Days Out is a separate branch of on line activity for the Silver Cross brand, intended to be a more user focused site that actively encourages on user interaction. Visitors can leave their own reviews and comments on places they’ve been with their children and rate them out of five stars. The site has been designed so that it is easy to use, and reviews and attraction can be uploaded with minimum fuss.

Designer Andrew Rees says: “When designing the Silver Cross Days Out website we really focused on ease of use and how to make the most of the great content. The layout is bright, spacious and fun reflecting the subject matter whilst always being clear and informative. Parents can quickly search for and discover great locations relevant to to their location and preferred activity type. The site has a real focus on the social aspects of the Days Out concept, integrating them throughout the site allowing parent recommendations and we look forward to seeing the community and site naturally grow.”

It is a curious paradox that the day which is traditionally dominated by the deity devoted to love and adoration should also be remembered (albeit as a footnote) for the demise of ‘LittleGossip’, the fallen angel of online interaction…

LittleGossip is, or was, the ‘social networking’ channel where users could chat anonymously about anyone and everyone. Originally developed as a virtual water-cooler, it was developed for sotto voce prattle between colleagues. Whilst it became self-evident that the intended audience – generally speaking – had neither the time nor the inclination to get involved, it didn’t take a genius to identify a likely demographic who have both commodities, namely school children. As such a number of schools started to appear, supported by playground commentary, and with it a wave of anti-bullying concerns surfaced from all quarters including ‘mumsnet.com’ and national publications such as The Daily Mail. LittleGossip responded by attempting to de-list schools, but the groundswell of interaction proved incredibly difficult to contain, with many slipping through the net.

Whilst the worst fears of the website’s detractors never truly materalised, LittleGossip was nonetheless closed yesterday accompanied by the almost Orwellian statement: “Voice without ownership means that a person’s worst side can surface.” The closure in itself is noteworthy, but of greater significance is the notion of self-regulation, which underpinned its retirement.

Throughout the meteoric rise of forum interaction witnessed in the early 2000s people tended to cloak their identity with random or unidentifiable user names. This practice allowed them to drift from conversation to conversation unrecognised, and thus arguably less accountable for their point of view. (A practice which is still evident, albeit less so, today.) However, social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn went some way to demystifying online conversations, precisely because you had to establish your connection to someone by providing information such as your real name or prior relationship before you can talk freely to them. Moreover, the recognisable nature of a person’s profile forced most users to regulate themselves, precisely because comment is easily attributable.

Significantly, the concept of accountability was also adopted by the owners of LittleGossip themselves, as it was they who took the decision to close the site. They claimed that “despite taking extensive measures to prevent malicious and unwanted comments a minority of irresponsible people have continued to abuse the site, something that we can not support”. It would be romantic to overstate this action, however it is interesting to note that the operators of a site with significant traction are prepared to pull the plug on their creation, before they lose control.

We should recognise their decision, and the wider implication that whilst comment should be encouraged, not being able to recognise a detractor feels inherently ‘anti-social’, and can create an environment which is nasty, brutish and short-lived.

Should all companies now consider using social media to allow an open policy of communication with their customers as a means of tackling complaints or problems?  How can this benefit your business today?

Whilst social media may have been around for a considerable period of time and have a proven track record, for many companies it remains the unknown. Those only just dipping their toe in the social media pool have questions, especially around the implementation and meaning of transparency.

This is a dictionary explanation for the word transparency:  “The social value of access to information held by centres of authority”.

We who are in the business of knowing social media like to talk about the absolute relevance and importance of being forthright and honest with your customers today. If you want to get people to believe in you, then it would seem only fair that you put forth all your brand issues to be discussed within a public arena. One side effect of being popular in today’s society is that you cannot hide from gossip or from those wanting to discuss both your positive and negative points. Public opinion holds so much sway with an online audience that a brand can quickly become an overnight sensation with barely any publicity. How often do you find that people talk about brands based purely on recommendation?  For many it is not so much what the company or brand is, but rather who is following them.

Who likes them? Who Tweets about them? Who listens? Who cares? They care…and that is all that matters.

Of course there are incidents when transparency has to be called into question. Does everyone really need to know exactly what Richard Branson likes to eat for breakfast, or where Steve Jobs walks his dog? Surely this simply interferes with their business image?

