his colleague Kim Houchens, Ph.D., director of worldwide packaging (CPEX) for sustainability. On Tues., Apr. 25, at 4:15 p.m., Nelson and Houchens will co-present “Digital Moment of Truth: Designing Packaging for e-Commerce,” in which they’ll talk about the company’s successes with right-sized and frustration-free packaging, and share their packaging design tips for optimized shipments.

Nelson previews some of what conference attendees will hear, and comments on other key ecommerce trends such as unboxing videos and heightening the consumer’s experience.

How important is packaging sustainability to Amazon and why?

Nelson: Our number one priority is to delight customers and packaging is an important part of that. Thirty one million times a year customers give us feedback and usually tell us they love our packaging, but there’s always more room for improvement. We are working hard on initiatives to further reduce packaging waste while protecting orders for customers. One of those initiatives is our Amazon Packaging Certification program, including Frustration Free Packaging, which last year collectively eliminated nearly 83 million corrugated boxes. To date, we have more than 1.1 million items that are available in certified packaging.

What are the challenges you’re seeing in ecommerce packaging and sustainability, and why?

Nelson: We consider packaging sustainability to be a win-win-win and we are working hard to share our standards and guidelines with brand owners and the packaging industry as a whole, so we can drive those positive outcomes faster, together.

The primary challenge we see is that packaging designed for brick-and-mortar retail is in many cases not optimal for online fulfillment. Packaging designed to stand out on a retail shelf is often oversized, with expensive “romance” design aesthetics, redundant features to prevent theft and not capable of surviving the journey to the customer. In many cases, these features can lead to suboptimal packaging for online distribution.

How can these challenges be solved or overcome?

Nelson: The most important thing is that the industry works together to create packaging that’s great for customers, companies and the environment. Using our Amazon Packaging Certification Guidelines, we are working to educate the industry about the impact that sustainable packaging has on customer satisfaction, including repeat customers and cost savings.

That’s part of why we are excited for the opportunity to present at the upcoming SustPack 2017 conference and why we are actively participating in forums where brand owners and packaging industry influencers are present. Certified packaging designed for Amazon and online fulfillment is a win for customers due to right-sized packages being designed to prevent damages; it’s a win for our brand owner partners and Amazon because it’s less material volume and often much lower cost; and it’s a win for the planet—the reduced amount of packaging is less wasteful, and lower damage rates mean less transportation of goods to and from the customer.

Are the packaging design tips you’ll be sharing with the SustPack audience ones Amazon follows or are they what you expect your vendors to follow? Are the company’s packaging expectations different for its own products versus products other vendors sell on the site?

Nelson: Absolutely, our packaging guidelines are the requirements we leverage for our own Amazon private label products. Our objective is to create best-in-class certified packaging (such as Frustration Free Packaging) that customers love and serves as a model for our external brand owner partners to follow. A great example is our Amazon Basics business, which encompasses hundreds of different products that are certified as Frustration Free Packaging or Ships in Own Container.

We will be sharing the core tenants of sustainable packaging for Amazon and a few of the many case studies of certified packaging designed for customer experience and online fulfillment. One of our goals for this presentation is to educate and dialogue with brand owners, packaging suppliers and designers about what, how and why packaging designed for ecommerce works.

Nelson: The whitepaper reflects many of the key differences between packaging for ecommerce and traditional retail fairly. There are distinct challenges and opportunities in both models, with packaging and logistics as particularly distinctive management areas. What the author stated—and a key message of our presentation—is that packaging for online fulfillment requires a reimagining of packaging. Furthermore, we assert that online retail (versus traditional brick-and-mortar) is actually a powerful enabler to reduce packaging waste, as many of the fundamental design features for packaging in traditional retail are far less relevant online (for example, product not packaging on display and no size comparison across products).

The author accurately asserts that ecommerce is beginning to be viewed as an independent distribution paradigm, providing an opportunity to design packaging with sustainability and optimization in mind. This is our business model—applying a sustainability lens to packaging enables us to create a better customer experience, reduce cost and drive more efficient use of resources, which reduces the environmental impact. A win-win-win. To do so, we must collaborate as an industry and is precisely why we are members of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition.

In many product categories, brand owners have switched from rigid to flexible packaging for a variety of reasons, sustainability being one of them. Do you anticipate similar interest and activity with flexible packaging for ecommerce?

