Driving E-commerce Customers to Retail Stores

By Paul Miller

A 2009 year-end survey of store traffic conducted by ShopperTrak, a provider of shopper traffic counting technology, showed a reasonably encouraging year-over-year increase of 3.5 percent. But store traffic has been so light over the past couple years that retailers, and their software vendors, are seeking ways to not only get consumers into stores, but also take them by the hand and guide them right to the cashiers. Case in point, take two recent retail technological innovations from Escalate Retail and NCR.

Earlier this year, Escalate unveiled an interactive store kiosk application designed to help shoppers find what they're looking for and get right inside their minds on the spot.

The kiosk uses Microsoft Multi-touch and Silverlight technologies to provide extensive product features and what it calls an "endless aisle" of shopping backed by rich media. It even gives access to some social shopping features. The tool reacts to several points of customer touch and gesture contact — no mouse, no keyboard. Store customers access the store's entire inventory by browsing videos related to what they're looking for.

They also can read customer reviews on the spot, and create or update shopping lists and  gift registries.

Why make it so easy? Escalate's thinking is that retailers don't want customers to walk out of the store to comparison shop online. They'll likely find something else and not return. Escalate wants retailers to beat web and catalog merchants at their own game by providing the tool to let customers conduct their online shopping research right in the store. Further, the tool provides far more detail than shoppers can see by picking up products and reading package labels.

The Microsoft Silverlight technology provides a "deep-zoom" capability for interactive product browsing, using the same  product content, pricing and customer reviews more commonly seen online — namely, on home computers.

Research at Home, Buy in the Store
Also this year, NCR unveiled a software tool that lets shoppers do a little online homework first but, like Escalate Retail's kiosks, gets customers to seal the deal in stores. The company is offering a coupon-to-card application to its multichannel offer management software, called NCR Advanced Marketing.

The program helps consumers find online coupon websites, choose coupons, then pick the stores at which they'll redeem them. The NCR software transmits the selection directly to the stores to activate the coupons.

When consumers present their loyalty cards in the stores, the NCR program confirms the items they picked from home for the coupons. It automatically transmits this data to the store cash registers, applies the discounts, then transmits the coupon information to the source — the product vendors offering the coupons. The platform supports percentage discounts, cash discounts and buy-one-get-one-free gimmicks.

Finally, it lets retailers build incentive offers based on such factors as basket size, item mix and loss leaders. They then can transmit promotional messages through email, their own websites and even at point-of-sale displays, all coordinated through this order management system. Results, of course, can be tracked instantly.

And like the Escalate offering, the NCR technology is designed to make in-store shopping that much easier for consumers, to not only encourage them to come into stores, but to keep them there and not let them out without making purchases. ROI

The former editor-in-chief of All About ROI and Catalog Success magazines, Paul Miller is vice president and deputy director of the American Catalog Mailers Association (pmiller@ catalogmailers.org).