*** Consumers Want One Thing, Merchants Deliver Another

Internet Retailer Magazine provides this article based on interviews with 2,472 online shoppers.  Shoppers ranked the “helpfulness” of a list of functions on retail websites; merchants ranked the “value” of these same functions. 

Areas where the consumer gave high rankings but merchants gave low rankings:

Product Comparison
Customer Reviews
Order History
Loyalty Program

Areas where the consumer gave low rankings but merchants gave high rankings:

What’s New
Upsell / Cross-sell
Top Sellers
Gift Suggestions

The author of the article does a good job of laying out what this all means about customer behavior and I concur so I won’t get into it.  It’s pretty clearly an example of Marketing Non-Productivity though.  How could this happen?

Well, probably because there were no marketing people involved with the design of the basic shopping cart, or if there were, they didn’t know anything about customer behavior.  The myth of cross-sell and upsell continues today.  You don’t cross-sell or upsell anything to somebody they didn’t already want.  Trust me.  So to waste all this time on cross-selling and upselling instead of producing better marketing, design, and systems is ridiculous.  Offering someone a related product that they would have bought anyway if they had only been able to find it is highly unproductive.

However, the above situation does sound like a very good setup for my friends at Bazaarvoice and Kobie Marketing

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