Whilst transparency in the interest of business is arguably a highly positive trend giving the consumer an unrivalled power never seen before, even us social media experts are still constantly trying to work out how it will best work for business in the long run. When everyone out there has a desire to be ‘real’ and have a voice, at what stage does the point of transparency get blurred between companies trying to overcompensate for their mistakes by being cuddly and friendly towards their audience?

More importantly, do we need to know everything? Does this benefit your business?  Furthermore, does your audience care about how transparent you are? At what point does transparency tip over the edge and become too much information?

A brilliant blog written by Paul Ford entitled The Web is a Customer Services Medium argues that the web and social media can have a massive impact where customer services are concerned because of their ability to deal with queries in an open manner. If you manage to get your customers talking amongst each other about your products from a knowledgeable standpoint, then already you have empowered your audience and inadvertently made them brand ambassadors;  something which he succinctly states in his last paragraph. People who want to talk about you care about you. It is as simple as that. It is up to them whether they like you or not. Scary thought, I know.

If you are still having doubts, think about it from this perspective: many of the biggest brands in the world have as many haters as they would lovers: Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nike, Toyota …I could go on.

What is important, from a business perspective, is not to be scared of the criticism that comes with transparency.

Embrace it because it might just do the last thing you expect; it might make them love you.

The average person in the UK spends £81 a month on online retail, according to recent figures, and retailers keen to get a share of this lucrative market have been launching new and updated sites focusing on commerce in the third quarter of this year.

Results from the IMRG/Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index show that British shoppers spent £5bn online in July, which represents a year-on-year rise of 18 per cent – and is a possible sign that the recession is lifting. Retailers are now attempting to tap into this potential market with sites that aim to bring the offline experience online and use social media to drive traffic.

Linford Haggie, managing director of consultancy Graphic Alliance, which specialises in online retail, says, ’The economic circumstances are certainly affecting people’s ability to spend online.’ He adds, ’What is happening a lot now is that the commerce site is becoming the final stop in the online journey. Social media is drawing people in and engaging them with the brand’s compelling content before they go to the commerce site at the end. Because of social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, content can be pushed at the consumer, as well as having them search for it.’

Graphic Alliance worked on the relaunch of the Conran Shop website, which went live earlier this month. The consultancy collaborated with the Conran Shop’s in-house team on the design of the site, while E-Inbusiness worked on the site build, based on an Episerver platform. Liam Butler, head of marketing at the Conran Shop, says the £250 000 project aims to drive online sales from their current level of just under £2m a year to £10m a year in 2014-15.

Butler says one aspect of the new site’s development will be to use social media to engage shoppers. The Conran Shop has appointed consultancy We Are Social to work on this aspect.

The site features a Sketchbook tool, which allows users to create ’personal mood boards’ by placing items in their wish lists on to a variety of backgrounds to create virtual rooms. These can then be shared with others through e-mail and Facebook. Butler says the aim is to exploit social networks further, ’so that Twitter can act as online concierge for us’.

The Conran Shop site itself ’aims to bring the offline experience online’ and ’ensure that the product is the hero’, according to Haggie. Butler says, ’A lot of companies go down the route of very expensive lifestyle photography – this can suck up the budget.’

He says the Conran Shop site is currently in phase one and is set to launch in France, the US and Japan in the next three months. Phase two of the site will roll out over the next six months, he says, allowing time to stabilise the platform and roll out more functionality. Butler adds, ’We see phase two rolling out with video or 360-degree coverage of products, so we can tell some of the background story.’

Like the Conran Shop, Japanese clothes retailer Uniqlo, which relaunched its website last Thursday, also aims to harness social media, in this case to alert shoppers to its new site. Dentsu Japan, which designed the site, also developed two social media initiatives in the run-up to the launch, called Lucky Machine and Lucky Counter.

Lucky Machine was an online pinball game in which players were given the opportunity to win a £1000 cash prize as well as online discount vouchers. Crucially, to get balls for the game, players had to invite friends to play using Facebook or Twitter.

The Lucky Counter initiative, which ran in the week leading up to the site launch, encouraged users to tweet about selected Uniqlo items to reduce costs – the more tweets there were, the lower the cost became. The site itself, like the Conran Shop site, offers more product images, with increased zoom levels on the products.

Uniqlo’s high street rivals Gap and Zara have both launched transactional websites in the past weeks, both designed in-house, while H&M is set to launch an in-house-designed site on 16 September. All three sites are global roll-outs and are posited by the brands as part of their ongoing expansion plans. Pablo Isla, deputy chairman and chief executive of Zara owner Inditex, says, ’The Internet and the world of social networking are indispensable tools and extraordinary channels for communication and fit perfectly with our group’s philosophy.’