Nelson: There is always a tradeoff that must be considered in terms of the sustainability impact of packaging, such as the amount of packaging material that is used, the quantity of post-industrial or post-consumer recycled material used and, finally, the end-of-life recyclability of the packaging materials. While there is no one-size-fits-all answer, we are committed to working with the industry and internally in our own operations to drive sustainable packaging solutions.

In the small-parcel shipping environment of ecommerce, the dimensional weight cost structure is causing product manufacturers to rethink their shipments for “right-sizing.” How does dim weight enter into your suggestions for how to design packaging for ecommerce?

Nelson: Certainly there is a trend toward lighter weight and decreased shipping volumes across the industry. Our commitment is to drive adoption of right-sized, minimal packaging that protects against damage and is made from environmentally responsible materials.

Much has been said in the last couple years about the popularity of “unboxing” videos and heightening the consumer’s experience with ecommerce packaging. What does Amazon do with its packaging to elevate the consumer’s experience?

Nelson: Amazon’s mission is to focus on what is best for our customers. With the launch of Frustration Free Packaging in 2008, our goal was to guide the industry to design and certify packaging that is right sized, easy to open and made from 100% curbside recyclable materials, features that are designed to delight our customers. Great examples of FFP packaging can be found on our Innovations and Sustainability sites.

Brent, you’ll be presenting at SustPack with your colleague Kim Houchens, director of worldwide packaging sustainability. How do your two perspectives differ and why?

Nelson: Kim and I have been in the packaging industry for a long time and actually worked together in former roles. My experience prior to Amazon was leading packaging innovation and supply chain teams for global consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. Kim came to Amazon with deep expertise leading global data and material engineering teams for suppliers and other retailers. Our collective experience has been a great match and together we have worked to drive a compelling vision for our team and Amazon in the packaging space.

What main takeaway would you like conference attendees to remember from your speech?

Nelson: The time is now to reimagine packaging to enable companies to thrive in an ecommerce business model.

Again, online retail provides distinct and powerful enablers versus traditional retail to invent packaging that delights customers, reduces waste and minimizes cost throughout the supply chain. Sustainability provides a critical catalyst for challenging norms and promoting systemic change in packaging.

Taming the E-Commerce Fulfillment Beast

(This article was originally written by Jesse Kaufman for Multichannel Merchant).

When it comes to fulfillment, every ecommerce merchant can relate to the lion tamer’s challenge.

Just as he or she must teach huge, hot-tempered animals to respond to commands without becoming their lunch, so must the ecommerce merchant get customers’ goods delivered on time and intact — all while preventing costs from skyrocketing. Needless to say, ecommerce sellers have a fine line to walk to reach top-notch fulfillment.

Jumping Through Endless Fulfillment Hoops

With all the competing factors at play, fulfillment is a tricky environment that requires skill, lightning-fast pivots and a cool head. From balancing postage and packaging costs without hiking up the customers’ price to aggregating tons of orders across different sales channels into one concise fulfillment platform, these endless obstacles can be tough to navigate.

And don’t forget the returns process, which can take an immediate bite out of your bottom line, then come back to further haunt you in the form of extra administrative costs. If your inventory isn’t sorted and catalogued correctly when those returns come back to the warehouse, you’re revisited with the pain of the bite a second time.

On top of these basic ecommerce quandaries sits heightened customer demands and expectations. Consumers want shorter processing windows; as time competes with money, this reality becomes another profit muncher.

“Ouch! The Corporate Sting of Fulfillment Challenges

By now, you know fulfillment challenges aren’t just a pain — they can truly compromise your business. 

Each time you make a fulfillment misstep, your bottom line takes a hit. You spend time that should be occupied building other parts of your business, like marketing, branding and product development. And those negative customer experiences due to order delays, mis-ships, or poor communication? You can only hope they don’t go viral in reviews.

So what’s an ecommerce merchant to do? The answer can be summed up in one word: simplify. Here’s how:

Partner with the Best

Building relationships with fulfillment partners that have strong technology backgrounds should be a priority. For the best results, find one experienced with brands and products that are similar to those you sell.

A solid fulfillment partner should know what it’s doing, while providing technical know-how and transparent pricing. Be sure to ask about “hidden” fees such as account maintenance or tech costs. And make sure any large postage discounts the fulfillment partner gets are passed on in full to customers.

