Two of my coworkers and I went to see the UIE Roadshow yesterday — it was a great day out of the ffice, a glorious day in DC, and a fabulous chance to get re-escited by what we do. Jared’s a one-man show, lot’s of one-liners, diversions, and now magic tricks in his show, but it all built up to a great demonstration that excitement, delight, and kindness are the magic ingredients to good e-commerce. There’s all sorts of  information in his day-long event, and some of it seems/feels disjointed (and personally, I’m done with the Chicken-Sexer routine), but all in all, lots of good nuggets in there.

1. Apple, in all their magic/mystery, are very planned, and thoughtful. He showed their 1987 Knowledge Navigator video — which was an attempt to imagine how computers would interact with people ca. 2010. We may not be there, but the point was creating a long-term vision, and then working towards it. What company couldn’t do with that amount of foresight?

2. He introduced a concept about how products evolve. I’m not sure whose research he was drawing upon, but the cycle is something like — New (innovative, unique) product –> Feature-competitive –> Experience Competitive –> “Commodity” (in his case, more of product that is driven through API to be a feature in other products). So imagine the flow for web mapping. 1. Mapquest creates the original mapping site. People are in awe. 2. Maps.com,. yahoo maps, and mapquest start to compete on features. 3. Google blows them out of the water with a map that does all the basics, but with a much faster, richer experience. 4. Mashups turn maps into commodity tools, that create entire new products using maps as an element of their features.

So yeah, I learned some really cool things, and now they boil around in my head, as I think of how to apply them to work problems. I really want to put a vision video together though, that’s for sure.

Summertime is coming to my house, and in the interest of keeping cool while we sleep without blowing a fortune on the AC, we decided to buy a ceiling fan.

I started at Google, which led me to a place called csnceilingfans.com - they have one of those faceted search systems where you specify features and are able to dial down very quickly to what you want. They also had a huge selection of fans, and good photos, good descriptions of the fans. We have an old house, with small rooms, so it had to be a smaller fan, that didn’t hang so low that the blades would cut our heads off. After a while I found the perfect fan - their catalog and search tools are really top-notch. After doing a sanity check on prices at a couple of other sites, and checking what other people had said about the fan and this company, I decided to pull the trigger.

I did the credit card thing, and got their confirmation email. The email said it would ship between the 9th and 11th of June — no big deal for me, since I would wait  until the weekend to install.

Then it all fell apart. On the 10th, I sent an email to customer service asking if it was shipped. I got a prompt response reminding me it would ship no later than the next day, and that they would send an email when it went out. Next day, no email. The next day (12th - one day late by their schedule) I sent another email, and was assured again by customer service that it would ship, and I’d get a notice when it shipped. No email.

The next day, no email, and I decide to call. I’m the customer that companies love - I pretty much never call, but this time, I was really annoyed - they had broken their word to me three times now, and were starting to seem shady. I made sure they had not charged my card, and then I called. The CS lady confirmed that it hadn’t shipped yet, and put me on hold to check with the warehouse. When she got back, I was told the warehouse was closed, and would not ship today. I asked for expedited shipping when they got around to it, so I could start sleeping cooler at night. She declined. When I asked for a manager, I was told they are too busy with another customer. I asked that they cancel my order, and  she told me they’d send an email confirming. Two days later no email, another call, and a promise that I’d get an email.

Email came, and I went to the next shipper on Google, ordered a fan, and got a UPS shipping notice within an hour.This was the exact experience I expected when I started csnceilingfans.com, and NEVER got. Unlike a lot of people, I am an undemanding customer, but in this case my limits were more than exceeded.

Lesson here: csnceilingfans.com - if you make a statement to a customer, follow through. The uncertain feeling I got when they failed to do what they promised to do 4 times over made me unsure of them as a vendor. This applies to everyone - your software can be top-notch, but if your follow-through fails you, then you lose the customer. If I buy a fan again, I’ll research it on csnfans site, but you can be certain I’ll buy from 1800lighting.com instead.

The last post was about buying from Adobe — the process. This one’s about the weird product purchase options they give you.

From a web-guy point of view, there’s really only a few things you must have, and they start with Photoshop. Then you can add maybe Dreamweaver, Flash (if your site demands Flash) or Illustrator (if you have design talent). Adobe offers all of these singly, or in bundles. Of course, buying in singles is prohibitive, but here’s where it gets weird for me. The “Web Premium” bundle offers all those, plus another 7 products, of varying value, for $1,699. Off course, you can counter that the price is also a significant discount for all of those apps.