Online shopping

51% of British adults shop online

76% of people in the UK have Internet access

UK shoppers spent £5bn online in July 2010

Source: IMRG/Capgemini

Luxury retailer The Conran Shop had a website redesign last week, and I’ve been checking out the new look version.

The site contains a number of expensive designer products, but is it doing enough to showcase these big ticket items?

Homepage

The homepage has a clean, uncluttered look with good presentation of the featured products. I like the fact that users can click to get the price and details of the products shown, and head straight to the product page if they want to:

This seems obvious, but it is something many sites don’t do. Having used lots of valuable homepage space to promote products, it makes sense to lead customers straight to product pages if they are interested.

Navigation

The drop downs on the homepage can be fiddly, since the links are small and close together, while white text on a black background can be a strain on your eyes.

If you click a sub-category from the drop-down menus, it often doesn’t bring up further sub-categories (or should it be sub-sub-categories?) on the next page, just a repetition of the labels from the drop down.

The products from the selected sub-category, in this case tea and coffee are shown, but unlike many e-commerce sites, there are no further filtered navigation options on the left hand side.

This particular category (tea & coffee) brings up 65 products, a mixture of espresso makers, kettles, teapots, mugs and more, but the refinement options, unless you are looking for products from a particular designer or collection, do little to help narrow the search:

The site search works well, returning accurate results and dealing with misspellings. It can actually be a more effective method of narrowing product selection than by browsing the site.

In general, the links are small on the site, and could be made to stand out more. For example, every product on the site search results page above has a blue ‘buy now’ link, but these links could be clearer. This also means that viewing and clicking the links on an iPad is difficult to do without plenty of pinching and zooming.

Product pages

Product pages look good, but they are short on detail; delivery charges aren’t that easy to find, while there are a few irritations.

For example, there is a colour palette on the product page for this chair, which is a good feature let down by the fact that there is only one image available, so clicking on any colour but crimson will produce a ‘no photo available’ message.

While there is a broad range of prices on the site, there are many big ticket items, but the product images and options don’t do as much as they could to showcase designer furniture.

The product images are high quality, and can also be seen in full screen view, but that’s it. When viewing a chair for £5,000, it would be good to see it from different angles. The product pages would benefit from tools such as the 360 view used by Schuh, or the kind of 3D planning tools used by MyDeco.

There are links to add the product to a MyDeco wishlist, but this requires registration for new users, and it can be lengthy process to get from the Conran product page to the room planner on MyDeco.

I found that a number of products were out of stock when I arrived at the product page. While it can be annoying to find that products are unavailable, at least the site gives shoppers the options of an email notification when the product becomes available.

This is a good idea, but the site could also appeal to shoppers who don’t want to wait for an email by suggesting alternatives to the selected item, or else checking offline stock and pointing shoppers to the nearest store.

The pop-ups are slightly annoying too. Shoppers have to first click the basket link to leave an email address before typing it into the box, while they have to click the small cross to close the pop-up, instead of simply clicking elsewhere on the page.

Checkout process

Once products are added to the basket, the basket link at the top right of the page is too small, and it isn’t possible to mouse over to get a summary of contents and charges. Shopping basket links should be easier for users to find.

The site handles the issue of registration smoothly, providing a login option for existing users, while new customers can simply enter an email address and continue on to the checkout.

Later in the process, customers are offered the option of creating an account, which is a good way of capturing customer details. However, the site asks customers to open a pop-up window to see the benefits of registration, but this information would have been better explained in a couple of bullet points next to the tick box.

A contact number is visible throughout the checkout process, which is good practice, as it offers reassurance to customers and a clear channel for getting an answer to any questions about their order.

The process has not been enclosed and the top navigation options are still in place throughout the payment process.

This is now an unusual sight for website redesigns, as the top navigation bar offers a distraction for customers when retailers would like them to focus on entering address and payment details, and there are a number of links which will take them out of the process altogether.

Conclusion

The new Conran Shop website generally does the basics reasonably well; navigation and site search is functional, most information that customers will need is accessible, and the checkout process is smooth enough.

As Matt Curry pointed out in a previous post though, many websites have yet to deliver a luxury e-commerce experience. The Conran Shop website doesn’t really differentiate itself from most other e-commerce sites, and doesn’t do as much as it could to sell big ticket items.

