Stores Magazine - December 2007 - (Page 70)

NUTS AND BOLTS / ONLINE How to Beat Internet Fatigue Social science-based approach helps create like-minded visitor communities, driving sales and margins BY JANET GROEBER ricks-and-mortar stores have certain inherent advantages over their online brethren — salespeople to direct customers and answer questions, mounds of merchandise to touch and lively environments in which to do both. B Still, it’s tough to beat browsing online at midnight in your skivvies. But e-commerce consultants like Forrester and Jupiter think “Internet fatigue” will cause a predicted slowdown in online sales. Cupertino, Calif.-based Baynote, an online product and content guidance provider, hopes to rescue online retailers with its new technology that allows likeminded customers to “hang out” online. Ninety-five percent of online customers “will bail if they don’t find what they’re looking for within just three clicks,” says Baynote founder and CEO Jack Jia. To help convert online browsers to buyers, Baynote developed the Community-Guided eCommerce service, which tracks 20 characteristics in order to form groups of like-minded customers. Baynote’s “content guidance” matches customers to products that they are actually interested in at a specific point in time. Rather than taking a behavioral approach — “You bought this last time, you should consider this” — Baynote uses contextual targeting powered by the ‘Wisdom of Crowds” — observing 70 STORES / DECEMBER 2007 Baynote’s platform, based on social science, states that like-minded peers will behave 95 percent similarly a site’s invisible crowds or silent groups of like-minded peers whose intent is determined by their implicit behavior instead of their explicit feedback (forums, posts or focus groups) or past shopping experiences. “We really don’t care who you are or about your past [purchasing] history,” Jia explains. “We are against profiling and personalization, and against tracking your historical behavior.” Why? “Because all those things are going to match with other people at some random point,” he says. “We care about the holistic view of that visitor community.” Baynote’s platform “is based on social science,” says Jia, “the idea that humans are not that unique after all. Our physical brain structure is quite similar even though we may be different culturally or from a gender perspective. We’ve found that the like-minded peer will behave 95 percent similarly.” WWW.STORES.ORG http://WWW.STORES.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Stores Magazine - December 2007

STORES - December 2007 Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Holiday Shopping Extravagance What Shoppers Think 10 Things You May Have Missed Numbers Worth Counting Full Price/Markdown Retail People Niche Marketing Eight Predictions for 2008 Concept2Watch Merchandising Strategy Sourcing E-Commerce Supply Chain Warehouse Management Software Contactless Payments Marketing Marketing Online Loeb Retail Letter ARTS Update Point of View NRF News Retail Industry Calendar Last Laugh

Stores Magazine - December 2007

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.