I admit it. I am a demanding consumer. But, aren't we all? We want everything better, faster, easier, and more personalized than ever before. We want to feel like we're important to the companies we do business with. But why is it that despite every marketing milestone and breakthrough many web experiences often fail to meet our expectations?

Blame company structure or budget or legacy systems or leadership or the weather. But the more you excuse it, the worse it gets.

I've made a career out of studying, advocating for, and creating customer experiences and sharing them with clients, in columns, speeches, a book, and now this blog.

So, forget the excuses. Here you'll find a consumer perspective on what works, what doesn't, who's getting it right, and who's still in the dark.

Straight-forward. Unfiltered. Customer fanaticism.




about What Women Want

What Women Want is an intimate look at the consumer experiences and expectations of American women, whose collective buying power constitutes the largest economy on the planet. This study was created exclusively for the Annual Shop.org Summit, the premier gathering of Internet and multichannel retail leaders.

In an effort to help retailers better understand and reach female online shoppers, Kelly Mooney and Resource Interactive, together with BIG Research, sent a survey to 4,000 women and also conducted in-depth interviews with several dozen using the agency's proprietary research methodology, Shop & TellSM. This process paired girlfriends, sisters, roommates, aunts and nieces, mothers and daughters—all manner of female shopping partners—to hear their mutually instigated consumerist confessions. This extensive study yielded many insights, including a list of ten things that women want in their online shopping experiences.

  1. The big picture.
  2. To control the edit.
  3. Details. Details. Details.
  4. Experience by proxy.
  5. To pause and play.
  6. To act on inspiration.
  7. To be gratified at the point of inspiration.
  8. Full-service gifting.
  9. To be remembered.
  10. To feel understood.

Since Kelly presented What Women Want to 900 Internet and multichannel executives at the Annual Shop.org Summit in Anaheim in October, and to multichannel retailers in New York City in November, there have been numerous requests for more actionable intelligence about female online shoppers within specific industry sectors. In light of forecasts of women's significant economic impact on this holiday season, Kelly and her e-retail team decided to conduct their seventh annual holiday study using the above criteria-the digital decalogue for winning women online.

Learn more about the What Women Want study.