Seth Godin's Blog, page 262

Five ingredients of smart online commerce

While it might be more fun to rant about broken online forms and systems, we can learn a lot from sites that aren't broken as well.

Consider the Ibex store. Here are five things they do that make them successful online:

They sell a product you can't buy at the local store. This is easily overlooked and critically important. Because it's unique, it's worth seeking out and talking about. Just because you built a site doesn't mean I care. At all. But if you build a product I love, I'll help you.

They understand that online pictures are free. Unlike a print catalog, extra pictures don't cost much. Make them big. Let me see the nubbiness or the zipper or the way you make things.

They use smart copy (but not too much).

They are obsessed with permission. Once you sign up, you'll get really good coupons and discounts by email. Not too often, but often enough that my guess is that they make most of their sales this way. 25% discount on a product just like a product you love--just before Valentine's day? Sign me up.

They aren't afraid to post reviews. Even critical ones.

No site is perfect, of course, and I hesitate to tell you that this one is. I'm sure there are glitches and your mileage may vary. But the checkout is simple and the customer service, while not trying to be Zappos, is pretty good too.

Penguin Magic, I just realized, follows all five of these rules as well. While the site is very different in look and feel (and has a different audience), they're using the same principles.

The amazing thing to me is that none of this is particularly difficult to do, yet it's rare. The state of the art of online retailing is moving very very slowly.

In defense of RSS

Lots of buzz today about RSS (dying or not dying).

If you're not using it, can I strongly suggest you give it a try? I use Newsfire. Not sure the particular readers matters, though.

Here's what you need to know:

It's not particularly difficult to keep up with 200 blogs you care about in less than hour using an RSS reader.

RSS provides home delivery. Instead of remembering where to click, or waiting for a post to get all buzzy and hot, the good stuff comes to you. Automatically and free.

Subscribing to a blog is easy. Just click here for my blog, for example. In Newsfire, you can paste the URL of any blog and it automatically finds the RSS feed for you.

RSS is quiet and fast and professional and largely hype-free. Perhaps that's why it's not the flavor of the day.

Making meetings more expensive

...might actually make them cost less.

What would happen if your organization hired a meeting fairie?

The fairie's job would be to ensure that meetings were short, efficient and effective. He would focus on:

Getting precisely the right people invited, but no others.

Making the meeting start right on time.

Scheduling meetings so that they don't end when Outlook says they should, but so that they end when they need to.

Ensuring that every meeting has a clearly defined purpose, and accomplishes that purpose, then ends.

Welcoming guests appropriately. If you are hosting someone, the fairie makes sure the guest has adequate directions, a place to productively wait before the meeting starts, access to the internet, something to drink, biographies of who else will be in the room and a clear understanding of the goals of the meeting.

Managing the flow of information, including agendas and Powerpoints. This includes eliminating the last minute running around looking for a VGA cable or a monitor that works. The fairie would make sure that everyone left with a copy of whatever they needed.

Issuing a follow up memo to everyone who attended the meeting, clearly delineating who came and what was decided.

If you do all this, every time you call a meeting it's going to cost more to organize. Which means you'll call fewer meetings, those meetings will be shorter and more efficient. And in the long run, you'll waste less time and get more done.

It's just better ketchup

In a discussion on why Heinz has such high market share for ketchup in the Pittsburgh area, one commenter posts, "It's just better ketchup. Their other products may be closer in quality to the competition, but for Ketchup nobody compares. When you go to a restaurant and they have a different kind, it feels you are eating at some cheap cafeteria."

This is really telling, but probably not the in the way Matt intended.

Heinz doesn't make better ketchup. Heinz makes better Heinz ketchup. There's a huge difference.

If you define ketchup the way most people do, you define it as, "the ketchup I grew up with." Or to be more specific, "the ketchup my mom served me, the one that I was allowed to serve myself when I turned three..."

One thing that marketers do is sell us a feeling, not a set of molecules or bits. When you spend $3 on a bottle of ketchup, that's what you're buying. And Matt and the rest of us are so brainwashed we rationalize it as 'better ketchup.'

That's not the way we do things around here

Please don't underestimate how powerful this sentence is.

When you say this to a colleague, a new hire, a student or a freelancer, you've established a powerful norm, one that they will be hesitant to challenge.

This might be exactly what you were hoping for, but if your goal is to encourage innovation, you blew it.

That's not the way we do things about here

Please don't underestimate how powerful this sentence is.

When you say this to a colleague, a new hire, a student or a freelancer, you've established a powerful norm, one that they will be hesitant to challenge.

This might be exactly what you were hoping for, but if your goal is to encourage innovation, you blew it.

Insurgents and incumbents

Incumbents compromise to please the committee and bend over backwards to defend the status quo.

Insurgents have the ability to work without a committee and to destroy the status quo.

The game is stacked in favor of the insurgents, except--

They're under pressure from boards, investors and neighbors to act like incumbents.

It takes guts to be an insurgent, and even though the asymmetrical nature of challenging the status quo is in their favor, often we find we're short on guts. ... and then the incumbents prevail.

Maybe next year...