Have the Right Tools in Place

It’s always about the tools. If you’re not at a stage when outsourcing fulfillment makes sense, you need those tools even more. Search for platforms that will help you track your inventory, ship products at discounted rates and provide full visibility of data across all sales channels. Try to automate as much of the day-to-day work as possible, allowing you to manage fulfillment on a high level without unnecessary distractions.

It’s simple: Just Communicate

If you don’t want angry customers blowing up your social media, keep them from getting angry in the first place by making sure they know the status of their orders. For merchants selling to the U.K., for instance, U.K. law requires ecommerce retailers to keep customers in the know with written order verification. And even where that’s not the law, it’s just good business.

Customers appreciate having up-to-date order info so give them the ability to see where their orders are through online tracking systems, including any updates on changes or delays. Even if orders are later than expected, they’ll never have to guess when their package is coming or call support to find out.

Ecommerce fulfillment is absolutely a creature requiring careful handling. But like the lion tamer, ecommerce merchants can control fulfillment. Streamlining processes in house or with a trusted partner lets you focus on bigger goals without upsetting your customers or putting your business at risk.

Amazon vs. Walmart

(This article was originally written by Mary Beth Quirk for Consumerist).

Amazon can now deliver many things in one or two days, so Walmart has to have lower prices for the many customers who can wait. Similarly, Amazon has to undercut Walmart’s grocery prices if it’s going to stake out any significant portion of that $800 billion market. For shoppers at either of these two retail giants, this can mean lower prices, but it’s also forcing manufacturers and suppliers to rethink how they do business.

Consumer brands have been increasingly dedicated to figuring out ways to deal with this pricing war, one executive told Re/code, noting that “it’s dominating the conversation every week.”

Though Amazon made headlines this week for gathering some of the biggest packaged food brands together to pitch them on the idea of frustration-free packaging, as part of a push to attract more customers to online shopping instead of buying in physical stores, Walmart has also been meeting with its suppliers in an effort to ramp up the battle for shoppers.

Last week, Walmart brought together major household brands at its headquarters for a pricing powwow. According to a presentation Re/code viewed, Walmart wants to have the lowest price on 80% of its sales, which means brands that sell through the retailer would have to cut costs elsewhere.

Some vendors say doing this will mean they’ll lose money on every sale — but if they don’t cooperate, they could find their distribution limited in comparison to those who do play along. Walmart could also develop new in-house brands and sell those products to consumers instead of using outside suppliers.

“Once every three or four years, Walmart tells you to take the money you’re spending on [marketing] initiatives and invest it in lower prices,” Jason Goldberg, head of SapientRazorfish, a digital agency that works with large brands and retailers, told Re/code. “They sweep all the chips off the table and drill you down on price.”

Amazon may not yet be the grocery powerhouse that Walmart is, but it still has significant leverage to push suppliers to keep their prices low. The online retailer is not only willing to lose money on certain products just to beat the competition on price, notes Re/code, but isn’t afraid of dumping brands or products when vendors don’t play along.

Re/code gives the example of Pampers diapers disappearing from Amazon last week, prompting speculation in the industry that the e-commerce giant booted Pampers in an effort to negotiate better prices.

Can Brick-and-Mortar Still Be Relevant?

(This article was originally written by Phil Wahba for Fortune).

After a tough holiday season, many big- box retailers went on a cost-cutting binge. J.C. Penney, Macy’s, and Sears all announced that they would shutter dozens of stores each as shoppers increasingly shift online. But the carnage could have been much worse. Oddly enough, it was that very shift to e-commerce—the one bright spot for most retailers during the holidays—that spared even more stores from the reject rack.

The counterintuitive strategy boils down to this: If traditional retailers have any hope of countering Amazon’s dominance, it’s by using their brick-and-mortar stores as local arms of their online businesses. Whether or not that’s ultimately successful, a number of retail CEOs touted the idea during recent earnings calls.

Kohl’s, which had record online sales over the holidays while its overall business slumped badly, says that one-third of online orders are now either picked up in its stores or shipped by one (shaving a half-day off its average delivery time).

At J.C. Penney, 90% of e-commerce returns are handled in a store, giving the company another chance to wring more sales from those customers.

And Target says three-quarters of Americans live within 10 miles of one of its stores, an edge that it claims will help it deliver online orders more quickly to shoppers who increasingly want their merchandise in a couple of hours, not a couple of days.

