Visual Merchandising And Web Site Catalog Copy
Visual merchandising can help
compare what users care about.
long copy outperformed short copy by 40.54%. Click–through traffic sent to the short copy page was unprofitable (-14% ROI), while traffic sent to the long copy page produced an ROI of 21%.
…Again, long copy outperformed short copy, this time by an even greater factor of nearly four to one. Our ROI was a dismal -66% for the short copy page and a very respectable 50% for the long copy page.
—Long Copy vs. Short Copy Tested
Criteria for optimal web design, by By Michael L Bernard, uncovers a curious information paradox. “Since online shoppers cannot physically interact with the product itself, potential customers generally require more extensive information about the product — in the form of links to detailed pictures or descriptions of the product.” However, an Internet Retailer article citing Forrester research explains, “Burdened in many cases by what Forrester identifies as poor copywriting and typography, none of the sites, drawn from industry segments including retail, consumer electronics and others, got a passing score of 5 or higher on a 10–point scale.”
Visual merchandising and catalog copywriting are well respected offline. Should you study Amazon.com you’ll find all sorts of content, from reviews to excerpts. And I seem to recall a single, huge, web page introducing an iMac model. You could practically call all the copy and matching visuals an online infomercial. It would seem Apple entertains the (statistically) radical notion content is king.
As digital economics drive down cost barriers to designing layouts, visuals and copywriting become crucial differentiators. Most web catalog designs are based around a vending machine model. You either instantly find what you’re looking for, no more – no less, or you leave. Current web design supports buying. Visual merchandising supports much more lucrative shopping behavior.
When Customers Want More
Does everyone think that once a person hits the Internet, he or she is ready to buy? We know they aren’t … but things are geared to favor the customer who knows what she wants and is ready to conclude the transaction. Folks who are still searching but are not ready to commit to buying all too often get left in the dust.
Pity, because these customers – very much in the majority – are your bread and butter.
—Are You Ignoring Eager Customers?
You don’t have to share Apple’s unusual ideas to acknowledge when customers click thumbnails in a catalog they want more than a larger image. Users can signal, through interaction, when they are shopping if the catalog does more than support the purchase transaction at the end. Progressive disclosure design techniques allow user control of visuals and copy, delivering the right amount of information at the right time.
Before and After shows context
A collision repair outfit used a photo of the finished work on a luxury car. A designer for a cosmetic treatement center showed stock photographs of fashion models pretending to be patients. What’s wrong is graphic art has trumped visual merchandising. How does the viewer know the work involved was anything more than buffing out a scratch from a car fender? How does the potential customer know the photo isn’t a stock photograph of someone who has never had a cosmetic procedure done? The only way to show the value the business brings to the table is to use graphics which tell the clent’s powerful visual story in context. Before and after photos are a simple way to show something as simple as the materials you use for t–shirts keeps imprinted designs from fading after mutiple washings.
Graphic art is stuck in the singular context of aesthetics, assuming what looks good must automatically be good for business. Visual merchandising stands at the converging contexts of commerce, aesthetics, information and interaction design. Where testing reveals a body of evidence about exactly how looks matter, and some of the results are disturbing.
Consequently the chief tool of graphic design is PhotoShop. With visual merchandising, the one indispensable tool is A/B split run testing and the planogram.
Planograms, The Merchandising Secret Your Web Designer Never Told You About
To date, the tool most often used to drive the upselling phenomenon has been the “planogram.” …If you were to place a price on such a planogram, it would be worth millions. The planogram is the most potent tool available to retailers who wish to increase their conversion rates.
—Webogram Power, Part 1 By Martin Lindstrom, ClickZ
The difference between merchandising and graphic design is evidence based web design around ecommerce patterns. Visual merchadisers test and inform product displays based on tests others perform. The larger patterns those tests reveal go into a planogram, the tool for merchandising offline.
Consumers come to commerce sites expecting to find accurate, actionable content. To accomplish their goals, they need clear features linked to meaningful benefits and images that show essential detail. But not one of 20 sites we evaluated managed to provide content that meets these basic requirements.
—Forrester Research: Web Content That Sells by John P. Dalton
Online planograms (also called webograms) tell you how many products you should have on a page to maximize profit without distracting user attention. And which upsells and cross selling will improve the shopping experience for the user. Bed Bath & Beyond knows if they provide information shoppers need, more users go on to buy an entire window treatment when they started shopping for curtains alone. Many stores support both buying and shopping behaviors, but it’s not as simple as throwing everything at the hapless user at once.
