Strada del sole, a Swiss manufacturer of sunglasses, is offering service on their website that allows you to try different models with the help of their webcam and a small program that projects the sunglasses on your face. Here is what it looks like, if you have a webcam you can check it out at their website.

While the software is not perfect (the glasses could be more realistic and resize automatically to the size of your head) this is nevertheless an interesting approach to solve the problem of allowing customers to virtually experience a real-world product.

Shoppers want to experience a product before they buy it. If we don’t have a chance to test a product before we buy it we have to trust others through recommendations and base our buying decision on these recommendations. Online retailers face the challenge that even though it is easy to order products on the Internet, the process of finding the right product is difficult for customers if they don’t have any prior experience with the product they intend to buy.

Innovative solutions are needed that allow customers to experience products in a digital environment and to form a purchase decision. Strada del sole made a first step into this direction.

Do you know any other examples of companies successfully bridging this gap? Let us know in the comments.

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Checkout Smartshop and other similar mobile price comparison software might soon be on the list of most-hated technologies of brick-and-mortar retailers. Price comparison for shoppers has become a lot easier through different online services yet most traditional brick-and-mortar retailers avoid these platforms since they cannot match the competitive prices on the Internet due to different, higher costs in their their retail stores.

Luckily for these retailers their customers so far had no chance to check prices for the products offered immediately in the store. Customers interested in price comparisons had to do it manually after their visit to the retailer at their PC at home.

Along came the iPhone (as well as other mobile phones) and an application call Checkout Smartshop that allows instant price comparison and online order or products that you just see standing in front of you in whatever retail store you are.

Checkout Smart Shop is an easy way to find prices (local and online), reviews, and local information for a product. Here is how it works:

1. Enter a barcode (UPC) number (faster than typing in a product description on the web!)
2. Now you’re searching!  Checkout automatically starts by bringing you to product reviews so you can see what other people liked about the product you’re looking at.  Checkout also automatically filters out the less useful reviews so you see things other people thought were good to know (don’t worry, the rest of the reviews are just a click away if you want to see them).  By default you see review summaries so you can tell at a glance what people thought, but full reviews are also just a touch away.  Note that even after you come to the reviews screen Checkout will continue to look for and load reviews.



3. If you want to look beyond reviews, you can look at either local or online prices.  For either category you can see the price listed, and choose to visit the web site if you like.

The challenge is that this is another building block to bring online experiences into traditional offline environments through the use of mobile computing. Retailers will be confronted with a lot of questions.

What are the consequences for shoppers? How will it change impulse shopping behavior? Does the knowledge of other prices redirect impulse shopping behavior from the location where it was triggered (the brick-and-mortar store) to the online store?

Do we see a new generation of shoppers that see brick-and-mortar shops only as an outlet to experience the product but the purchase is made online right in the store where the cheapest offer can be found?

What does this mean for retailers? Should retailers fight these mobile applications and try to focus on keeping the existing business model?

Or should the focus shift towards creating a truly extraordinary shopping experience, redesigning the supply chain and through this ensuring maybe not the cheapest, but probably competitive prices.

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The IBM Institute for Business Value published a report titled "Why advocacy matters to retailers" which identifies the key attributes that turn everyday shoppers  into loyal advocates. The main question is of course: What drives advocacy?

Building customer advocacy is harder than simply meeting customer expectations. In our sample, 78 percent of all consumers said their primary retailer meets their expectations, as compared to 21 percent who are Advocates. Understanding the expectations of customers and their reasons for shopping are simply “table stakes” or qualifiers for “getting it right,” but are not sufficient to transform customers into Advocates.

A retailer’s ability to fulfill customers’ expectations and understand their reasons for shopping simply helps get consumers in the door – it does not turn them into Advocates.

But the essential finding on attributes that drive customer advocacy is this:

It is the shopper’s experience with the store that transforms an existing customer into an Advocate of the retailer or, conversely, into an Antagonist. After meeting customers’ basic needs, fulfilling expectations and understanding their reasons to shop, then retailers can develop advocacy.

The report is based on the results of surveys conducted across five retail segments – grocery, large-format apparel, mall-based specialty apparel, drugstore and online.

The following table shows a summary of key initiatives that help to deliver a customer-focused strategy.

 

Download the full report here.

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