Kohl’s says it has data to back up the theory that brick-and-mortar stores help online sales. Last year, after closing 18 stores, it found that online sales at nearby addresses fell 10%, as some shoppers forgot about the chain altogether. Based on those findings, Kohl’s plans to shrink 200 stores instead of closing any of them.

Meanwhile, retailers like Best Buy believe that more technology will lift store sales. For example, Best Buy has armed workers with handheld ­devices that can show customers whether nearby stores have a particular TV that is otherwise out of stock. “In the stores, technology can be our best friend,” says Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly, whose company has avoided closing stores in recent years.

Still, the inescapable reality for retailers is that store sales are falling faster than e-commerce can make up for. In the end, retailers may only be postponing their day of reckoning.

High real estate costs in prime locations make it expensive to keep stores open, says Joel Bines, cohead of retail for consulting firm AlixPartners. E-commerce warehouses, in contrast, are typically built on cheap land and where wages are low.

Says Bines: “The wave of store closings we’ve been predicting for years is upon us, and it’s going to last for many, many years.”

A $50 Million Dollar Postcard Empire

(This article originally appeared in Entrepreneur).

Even some of the smartest moguls alive take for granted a truth that is just plain wrong: Direct mail is dead. No, we’re not making this up: Sending physical mail to prospects and customers can actually work — and pay off big-time.

While digital hogs the headlines, direct mail has made a quiet comeback, representing a huge opportunity for the businesses that do it right. Don’t take our word for it, though. Real businesses are benefitting from direct mail.

One real estate agent makes $5,000 to $20,000 in commissions every time she runs a direct mail campaign. A Texas dentist added six figures in new revenue thanks to one mailing. And a financial services firm spent a few thousand dollars to net dozens of new clients with an average value of $1,500 each.

This kind of success is typical for Joy Gendusa, founder of PostcardMania, a company that does nearly $50 million per year selling incredibly successful direct mail campaigns to thousands of small businesses.

Given her stunning success, we had to sit down with Gendusa to find out how to do direct mail right.

Born from a customer service experience from hell.

Gendusa started out small enough. She ran a graphic design business and tried to keep up with the market. “I started making more money brokering printing services than selling actual graphic designs,” Gendusa says.

Gendusa had two toddlers while working 70-hour weeks. The business was making some money, but nothing life-changing given the time she was investing. Even then, she still didn’t think about starting a large venture. That only happened when she had a customer service experience from hell.

She designed a postcard to promote her business and FedEx’d the art off to be made into postcards. When she got the proof back, it had the postcard company’s own phone number on the bottom in tiny five-point font.

“They told me I had to pay $50 to remove their branding on my postcard,” Gendusa says. She dodged the charge, but was furious about the bait-and-switch.

“I decided to start PostcardMania and that we’d sell direct to business owners. Nobody was doing that.” And a new industry was born. That was in 1998, and Gendusa hasn’t looked back since.

Why direct mail and why now?

It’s 2017 and someone is making tens of millions of dollars mailing postcards. How is this even possible?

According to UnitedMail, 79 percent of people act on direct mail immediately; only 45 percent do the same for email. More than two-thirds of consumers open all of their mail, even easily recognizable junk. If you think this only applies to your grandparents, think again. According to the U.S. Postal Service, 36 percent of people under the age of 30 look forward to checking their mail. Thirty-seven percent of the coveted 25- to 35-year-old demographic immediately read their mail.

Gendusa’s numbers validate direct mail’s appeal. Her company made $45.7 million in 2015 almost exclusively by sending 135 million postcards that sell products and services for more than 13,000 customers.

Gendusa’s enthusiasm for direct mail doesn’t mean she shuns digital. Her postcards marry the best of both worlds. Her company’s mailings are optimized for conversion through strategic design and innovative tracking codes that provide levels of delivery precision.

In fact, Gendusa sees a valuable role for PostcardMania in a digital landscape. “Google advertising isn’t very user friendly,” she says. “People set budget for $500, it’s suddenly gone and they have no idea what happened to clicks and leads. Google doesn’t teach things like remarketing well. It’s not just about getting someone to click, but what they do when they arrive.”

Gendusa and her team understand these challenges because they’re marketers first. In addition to selling postcards, the company makes it dead simple for clients to convert postcard traffic by building landing pages and Wordpress sites that non-programmer clients can then customize.