Matt points out that luxury brands need to do more than simply deliver a standard e-commerce experience, and should seek to delight customers and to carry some of the in store experience online.

Take a look at Temperley London’s facebook page , click on the ‘Store’ tab and you’ll see a page that acts as a shop front to the Temperley online shop – directly from Facebook.

Of course, Temperley aren’t the first brand to embrace this idea (brands have been using FBML (Facebook Markup Language) in Facebook to modify pages for a while now). However, what’s so clever about the Temperley Store page is that website and social media administrators at Temperley do not need any knowledge of HTML or FBML in order to modify the page.

In fact, this page is created and controlled entirely through their CMS. So, if they wanted to change their hero product, layout of the page or link through to a specific product instead of to category pages, they could do this quickly and easily in house.

Although it seems as though Facebook will be launching a payment platform very soon, this is currently not available and (for many reasons) may not be right for them in the future anyway. So, for Temperley London, this method of directing Facebook users straight to purchase on the website is  a perfect way of monetizing their page quickly and efficiently.

Earlier this week we wrote a post on 5 of the best WordPress plugins. Just so you know, WordPress is a blog publishing application and content management system – and we love it! So, when our friends at Tank came to talk to us about their new digital fashion magazine built entirely in WordPress, we couldn’t wait to get stuck in.

If you’ve not seen Because yet, either online or in NMA’s site inspection feature, go check it out. It’s a digital magazine which offers the very best in fashion, accessories, beauty, jewellery and culture and has been quoted by NMA as being “high-end fashion pornography… Because magazine is a beautiful fashion and culture click-to-buy site”.

So, how was it created? Well, the entire site was implemented in WordPress and modified using a wide range of plugins. However, because they came to us with a set of specific needs, some extra modification was required. All user account creation and management functionality was skinned from the front end – which includes the login, registration, and profile pages. Logged in users can also save their favourite items to a personal wishlist so that they can go back to lust over their favourite items again and again!

Upon launch, the new eCommerce website for Temperley London, the British designer label synonymous with timeless glamour, exquisite craftsmanship and collections desired by women the all over the world, was received by a number of fabulous reviews from the online fashion world;

“Plenty of sartorial surprise in store… get ready for the virtual stampede” (Vogue)

But first, let’s take a closer look at how this was achieved…

Objectives:

Firstly, a unique online destination shop had to be created, entirely different to other fashion and luxury brand websites. Secondly, best practice eCommerce functionality had to be seamlessly integrated into the Temperley brand experience. Thirdly, the customer journey had to reflect Alice Temperley’s aesthetic and the distinct style of the stores in London, Los Angeles and New York.

How we achieved them:

Within the new website, all items are displayed using an unconventional but intuitive carousel, designed with traditional rails in mind and far removed from the ‘grid’ layouts of many other online shops. Select a product from a collection/category and a wealth of content appears in scrapbook style including catwalk video, detail views, red carpet shots and design inspiration. All of this supporting media can be viewed in astonishing detail using a full-screen high-resolution product zoom, especially developed for this project.

Items can then be easily added to ‘My Rail’ without disrupting the browsing experience before either purchasing or saving for next time. A special section entitled “We Like” features Alice Temperley’s vacation photos, behind-the-scenes video footage, styling tips and music recommendations. Online visitors can also get a sneak preview of upcoming projects, see footage documenting the creative process behind the collections, and read updates and interviews which offers a unique insight into the world of Temperley.

The result:

Graphic Alliance has brought the world of Temperley to life on screen by re-creating a flash-style website using javascipt and HTML. The customer journey is unconventional yet intuitive; innovative horizontal navigation manages to maintain usability whilst maximising functionality. A huge amount of interactive content – all fully searchable and accessible by the search engines – accompanies each of the individual products and collections.

Stuart Bowler, Project Director at Graphic Alliance, said:

“the real innovation with this site is the way that all of the background supporting media, telling the brand story, has been directly associated with the products. With four collections, well over 100 runway looks, and over 600 SKUs, this has required some intense rewriting of the way eCommerce data works.”

Additional reviews:

“Browsing the new website almost compares to seeing the clothes in person, and that’s as good as it gets from your desk” (Teen Vogue)

“The latest (and very exciting) addition to the internet is here!” (Glamchic)

“The fashionista’s favourite” (Grazia)