Kelly Mooney's blog about the online shopping experience from the customer's point of view -- MooneyThinks.com

Shawfloors.com Insanely Great Rug Giveaway

In the market for an area rug? Or, just feeling lucky?

Full-disclosure right up front.  We just launched a new campaign for our client, Shaw Industries. Problem is, the rules dictate, I/we/RI associates and family members are not eligible to win. But, YOU are! Here's the deal: Shaw is giving away over 1,000 rugs! One rug every hour, every day for the next 60 days. Play as often as you like or until you get caught wasting time at work.

While you're at it, check out the visualization tool, order samples, or upload your own photo to visualize a new floor in YOUR home. Pretty cool.

Timing is, Unfortunately, Everything

A fellow Resourcian's shopping ire got forwarded my way this morning. Not so much a bad shopping experience--the e-commerce transaction went smoothly--but it was the post-purchase communications that sent her to that place where e-retailers really shouldn't send their customers, the realm of resentment and mistrust.

As the story goes, after a month of carrying around the most recent catalog and promotional postcards from J.Jill, and narrowing down to a handful of items for fall, she went online to buy them. (Typing in item names from the catalog was surprisingly unhelpful, but she eventually found what she wanted and made the purchase.) As she reports, she felt good about the experience, up through checkout.

And if you ever buy online, you know that once you click the "submit" button, at least one automatic email drops immediately into your in-box--the typical Thanks for your order, we received it, we're processing it, and so on. Which she got. Still, feeling good. It was the second automatic email that caused the stir.

It was a nice html piece that started with "Thank you for your recent purchase" but was immediately followed with "discover more just-reduced styles." They posed the email as not just a thank you, but a gift from the retailer to the customer. In reality it was a redirect to the sale section on the site.

I can see from the retailer's standpoint they wanted to leverage an existing customer's interest in the brand--it's much easier than converting a new customer, but they also have to be careful not to bruise customers with the power and speed of email. Sending the wrong message at the wrong time is a turn-off. And twisting a buy-more-stuff message into a thank-you-for-your-business message is just unfashionable.

POLO Makes Great Sport of Interactive with Rugby.com

When Ralph Lauren sets its mind on digital marketing it does so with the energy of a team that plays to win.

A recent email from Polo introduced me to its new concept and web site, Rugby.com. Wow. What a compelling, engaging and personal way to sell an entirely new concept! Note that I had visited the NYC store last summer and discovered that 2 of the preppy yet chic sales associates were from my hometown and remarked, "Oh my god! You're the same age as my mom!" Uh....exit stage left. Wrong store for me. ; )

I digress.

Anyway, I like the section called Around the Corner. It's a monthly video featuring a customer and his or her city. I sat there for minutes watching a customer named Sherwin talk about his favorite restaurants, bars and music store in New York City. He wasn't just selling Rugby clothes, he was selling me the lifestyle, or  the "whole package," which made the clothes a necessary part of an experience a consumer might be yearning to have.

The site is chock-full of great content and beautiful interaction design. Some of my other favorite parts:

• A page of Rugby store associates modeling their favorite Rugby clothes and telling why they loved them.
• A playful blog on "what's hot and what's not"
• The Rugby collection, which is a dimensional delight to navigate through, oh, and informative
• A style guide with quick little videos that really do guide you
• The history of the rugby shirt, which tells a great story and tells you how to make your own at one of their stores

Interesting, that they're bold enough to request a mobile phone number on the home page. Now, I have to test that experience. More later.

With such a strong online experience out of the gate, Rugby.com is sure to win a crowd of fans.

Shoeboxed.com Aims to Satisfy Need for Convenience

I'm up for just about anything that makes my life easier. If it's going to shave off minutes, reduce stress or increase efficiency, I'll give it a try. So when I heard about Shoeboxed.com, a start-up created by Duke grads, I thought I'd give it a look -- most of all, because I am a big fan of fresh thinking and the bold ambitions of students.

The site bills itself as an antidote for spam and identity theft, specifically, by giving members an email address to use for all online shopping (and supposedly reducing spam in the inbox). The other big sell is organization. They keep all your receipts (even the hard copy ones if you scan them in) in one place. I considered it worth a tour since my receipts are bulging out of my wallet, scattered throughout my handbags, piled on my desk and typically deleted from my email.

I've poked around a bit, but I have to say I'm not yet sold. Maybe I'm just so used to having one email identity from which I do all that I want. Or maybe I'm not terribly burdened after all by the emails I already get because I sign up for them, deem them "junk" or just keep mindlessly deleting them.

But then there's the receipt storage service. Truth is, I'm not going take time at work or at home to scan those receipts. Just isn't going to happen. It's not on the top 10 list (or 20 or 30 for that matter) of ways to improve my life. However, I do want retailers to track my purchases, save my warranties, and make recommendations based on my history. Even more, I want a universal username and password that works at every online retailer so I don't forget all the goofy combinations that I've had to contrive over the years. Thank goodness for Google Checkout. Now that's a convenience worth my time. Maybe Shoeboxed and Google should talk.