The economy will be going gangbusters

Your knowledge will reach critical mass

Your boss will give you the go ahead (and agree to take the heat if things don't work out)

Your family situation will be stable

The competition will stop innovating

Someone else will drive the carpool, freeing up a few hours a week

There won't be any computer viruses to deal with, and

Your neighbor will return the lawnmower.

Then...

You can ship, you can launch your project, you can make the impact you've been planning on.

Of course, all of these things won't happen. Why not ship anyway?

[While others were hiding last year, new products were launched, new subscriptions were sold and new companies came into being. While they were laying low, websites got new traffic, organizations grew, and contracts were signed. While they were stuck, money was being lent, star employees were hired and trust was built.

Most of all, art got created.

That's okay, though, because it's all going to happen again in 2011. It's not too late, just later than it was.]

#YearInReview What did you ship in 2010?

This might be a useful exercise. Doesn't matter whether it was a hit or not, it just matters that you shipped it. Shipping something that scares you (and a lot of what follows did) is the entire point.

[Funny, it's actually difficult to publish a list like this... maybe that's another reason we hesitate to ship, because we don't want to tout too much].

Here's a baker's dozen from the year I'm wrapping up... this obsession with shipping can really make things happen:

Launch Linchpin

Book launch in New York, including triiibes dinner

Worldwide blog tour, including book signing with Steven Pressfield

Launch and run the Nano MBA program

Launch Roadtrip—Boston, DC, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles

Two worldwide Linchpin meetups--more than 1500 meetups held

Squidoo launches social gaming system and hits the top 90 on Quantcast

Speech at the ISB in Hyderabad

$40,000 for Charity:Water in July

$275,000 for charity from Squidoo to celebrate 5 years

13,000 people at Catalyst in October, including Graceful booklet

Launch and run the FeMBA program

Announce the Domino Project with Amazon and hire accomplices to help launch it

I didn't do all this myself... far from it. Thanks to Ishita and the thousands of readers and volunteers and colleagues, including the Squids, that pitched in and made these projects happen. There's also another ten or fifteen projects that I started but couldn't find the guts to finish or ship. If it doesn't ship, it doesn't count.

Your turn to post a list somewhere... You'll probably be surprised at how much you accomplished last year. Go ahead and share with your friends, colleagues or the web... don't be shy.

Sadly stuck with the status quo

JetBlue is ordinarily smart with their web site, which is why their broken system is particularly useful to take a look at. I'm guessing that at some point, management said, "it's good enough," and moved on to more pressing issues. And then, of course, it stays good enough, frozen in time, ignored, and annoying.

The problem with letting your web forms become annoying is that in terms of time spent interacting with your brand, they're way up on the list. If someone is spending a minute or two or three or four cursing you out from their desk, it's not going to be easily fixed with some clever advertising.

Here's an illustrated guide to things to avoid, JetBlue style:

First interaction wasn't so great. If you even bother to build a "please wait" page, be sure it says something useful, or perhaps interesting, as opposed to confusing. Should I press continue?

Throughout the form, JetBlue frequently asks for dates (of birth, say, or issuance). Everywhere else on their site (and in the country they're based) the format for dates is July 10, 1960. But here, just this one time, the format is 10, July 1960. And you can't just type in the date, which is fast, you need to wrestle with pull down menus, menus too dumb to list all twelve months of the year at once, but instead requiring you to scroll if any date is after April...

Alert readers know that pull down menus with more than thirty total choices are a petty annoyance for me, and this one is particularly vexing. There a more than a hundred and fifty countries here, including a few I have never heard of. The United States, home to 90% of JetBlue's customers, is listed near the bottom, but not at it (hint: if you insist on this sort of error in form design, list the popular choices at the top, at the bottom and in alpha... no penalty for multiple listings). (A far better alternative is the auto-completion guessing trick Google now uses in search).

Worse, if you try to type the country (U...n...i) it takes you to... TUNISIA!

Four passengers; 8 times I had to scroll down all the way, then slowly scroll up and then click...

It gets more annoying. For each passenger, I had to choose, "Travel document type". But of course, there's only one travel document permitted, "Passport" which hardly requires a pull down choice I think. Rule of thumb: when in doubt about a question, don't bother asking.

They also wanted to know the nationality of traveler, which is fine, but then two items later, they wanted to know, "Issuing country." While I'm confident that there are a few travelers who have a nationality in one country and an issuing country in another, my guess is that it would be considered a nice gesture if the form remembered your answer from three seconds ago and automatically entered it for you, no?

After painstakingly filling out the form, I was presented with these two buttons at the bottom of the page... hmmmmm.

Doesn't really matter which one I pressed, though, because lady and the tiger style, I got this:

NOOOOOOOO!

And I had to start the entire form over again, from the beginning, with no fields remembered.

I know, I know, this is a rant. But it's a rant with a point:

Fill in your own forms. Make your executives do it. Watch customers do it. See what your competitors are using. Improve the form. Don't use pull down menus for more than 12 choices unless there really is no choice.

"Good enough" is a hard call, but I think we can agree that most online forms, aren't.