Welcome to the modern mail campaign.

Modern direct mail campaigns are well-oiled machines that marry the best of direct and digital marketing. On one hand, the cards have crisp calls to action on their physical surface; on the other, the actions that the consumer takes are tracked and enhanced using online technologies like retargeting.

Here’s how it works. PostcardMania crafts clear, eye-catching copy on the postcard design for, say, a dance school client. The copy offers a free day of dance to local moms in the hopes of bringing in new students. Then, the card continues with carefully defined bullet points that speak to the dance school’s benefits on the back. These include items like “teaches discipline” and “fun and entertaining.” The card is sent to a highly targeted list of mothers with an annual income over $100,000 and daughters ages five to 12.

“Too many business owners sacrifice clarity for cleverness,” says Gendusa. “We’re trying to get a response not a design award, so we make the postcard crystal clear.”

When prospective customers visit the dance school’s website using the URL on the postcard, PostcardMania uses cookies to add that prospective customer to their online follow-up list. Anyone on the follow-up list sees online ads promoting the free day of dance for 90 days while surfing online. The ads are designed just like the postcard, so the marketing stays consistent when it makes the jump from print to digital. Small businesses get access to branding that used to only be available to major marketers. And they are paying pennies on the dollar, thanks to PostcardMania’s partnership with the Google network.

PostcardMania’s website touts a number of case studies in dozens of industries where customers generate considerable revenue with a single direct mail campaign. Because of that, the business has grown over the last 18 years to employ more than 200 full-time staff and generate nearly $50 million in annual revenue, all while touting a culture more at home in Silicon Valley than its Tampa Bay, Fla., location.

And there will be millions to go around if her bet on software and subscriptions pays off.

Postcards, meet software.

To capitalize on her success, Gendusa started a software startup, DirectMail2.0, that offers a white label version of PostcardMania’s software to other printing and mailing companies. More than 50 partners have already bought in and the DirectMail2.0 product produced $1 million for PostcardMania the first year it launched. It has more than doubled in revenue since.

Gendusa’s also spearheading the postcard-as-a-service model. Her product “New In Town” is a follow-up system that mails an area’s new residents each month on behalf of PostcardMania’s customers, fully automatically. These introductory postcards are critical for local businesses: They introduce the business to new residents and lock in long-term customers by offering one-time promotions.

These successes have PostcardMania set to crack $100 million in the next 24 months, proving one simple truth: Anyone who says direct mail is dead should check the casket, because it represents a huge opportunity for the businesses that do it right.

Six steps to the perfect postcard marketing campaign.

There is art and science to postcard marketing. Gendusa shared with us what business owners and entrepreneurs must do to create campaigns that boost visibility and sales, based on the strategies she used to make millions off direct mail.

1. Get the right list. Postcard campaigns live and die by the quality of their mailing list. Gendusa suggests isolating a list of only your target market — even if you have fewer people on it.

2. Actually design with your audience in mind. Gendusa says that direct mail marketers make the same serious mistake over and over again: They assume their audience understands the terminology of their industry. “Financial advisors do this all the time,” she says. “Nobody knows what they mean and they don’t get responses.” And it happens in every industry.

3. Communicate what problem you solve — immediately. Too many business owners waste postcard space with unnecessary copy that no one ends up reading. Instead, they need to immediately communicate what problem the business solves in the headline (not buried in the body copy).

4. Don’t get cute with your images. The image used on the postcard should be “instantly recognizable,” Gendusa says. Too many business owners and entrepreneurs try to get cute or creative, and end up confusing their audience. You have seconds to communicate a value proposition and reinforce it with an image. If you fail, consumers won’t keep reading. More importantly, they won’t act.

5. Don’t neglect the back of the card. It’s just as important as the front. Once the reader turns over the card, you’ll want a sub-headline that transitions into text or bulleted items with the benefits of your product or service. Keep them simple, Gendusa says. People won’t read a bunch of text.

6. Create an authoritative call-to-action. “People enjoy being told what to do instead of just being given a phone number,” says Gendusa. The last item on the card you want them to see is a clear call-to-action that gives the reader directions: go to the site, download an offer or pick up the phone and call today.

It helps that Gendusa never loses sight of the mission behind even a simple postcard.

“We’re not just selling a commodity. Small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy and we want to help them grow.”