But what if I never wanted them? It becomes an arm-twist, where I spend a lot more than I feel comfortable about, so I can get a lot of stuff I may never use, but I’m forced to do that because the base pricing for the few products I want are extraordinary high as well. It’s like Cable company pricing — the only way to get the channel of value is to buy all the other junk channels. And we all know how much in love most of us are with our current cable company relationship.

It’s almost like their financials dictate that they sell a specific number of product x, regardless of if the customer ever wants them.The customer is forced to deal with the problems that Adobe’s internal product-line competition has created.

Adobe — I’m pretty sure you could avoid these continuous sales on bundle upgrades if you’d just price them to be what people want. Or, try a “Build Your Own” where I tell you I’m willing to spend $900, and you let me choose what goes in the bundle. It could be really cool if I could change my budget amount, and you’d let me add more items to the bundle — for a $900 purchase I can chose any 4 of 8 products, for $1100, I get 5 of 10, etc. I have a sneaky suspicion you’d get two things at once:
1. More sales overall — price points are big inflection points, and right now, I bet a lot of people are unhappily making the purchase they “must choose.” Twist their arms less, they’ll buy more, betcha betcha.
2. Customer insight in to the products they do and don’t like, which will lead you to smarter product development strategies.

Right now, everyone is forced to get all these things, some of which they neither want or ever intend to use.

My wife and I like to tease each other with the nickname Grumblefuss, sort of hinting at our persnicketyness, and general intent to hold things to high standards. She’s a graphic designer, and I do e-commerce stuff, various user experience, sales flow optimization things, so the internet gives us plenty of options for grumbling. She’s currently between full-time gigs, but a recent string of nice freelance work allowed us to rationalize spending some money.

In this case, she wants to upgrade her primary tool set to the newest version — Adobe CS4.  Generally speaking, I’m the spender in the family, and Jan is the saver, she makes the rational decisions, and I make the irrational ones. I had to push her to admit that it was time to upgrade her toolsets — employers are asking for the latest tricks, and the old versions of Photoshop/Flash/Illustrator were holding her back. So off we went to www.adobe.com to give them our money. I already knew from lurking on Adobe’s site that they had a discount deal on offer, and it was going to end sometime soon. So off we went to Adobe. The trip gave me ample opportunity to find room for improvement in Adobe’s purchase flow, which I’m about to share with you all…..

This is Adobe’s homepage — I pulled it this morning.  If you look very closely, there’s a text link in the news section that talks about the sale I was looking for. No other promotional art on the homepage. Even the “News” section is pretty sedate, done in that design treatment that leads me to ignore something. Especially in contrast to the beautiful art on the top and right hand side of the page.

After digging around a while, we found the link that leads to the offer. On click, we arrive at the landing page for the offer. As an e-commerce person, you often create landing pages for an offer — you don’t want to send people to the general page on your website for the product, since the message on that page might not be targeted enough for your offer. Say the offer is a limited-time deal, you want to put that all over the page, as a way to incite people to act. The thing about landing pages is you really want them to be clear, direct, and easy to act on. This one isn’t. First thoughts — nice image on the top, pretty striking design. Then I start trying to get to the meat of the matter — getting Adobe Products at a discount. Landing pages are powerful when the desired action for the merchant is the easiest thing for the visitor to do. In this case, I think Adobe wants me to get to this page, find my package and buy. First problem then, is finding my package.

I followed the link to compare suite editions, trying to figure out which package I want. I could go on a whole other train of thought about the current Adobe packaging decisions — I’ll save that one for another day. Let’s leave it at I have a hard time figuring out what I want without spending a bloody fortune.  Anyway, I get to the compare chart, I see which package has what features, but guess what — there’s no link to buy!!!! So I start acting like a click-monkey, and hit the colored text under the pretty box picture for the package I want.

Okay — now we’re on the product page — actually, a product content section — I look all over that page, and eventually see an ad on the right side of the page, It even says “Upgrade Now.” I must be in business now!!!

Here’s where things are really getting silly — that link leads me right back where I started. The landing page, with the pretty picture, and the huge chart! There are two links in the body copy, and then a long list of links in a chart. First thing I found missing was a buy link. Nice little columns of strikethrough text tell me what I can save, but there’s no link to buy! No buttons, no call to action. Jeez — do they even want my money? Well, in desperation, I look further and further down the page, and found nirvana — a link that reads “Buy” underneath the pretty box image.

I click that puppy. Open this image  — you’ll be blown away. I was asked to select a country for my store. Why? Is there some sort of channel distribution issue? Do they have trouble knowing where I come from, or what language I speak? Those are all in the browser request. This page was a real buzz-kill after all the findability joy I had gone through already.

Next page after that asks me to select a package. This really was crazy — I already spent 20 minutes trying to figure this out, and their linking system couldn’t keep track of it?

