Theory: The Web is the great equalizer and, given the opportunity to access comprehensive, accurate and unbiased information about products they want to buy, consumers will choose to buy the products that are best for them, given price, features and various other details.
But is that really the case? Its clear that the larger retailers have an edge, with well-known brands and the relative comfort-food-security belief that theyll be around to stand behind the product later. Well, probably not, but at least they are seen as being more than some vendor that the customer has never heard of.
So lets fine-tune the question. Do consumers have a strong preference to buying from a particular large retailer, even if they believe a better product exists elsewhere?
Were not talking brick-and-mortar here, where parking and location—especially in these high-gas-price days—can have a huge impact on convenience. Were talking one retailers online site compared with another, where they are all equally convenient. With the effort required to surf to another site so minimal, would any retailers customer be so loyal as to pass up more attractive product offers at another large, comfortable national retail brand?
Joe Chin, CEO of Guidester, argues that they would. Guidester is a paid-search company that began life as Decidia. The companys core product is an extensive consumer product database finds for customers the most ideal product by asking an extensive series of questions about price sensitivity, feature preferences and other details.
The database works well—better than many others in this space—but any database is only as good as the data its based on. The more data included—assuming the recommendations are honest and intelligent—the better the results. And therein lies the intrigue.
The vast majority of the consumers who have used Guidesters database have done so while visiting various retailers—including Circuit City, CompUSA, Buy.com, J&R Music World and Ritz Camera—and clicking something along the lines of “Need Help Deciding?” or “Product Finder.”
The problem is that every retailer insists that the database only consider products that that retailer sells. So if the full robust database at Guidester headquarters knows of an ideal product for a consumer, it wont show it unless it happens to be sold by that retailer.
Chin gave eWEEK special limited-time access to the full database, which is generally not available to the public.
In the television category, for example, the full Guidester database looks at 1,834 products. At the Circuit City Web site, however, the Guidester database for televisions is limited to 152 products.
At Ritz Camera, its even worse, with the Guidester database for televisions only considering 56 products. Guidesters full database looks at products from 99 vendors. The Guidester version that Ritz Camera shows considers just 14 vendors. Another example: The full Guidester database shows 2,269 notebook computers, but the Circuit City Guidester database shows only 47 such products.
From CEO Chins perspective, thats exactly the way consumers want it. His argument is that consumers who venture to, say, Circuit Citys site have a strong preference to make the purchase at Circuit City.
Isnt it more likely that Circuit City visitors might have a slight preference for Circuit City, but just happened to visit that site first and will be equally comfortable buying from another household-name retailer site, especially if the consumer were able to get a better product at a better price?
Chin says no, on the convenience and confusion rationale. Lets say that all the retailers permitted Chin to show the full database to visitors. A consumer looking for a camcorder, for example, will expect to be able to just click on the best one and purchase it. But if its not sold by the retailer whose site the consumer is visiting, the consumer will get a frustrating message, Chin argues, that directs him or her to find the product at some unspecified retailer. Not a good experience, he said.
Ill begrudgingly concede that Chin makes a fair point, but as a longtime fan of ConsumerReports and other product-comparison sites, I still find it hard to believe that consumers actually prefer not knowing about products that are—for the sake of argument—more appropriate for their needs.
Next Page: Do retailers really want their customers getting the best products?
Do Retailers Really
Want Their Customers Getting the Best Products?”> Lets now get into the business realities of this situation. The retailers clearly do not want their customers getting the best products out there. Retailers are content with letting consumers choose the best products from the handful theyre offering at the moment.
This raises a branding question for Chin. When I started looking into Guidester, I was impressed with the sophistication and the thinking—and the programming—that went into their database. But I found the results on various major retailers to be humorously disappointing.
For example, I visited TigerDirect, which was one of the sites that Guidesters PR had suggested I hit. The test I did was searching for camcorders. The first question asked—without further context—was if I preferred to have the best technology. Sure, who wouldnt? Suddenly, that single answer reduced my choices to two models. I then answered that I considered myself a “novice or intermediate camcorder user.” Boom! The system had narrowed down my options to the one ideal camcorder already. Not bloody likely.
I then tried the same camcorder search on CompUSA, which was another suggested site courtesy of Guidester PR. (I mention that they recommended it so that you dont think I sought out the weakest of their retailers. These were their showcase retailers.)
CompUSA lets me get to a third question, but when I said that I wanted to be able to create high-definition video, it gave me a window that said it had zero products that matched and asked me if I wanted to undo my answer. If I then agree and lie about my answer, why would anyone expect its recommendations to be on target?
Consumers only see this e-commerce database on various retail sites, and if their experience is as, well, nauseatingly awful as the camcorder searches were, wouldnt that start to weaken Guidesters brand reputation? When that question was posed to Chin, he said he wasnt concerned and pointed to surveys—from unspecified sources—that showed how happy consumers were after using Guidester on various retail sites.
That may be true, along the lines that someone in the 1960s would be very satisfied with a mainframe computer, as long as that person didnt know about far more attractive computing options. Consumers today are starved for the kind of product-selection-assistance info that Guidester is selling, and they are happy for whatever help they can get. That doesnt mean they wouldnt be a lot happier with far more information.
Retail e-commerce execs need to have a lot more respect for their customers and for themselves. They need to respect their customers by giving them full access to unbiased data about the widest range of products possible, in the way that many car Web sites provide extensive unbiased comparison information about rival cars.
The retail e-commerce execs need to respect themselves by showing that they know that they consistently choose the top products to sell and that a comprehensive product comparison database will show that to be true. They may not offer the best products every time, but by treating their customers as adults, they will win more sales.
Amazon.com is a great example. People know that they are offering the identical books (and other items) as elsewhere, usually for more money.
Whats a key difference? One fascinating difference is customer comments about products, including many that are not flattering to those products.
A company less enlightened than Amazon would have said, “Theres no way were going to use our Web space to show comments that criticize the very products were trying to sell.”
But Amazon knew that by being fully open and transparent, it would make them more credible and sales would result.
Think of the lessons that Macys learned in Miracle on 34th Street. As a practical matter, consumers will likely flock to the retailer that offers the full unabridged product database that Guidester offers. Enlightened self-interest can be a wonderful thing.
Evan Schuman is retail editor for Ziff Davis Internets Enterprise Edit group. He has tracked high-tech issues since 1987, has been opinionated long before that and doesnt plan to stop anytime soon. He can be reached at Evan_Schuman@ziffdavis.com.