Launching The OPEN Brand

What a whirlwind of a week! I just left Las Vegas, where I had the opportunity to share and discuss more ideas from my new book The Open Brand in my keynote address at Shop.org's Annual Summit. What a great event--and some nice coverage from the blog Variable Markup, and an article and video from WebProNews.

And while the Shop.org presentation marks the beginning of a busy season on the road, the writing,editing and tweaking of the book itself ended this week. See the picture below of the book in layout!  Plus, we've just launched a great Open Brand microsite and wiki. Please come check them out--you can download a sneak peek of the book and learn about the O.P.E.N. Experience Framework. But most importantly, please engage in the dialog and share some of your own thoughts!

Change Entertainment Today with People's Choice

People's Choice invented power to the people more than 30 years ago in the form of an annual awards show. And now we at Resource are thrilled to help the brand amplify that power by 365!

The freshly re-launched pcaVOTE.com reinvents People's Choice as a year-round brand, ripe with scoop, community dialog and, my favorite, voting--where you can tell Hollywood what you think about the timeliest TV, movie and music topics. Voting = influence, and for an entertainment enthusiast, it doesn't get any better!

Not entertained with entertainment today? Go to People's Choice (pcaVOTE.com) and start influencing Hollywood!

Borders Offers Inspiration, But Still a Beta Experience

Recently, I had a chance to dig around the beta version of Borders Stores' new site and I was pretty intrigued. A huge improvement over the current site with lots of  relevant, engaging content  loaded with goodies like Borders Media, Borders Book Club, playlists, and Rewards and Perks. The design is clean and fresh. And, many of the experiential aspects of the site were well done, but a few of core interactions need some fine-tuning.

On the homepage, there is a fun feature zone called Magic Shelf. (I wonder if that was one of those internal, placeholder names that accidentally made it to the site. What do you think?) The Magic Shelf consists of many shelves for things like New Books, New Music, and a personalized area for more timely items, like the "Remembering Pavarotti" shelf. Cool idea.

Unfortunately, the Magic Shelf is unintuitive to navigate (the browsing cues don't show up until you sniff them out with your mouse, and what I realized later was a navigational chart isn't clearly defined or explained). While I appreciate the bookshelf metaphor, it doesn't give you any help reading (like enlarging) the titles, so it's much like standing in front of the bookshelf in the store, except I'm standing 10 feet away.

I also like the Guest Shortlists--lists of book, music or movie recommendations from famous people. Celebs like Stephen King, Anna Quindlen, Barack Obama, Beck, and Art Buchwald explain why they like each title. Apparently this is a feature they've had on the existing Borders Stores' site, and after a few clicks I found myself back on it. I hope this will be fixed, because right now it leads you into a different, not-so-nice place and leaves you there.

For me, once I was inspired, I wanted the immediate gratification of purchase. Not just the ability to reserve in store (which is cool but not my preferred method of shopping for books and music). Yes, this is a beta, I know. In transition from the Amazon platform to a new one. So, my need for instant gratification wasn't met...but sounds like it will be soon!

Misguided by Williams-Sonoma

I take words seriously. Interactive marketers have to. Space is small (despite the bottomless cup feel of cyberspace, you don't have all the space in the word to ramble on), time is short because attention spans can be and, yes, every word counts.

So the subject line in a recent email from Williams-Sonoma Home really intrigued me.

Shop Our Fall Decorating Guide

Wow, not just the new fall products like everyone else is blasting me about (online and in my overstuffed mailbox), but a guide. A way to think about decorating for fall. I have my own ideas on these matters ,of course, but who doesn't love to hear from an expert once in a while, especially if that expert is a home goods company?

So I opened the email. Let me rephrase that, I opened the email FIRST. Admittedly, I actually opened it before personal and business emails (maybe it was the weekend of anguishing over remodeling decisions that got me). It started out well. There was a decent image of products arranged together, some individual shots (kind of generic, but not awful), and, above them a paragraph that made a point about mixing materials. OK, I'm paying attention, you still got me. Then I clicked through.

The Fall Decorating Guide was 66 words and a bunch of thumbnails. That's their idea of a guide? More like a catalog. No guiding. Just selling. No thanks.

Tiffany's Lacks Luxe Navigation

If you're a regular reader of my blog, you may recall a post I did last September about the Tiffany web site, as I browsed/searched/struggled to find a gift for my business partner to commemorate the founding of RI. Since then, nothing's changed on the site. Except, they've added more products, which has complicated the experience even further. Just go to Tiffanys.com and try to find, say, a pendant necklace. Good luck. You'll find 94 screens with 5 images per screen. You do the math. No navigation by necklace length, gem type. Better yet, price point. Perhaps Tiffany's  thinks that its customers don't shop that way. Or that, their brand shouldn't communicate that way. But, even the savviest of shoppers want a variety of ways to narrow options--quickly.

I knew what I wanted but it took 28 clicks. I'm serious. 28. Not on-demand or engaging. Feeling as if I deserved a reward after this exhaustive acquisition process, I had dreams of a shipping deal. Free shipping, say, for just sticking with it. Nope. How about charging me $15 for ground shipping -- to mail a box about 2 1/2" square. That was the best offer. And it arrived more than one week later. Even the little turquoise box couldn't make up for this less-than-luxe experience.