Here’s where I’m getting at on this post — yes, Adobe is the biggest act in town, and yes, I was pretty dedicated to make this purchase, but still, could they make it any more obtuse? Times are tight, the economy is giving people troubles, and in this day and age, do they really need to put any roadblocks in the way of people who are willing to give them money?

I can shoot a few more fish in this barrel — why do they use Flash for the purchase flow? I know it’s cool for presentations and stuff, but honestly, whenever I see that spinning flash wheel on a page, I feel like I’m going to have to wait a while. And waiting does not go along with purchasing. All this screen needs to do is show me my selection, repeat back to me who I am, and what I’m spending. That can all be done in a very lightweight fashion, a little text and an image. No need for the flash engine.

Next up, I log in, I go off to paypal, I come back, and what do I see in the middle of the page? A coupon entry field. That’s right, just another reminder that I don’t know enough to buy this, and in this case, I don’t know enough to have found an even better discount. Hint to Adobe — lose that box when you’ve already offered a discount, or hide it with a link. Really, the best way to deal with coupons in a smart site is to embed them in the link going in to the purchase flow, and never ask for it again. That way you give the deal to your intended customers, and you don’t have to worry about antagonizing those who don’t have a coupon, or getting abused by people who put your coupon up on Fatwallet.com, and costing you millions.

Alrighty then == what’s the takeaway? I’m pretty sure i can improve the conversion of this flow significantly with a few simple steps:

1. If you’re serious about the offer, highlight it on the homepage.
2. On the landing page, add a column of buy links. Let me poke around for info if I need to, but don’t make me poke around when I am ready to give you my money.
3. This one is a shot over the bow to the designers — be old school, and underline the links. At least the important ones, like “Buy Now.”  I’m all for aesthetics, but we’re trying to make money here, not re-invent how people interact with the Internet.
4. Make a guess on my country and language — hint, you won’t do badly starting with English. If you have some weird channel conflicts, please do a better try at getting me to my channel. How about a globe map instead of a huge list?
5. When I get to that check out flow, you need to remember the choice I made in the first place. Don’t lose track of that. It’s like I chose a book on Amazon, and got to the cart and had to find it again.
6. Hide that coupon entry field.

And for a big change — drop the Flash checkout code. When we were making this purchase, we watched that wheel spin at home for easily 10-15 seconds per page load. I know Adobe is proud of Flash, and want people to use it all over the place, but it’s really bad example, and not very trust-inspiring for me as a customer when I’m trying to buy. I kind of wonder how many potential developers of Flash shopping carts decided not to do it once they followed through the Adobe flow?

Maira Kalman — an illustrator, has written a beautiful narrative on a visit to DC at Cherry Blossom tiem, to listen to the Supreme Court, and reflect on success in general. Read it, it’s wonderful.

As a wanna-be rock star, and an e-commerce industry “expert,” I spend a lot of free time thinking about the record business’s downfall.  The record industry has a unique crisis going on, and plenty of critics/supporters. Read Bob Lesfetz for a lot of opinion about what’s wrong with them. Fans will take what isn’t given to them cheaply, but it is important to realize that fans still love their artists. Theft, in this case is often flattery. The movement to digital formats has done wonders for availability — when I think about the wealth of musical opportunities my son has that I never had, much less compared to the dearth of options my parents had (really, music was great in the 50’s, but there was almost no opportunitiy to hear Son House, or Baba Maal, or the Tibetan Throat singers for anyone but the nichesst of cogniscenti), well, when I consider how rich the listening options are, I’m blown away. In the very same time though, most of that music is unpaid for, or if purchased, purchased for a minimal fee. Crazy. You could say kids these days can’t appreciate what they don’t have to work hard to find, and that may be, but I digress.

Anyway — the thing I’ve been thinking about, and trying to find the angle for, is a return to hard goods. Hard goods can’t be digitally copied. Plastic albums, shirts, hats, cast-iron trinkets, framed works of art with real paint on them. Granted, reproduction is a bitch, therefore unit prices have to MUCH higher, but hard goods make theft a lot harder. And honestly, I’m partially on the side of the RIAA here — P2P sites are stealing Intellectual Propoerty from people. We may not feel much sympathy for the victims (sort of how we’d feel if told that the CEO of <insert Broken Bank here> had his prized art stolen from the walls), but still there’s a principle, and it’s getting violated. There are times I feel like the entire internet “economy” is like a bunch of kids tearing down the walls of the homes around us, with no ability to create replacement shelter. It’s scary, really, when you look at what’s happening to the entertainment and media industries.

Hard goods — the future’s in hard goods. Plus, they’re so much fun to hold.