How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Online Shopping

The writer William Gibson once said that the future is here, just not evenly distributed. That was the case with the World Wide Web 20 years ago, when some business models – notably e-commerce and new media – took off faster than others. Now a similar trend is happening with artificial intelligence, or AI.

The promise of AI has seemingly been just on the horizon for years, with little evidence of change in the lives of most consumers. A few years ago, buzzwords like “big data” hinted at the potential, but ending up generating little actual impact. That’s now changing, thanks to advancements in AI like deep learning, in which software programs learn to perform sometimes complex tasks without active oversight from humans.

Deep learning algorithms have been powering self-driving cars and making quick progress in tasks like facial recognition. Now these innovations are beginning to find their way into the daily lives of consumers as well.

“For retail companies that want to compete and differentiate their sales from competitors, retail is a hotbed of analytics and machine learning,” says John Bates, a product manager with Adobe Marketing Cloud, which offers machine learning services in e-commerce and other industries. As with the early Web, travel and entertainment are also making early use of machine learning, according to Bates.

A spate of recent experiments and announcements underscore the trend in e-commerce. One notable example is Pinterest Lens, a Shazam-like service that conducts visual searches based on items in the everyday world. Just point your camera at, say, a piece of furniture or item of clothing and Lens can help you find it online.

Lens builds on earlier Pinterest innovations like Related Pins and Guided Search — both based on the idea that you sometimes don’t know what you’re looking for until you see it — as well as a visual search tool that can find similar images inside the billions of pins that Pinterest has collected. Related pins are served up according to a similarity score that Pinterest’s algorithms assign between images.

Lens expands on that earlier search tool beyond images to include things in the real world. Image-detection programs identify an object and visual search digs up similar images, making it easier to buy a coveted item online. The potential for this kind of product-search innovation is interesting: You can search for things that won’t fit in a standard search box, and more tightly connect things found offline with those found online.

“For shopping specifically, improvements to online discovery means new ways to find products you’re interested in but may not have the words for,” says Andrew Zhai, an engineer working on Pinterest’s visual search. “Visual discovery gives people a way to discover new brands and ways of styling that they never knew existed.”

Other e-commerce sites are also adopting deep learning to help shoppers more easily find what they seek. Gilt deploys it to search for similar items of clothing with different features like a longer sleeve or a different cut. Etsy bought Blackbird Technologies last fall to apply the firm’s image-recognition and natural-language processing to its search function.

And notably, Amazon is planning to use the AI technology it offers on its Web Services in its new Amazon Go grocery stores. The company is operating only one store in Seattle, but Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said during a February earnings call that “it’s using some of the same technologies you would see in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor, fusion, deep learning.”

Adobe, meanwhile, is taking things a step further by letting people create images of their desired products. Working with researchers at UC Berkeley, Adobe developed an image-editing tool that can turn a crude sketch of a handbag or shoe into a photorealistic and easily tweakable image. The tool also draws on a deep database of related images to turn sketches into pictures.

Adobe’s marketing tools are also incorporating deep learning into offerings for retailers, using AI to predict customer behavior. Shoppers can choose to receive suggestions based on their shopping lists – a belt that matches a pair of pants, painting supplies to help with a can of paint, a wine paired to a dinner recipe. Programs can subtly nudge people along when they are making a big-ticket purchase online but are not ready to hit the buy button.

Subtlety is a key part of these AI-powered marketing tools. People can grow alienated if they feel retailers are snooping on their behaviors or if it comes across as a hard sell. Adobe’s AI learns from past behavior as well as trial and error to learn how to make a gentle nudge without being too pushy.

“That’s a bit of the art and science behind deep learning,” says Bates. “But that’s where a lot of these signals can be built into the algorithms. If it creates an unnatural signal or puts someone off, it can be built into the training itself.”

While deep learning is becoming a part of the retail experience, it’s happening in fits and starts, as Facebook found with chatbots. Touted as a tool that could automate customer-service functions and deepen human engagement, chatbots were added to Facebook Messenger, with more than 11,000 of them available last year. But last week, Facebook scaled back its chatbot ambitions after they clocked a 70% failure rate.

As with the early days of the Web, there remains much work to do before deep learning can be seamlessly integrated into the daily lives of consumers. Compared to expectations of even a few years ago, though, things are a lot farther along than many expected. And that suggests Silicon Valley may again be ready to change how we shop.