Online storeowners take note: broadband use is surging. And that's creating big changes in how merchants sell on the Internet.
Between March 2005 and March 2006, broadband adoption zoomed 40 percent, according to a Pew Internet Life report. Pew reports that the total broadband population jumped from 60 million to 84 million users. Other researchers forecast that 84 percent of users will connect via broadband by 2008.
This major shift to broadband produces an equally major shift for online merchants. The prehistoric dial-up era was a period of static online stores, with basic product shots accompanied by text. But the broadband era is all about sound and movement and advanced interactivity. Today's top Internet stores make significant use of rich media.
Rich media, broadly defined, is everything beyond text and static images. It's audio, video, Flash and photos that can be zoomed, scrolled or otherwise changed by the user. It's a level of interactivity that allows shoppers to customize products as they wish.
Online shopping, in other words, is beginning to feel more like shopping in a real world store. We're more able to see and hear and examine goods like we do at the local mall. (In fact we often get more information online than at the local mall.)
The trend is clear: the greater the broadband penetration, the more that rich media shapes e-commerce. Is your store positioned to keep up?
Rich Media: Ready for Prime Time?
Before you go out and spend a fortune on audio and video for your site, realize that experts disagree on where we are in the evolution of rich media and e-commerce. While some say it's very much here, others claim that certain rich media applications are still ahead of the curve.
A Jupiter Research consumer survey found that many of the higher-end rich media applications — audio, video, and 3D views — "are not a strong motivator when consumers are trying to decide what to buy," says Jupiter analyst Patty Freeman-Evans.
However, certain lower tech media applications do boost sales, she says. Specifically, she points to tools like zoom, the ability to view a product in many colors and offering multiple product photographs.
"The success we've seen is really in color change, where you can change the color of the sweater n the model. And that really gives consumers a wonderful way of envisioning the product."
She refers to these tools, somewhat tongue in cheek, as "less rich media" She says, "''mildly wealthy' media, or 'middle class' media is very helpful to consumers."
In fact, she says, one of the most persuasive sales is decidedly low tech: allowing customers to refine their search results by price, brand, style, attributes, etc.
"It's things that make their shopping more efficient," she says.
As for rich audio-video applications, "First of all, there's not that many retailers using it yet, so there's a partially a chicken and egg (situation)," she says. "Second, the sophistication of the use of it to really motivate and drive purchases hasn't really been learned yet."
However, she notes that QVC is "moving heavily into using video to drive sales." The site offers a plethora of video clips, from live streaming of current show to on-demand promotional videos.
Producing video is too expensive for most sellers, she notes. But "the big guys, like a QVC or the Home Shopping Network have rich troves of video that they can repurpose. They will be the pioneers in this area, and probably prove out — or disprove — the concept."
"I think we'll see a lot of testing," Freeman-Evans says.
Not surprisingly, some leading rich media providers disagree with Freeman-Evans. Rich media is "absolutely here and now across all merchandise," says Sheila Dalgren, VP of marketing for Scene7, a rich media technology provider.
Joe Chung, CEO of rich media development firm Allurent, feels that the online shopping world has passed the tipping point in terms of using rich media. "I think we're seeing a pretty huge change," he says.
He concedes that, until not that long ago, there hasn't been enough of a critical mass of broadband users to justify producing rich media. But he says that's changed. "Most of our clients report 75 to 80 percent of customers coming in over broadband."
For anyone who doesn't believe rich media is ready for prime time, Chung points to eBay's $2.6 billion acquisition of Net telephone provider Skype. The auction giant plans to allow buyers and sellers to communicate via VoIP — surely proof that static e-commerce is a thing of the past.
The rise of rich media "has been an evolution," he says. "In some sense there's nothing radically new happening, but on the other hand, because you have such a big percentage of users on broadband, now you're really starting to see it hit mainstream."
Rich Interaction
Chung points to a form of growing form of rich media he calls "rich interaction." For example, Google Maps, a fully interactive program allowing users to drag and zoom maps at all levels of detail for all of North America. In the past, "This was the type of application you got only when you were using a desktop application," he says.