Put cans of soup in alphabetical order, shoppers get exactly what they came for and leave. That’s usability. Put cans of soup in a different order, sales increase by 30%. Users aren’t making mistakes, they’re considering a wider range of choices: They’re Shopping. That is merchandising.
Employing tested and proven merchandising techniques not unlike physical retailers; online stores are seeing increased conversions and sales beyond what ecommerce–as–vending machine models deliver.
Pig online and L.E. Cruickshanks use the same techniques in business–to–business ecommerce. They don’t sell more because the layout is “pretty.” Looks matter, just not the way graphic artists want it to. Testing shows conversions and profits driven by message–to–market match. Information design trumps pretty.
Without the visual information merchandising provides, users are left one fragment of data to base decisions on: Price. The design crux is not long or short copy; it’s about the right length to make the most sales being a testable proposition. Visual merchandising, by definition, means visual display of merchandise to promote better sales. Visual merchandising is testable; creative whims are not.
Related Articles:
A Desirability Design Process Diagram
Resources
- Bestcellars.com developed a desirability based navigation system for users (shoppers unversed in the peculiar lingo of wine tasting) to navigate the subjective flavors of wine.
- Global industrial shelving uses video and graphics about the product, not this week’s hot PhotoShop trend.
- “Like most retailers, PETCO assumed that the best way to showcase the products on a category page was to use a shotgun approach: lots of thumbnails on the page to show the breadth of products. Wrong again. That time, we learned that picking one or two products and showing a larger, more attractive photo converted visitors to buyers at a faster rate than the thumbnails.” Why Your Site Doesn’t Need to be Pretty explains testing reveals looks matter, just not in the way graphic artists want it to.
- Marketing Experiments did a test of long versus short copy. While long copy coverted to sales better than short copy by large margins, there is more to the long versus short copy debate. It’s about what information is right for different points in a shopping cycle. The article Are You Ignoring Eager Customers? explains sites don’t support shopping, they support buying; taking the order after the user has done research work elsewhere.
- “Copywriting is still the web’s biggest weakness … Who’s doing a great job of explaining their product or service? Who speaks like a human and not like a computer or a marketing machine?” —37signals
- The Pig Online Catalog is a good example of business to business catalog copywriting with personality, salesmanship, and information. L.E. Cruickshanks Sheet Metal Limited manages to find common ground between aesthetics and business. Estensis uses relevant diagrams and Jewelboxing makes the product look good where others use pointless stock photography to make the layout look good.
- Lotus White is an example of visual merchandising online. The product descriptions of Garnet Hill are examples of copywriting, not filler content. Rounding out the consumer catalog side is the product description copywriting of Retrodress and Technoscout’s new incarnation firstSTREET.
- Few copywriters worth their salt are without some examples from the DAK Electronics Catalog in their swipefile. Drew Kaplan offers the enthusiast’s alternative to commodity warehouse copy. The lesson from a DAK or an Apple is unenthusiastic writing can’t be short enough to mask the writer’s disinterest.
- The Banjo Minnow site is as good at visual merchandising as it is at making creative types cringe. The Proactiv site makes good use of visual flow. Bike Friday’s site talks to and about best customers. The method site creates a business identity for their cleaning products. Each site design understands what too few do: text and visuals create the mental image for the user. Layout, style and content have to work together to communicate effectively.
- The web can take the order, but does so for only 3% of potential buyers is an internet retailer article covering the Forrester research report Web Content That Sells by John P. Dalton
- Catalog copywriting with a human voice and visual merchandising with a human touch equals good interface design.
- Criteria for optimal web design (designing for usability) How can my website promote customer sales and loyalty? The article Progressive Disclosure – the best interaction design technique? explains the idea of delivering the right information at the right time.
- The Content–Free Buzzword–Compliant Vocabulary List seems paradoxical. Buzzwords are content in one sense — filling a container — they just aren’t informative. The article’s premise is nothing you haven’t heard before, features don’t sell benefits do. Yet many sites simply mislabel features and buzzwords as benefits. When information on the difference between features and benefits goes missing, the implication is the company can’t distinguish between them.
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