Internet Retailer Releases 2008 Top 500 Guide

If you're looking to see who's the king of the e-commerce mountain, look no further that this year's Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. The guide gives you a comprehensive look at the top 500 e-tailers (based on overall web sales).

This year Apple made a huge splash, pushing SonyStyle out of the top 10. Collectively, the top 10 retailers represent over $45B...now let's just say those companies probably know a thing or two about the way an ecommerce site should be designed and the features it should offer.

I find this information extremely useful not just for competitive research, but for finding overall trends when it comes to design and usability. Recently I completed an in-depth study of some website analytics, hoping to better understand the buying behavior on our company's websites. What I learned about the actual behavior was very enlightening, but I really wanted to help move our capabilities forward in a much stronger fashion.

Using the same sites as a benchmark, I started looking at how certain retailers designed their own product pages. Perhaps I could find something in the way they had gone about similar challenges (presenting a mix of product data with user generated content like reviews. ways to incorporate multimedia into showing your products, tabbed browsing, global navigation...the list goes on).

It was very helpful to step away from what our direct competitors were doing and instead see what these top 10 companies have done to create the expected web experience in customers' minds.

This year's top 10 list (in order):

Amazon.com Inc. ($14.8 B)
Staples Inc. ($5.6 B)
Office Depot Inc. ($4.9B)
Dell Inc. ($4.2 B)
HP Home & Home Office Store ($3.4 B)
OfficeMax Inc. ($3.2 B)
Apple Inc. ($2.7 B
Sears Holding Corp. ($2.6 B)
CDW ($2.4 B)
NewEgg ($1.9 B)

Source: 2008 Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide

What this means for other businesses:

Like it or not, we all live in a post-Amazon age, and if anyone has trained us on what the expect when you're buying online, it's these guys. Sometimes it helps to step back and look at what Amazon is doing, as well as some of the other bigger names like Staples, Office Depot, Dell, and HP Home and Home Office.

You might be surprised, or you might be inspired. But a single word of warning; remember that these sites do what they do because it makes the best business sense for them. Some features may seem counter-intuitive, but you can rest assured if you're seeing them on these sites, they've been tested and re-worked over time to make the biggest bottom line impact. So just remember this warning before taking a surgical knife to your site and trying to mimic exactly what Amazon does!

Marketing Sherpa's 2008 Email Awards - Dell Racks up Two B2B Wins

Back in March, Marketing Sherpa released their list of 2008 winners for their annual Email Awards Gallery. Dell was featured as a winner in two of the categories for their B2B business, both of which are featured below.

Dell's come a long way since the Dell Hell days on the community front, but this is the first time I've seen some press on the email front. Love them or hate them, there's definitely some great content in the email examples featured below that you should be able to take away and get some great results for your own business.

1) Injecting website ratings and reviews into Dell's email channel. Bold, direct, and much more effective than generic customer testimonials. I've only seen stats from Petco on the effectiveness of using this UGC in the email channel, but in their case it boosted click-thru rates 5 TIMES over their normal response rate.

Dell Email Example: Ratings and Reviews

2) Simple, direct messaging in Dell's auto-email response to abandoned cart owners. As any brick-and-mortar retailer will tell you, there's money left on the table when someone loads up their cart but leaves it alone somewhere in aisle 12. While your average $8/hr employee won't be motivated to chase the cart's former owner out into the parking lot, auto-emailing online shoppers is also a great way to recapture some of those potential dollars. I've seen cases in the past where retailers will send you offers for free shipping or 10% discounts if you return to the site and complete your purchase. Dell didn't offer either of these options, but did win Marketing Sherpa's award for this category for another direct, easy-to-digest auto-email reminder.

Dell Email Example: Abandoned Cart Auto-Responder

What does this mean for other businesses?
While we won't see results for either of these two uses of email, it definitely begs some thought.

1) Ratings and reviews are migrating from websites to other channels. Dell's example here is specific to email, but you're also seeing others out there (WalMart is one example) where reviews are showing up in physical stores as well. In many ways, it's the same idea you find when you go to any good independent bookstore and they've got featured reviews from employees that are also avid readers, only in this case retailers are leveraging the power of their customer's reviews to drive more customers back to their site and getting more of these visitors to convert.

Don't have ratings or reviews to share? Or are you in a service business that isn't in the "Rate This Product" game? I'd argue that even those businesses selling service offerings could still stack those offerings against a 1-star or 5-star spectrum, but consider using customer testimonials about your services instead. The end goal is to leverage content from your customers to market to other customers, given that you'll get much better results using this approach than from a canned and carefully crafted corporate marketing message, so you just need to consider how best to pull this off in the absense of a warehouse full of 5-star products.

2) Automate the emails you can, but make your message friendly on the eye and easy to take action. Ever gotten a text-only email from a company that screams "useless form letter"? Worse still, ever get a similarly useless email where you have absolutely no idea what it is you're supposed to do with it? Are you doing this today without even knowing it? Take five minutes and look at what you're doing today, then compare it to the Dell example above. You may be fine, but if need be, don't hesitate to get out your marketing scalpel and make a few targeted incisions. Your customers (and hopefully your CFO) will thank you for it.

And one last parting thought. If you're a small business that isn't using auto-responder email technology for cases like abandoned carts, new user registrations, or order/ship confirmations, you've got to get with your ISP right away.