An example of the pioneering use of rich interaction in e-commerce is the Mini Cooper site. The site enables users to customize their own car, from body color to dashboard details to radio type. As the user customizes, the dollar total updates to reflect the cost of choices. Due to the quality and number of photographs used, offering this interaction via dial-up would be cumbersome.
Chung explains that a "rich interaction application" is a custom-written piece of software that enables a Web site to offer advanced user-site interaction. The application downloads in the background, seamlessly, without needing input from users.
In the dial-up era, these apps had to be pretty small. "But now it doesn't need to be so small anymore," he says. "Now you can send someone a couple megabytes of software. A couple megs of software is a lot of software - it can be really functional."
One such rich interaction application is Allurent's shopping cart module. The demo is here.
The cart's use of rich media to enhance suggested selling techniques is particularly persuasive. In response to items already in the cart, various related products slowly fly into view, fade, then are replaced by other related items.
The cart interacts with users as they fill out forms. If a shoppers makes a mistake, instead of having to fill out the entire form then hit 'Submit' — only to be told of a error — a small flag pops up the moment they type something incorrectly.
On Demand Rich Media
Scene7, based in Novato, California, is the kind of rich media technology provider that will see growth in the years ahead. The Scene7 servers host photos, videos and other rich media for a variety of e-commerce sites, including QVC, Williams-Sonoma, Land's End, and smaller Net merchants.
In the past, if an e-tailer wanted to offer shoppers the option to view an item in multiple colors or patterns, that merchant had to load multiple product shots onto their servers. The Scene7 server software enables a single image to be viewed many different ways. Images are "doctored on the fly."
So a single photo of a shirt can be presented as green, red, blue or any other color, or in any pattern the e-tailer wants to show. This streamlines and simplifies the publishing process for site owners.
"Anything you want to apply to an image, we can render on top of," says Scene7's Sheila Dalgren.
Scene7 sells its service both "on demand" and on a per-license basis. Dalgren says the firm has many small Internet merchants that buy on demand "because it's the cheaper way to go — you don't have to run your own servers." The entry level service can go as low as $1,000 or less per month, she says.
As an example of a smaller retailer that uses Scene7 is Delightful Deliveries. As you'll see here, the zoom and pan option can work well with a single photo.
Popping Up All Over: Examples of Rich Media
Spytown, which sells surveillance equipment, offers multiple product views of many of its items. When users scroll over Spytown's product pages they see enlarged photos of the gear. Owner Howard Geschwind says the technique has helped sales. "This has done a lot for us."
On a light-hearted note, FlyPenTop offers an engaging interactive display in which shoppers doodle on a sketchpad, followed by four quick video testimonials from hip young users.
Bare Necessities, a woman's apparel retailer, offers advanced photo zoom capabilities. On this page, the users can zoom all the down to the thread level, or zoom out to see the entire garment.
The high-end lamp retailer Lamps Plus allows shoppers to click to view a larger photo, then scroll across that photo to examine any design detail.
The Gap's Quick Look application is clearly a leader in rich media. Users click on a "Quick Look" link to bring up a floating mini-window, allowing them to rapidly select color and size and see their choices as they make them. A selling point: users don't need to open a new page to dig for details.
This collection of rich media demos by Web development company Heck Yes gives many examples of zooming, flying and swooping product displays. It features products by Les Paul guitars, New Balance shoes and an RC car maker.
The Future of Rich Media: Big Sellers vs. Small Sellers
Allurent's Joe Chung notes that rich media tends to be expensive, and so its use is becoming a major dividing line between big, well-funded e-commerce sites and small mom and pop sites.
In the past, even the smallest e-tailer could put up a good front. With a slick, well-designed site, a home operation could appear to be a big time outfit. But, Chung notes, due to the expense of rich media, small merchants may not be able to keep up as online stores grows ever more dependent on the allures of rich media to draw shoppers.
"The large retailers are flexing their muscles here because they have the resources to invest in this technology and push ahead."
James Maguire is a contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. His column appears every Monday.
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