Although the previous site was only updated 2 years
ago, he describes the need to keep ahead of competitors
as ‘a cat and mouse thing’.
But new site advances must be combined with com-
petitive prices, Wall says:
Online customers are price-loyal, not retailer-loyal. The
customer is only as loyal as the cheapest price they can
pay for a product. It means your competitors are only
ever one click away. We have to do everything to keep
our customers on our site. Getting them to pay that
price to you, rather than your competitor, means that
you’ll need to exploit the constantly-evolving benefits
of digital technology to make their buying experience
on your site as fluent and satisfactory as possible.On-site search capabilities
Part of the new site is improved on-site search capabilities
from Endeca, which powers the search of Walmart and
Circuit City sites in the US. Search is important to increas-
ing conversion rates, and so increasing sales, since if a
user is not presented with a relevant product when they
search, they are likely to try another retailer. The search
capability should strike a balance between delivering too
many results and too few. Channel Register (2005) reports
that dabs.com hopes to increase conversion rate by up to
50% by updating the site’s search and navigation fea-
tures. The current conversion rate is 3.5% and it is hoped
this will be increased to nearer 5%.
Endeca’s new search allows users to select products
by attributes including price, brand and even size and
weight. This method of narrowing down the search should
result in the customer being left to choose from a list of 10
or 20 products rather than hundreds.
Another aspect of the business case for the new site is
to ensure the customer makes the right decision since
product returns are costly for dabs.com and annoying for
the customer.
Dabs.com marketing director Jonathan Wall explained:
‘When we launched the website in 1999 people knew
what they wanted. Now we find a large tranche of cus-
tomers might know the type of product they want to buybut not which model they want. The new site is about
guiding them through the process.’Accessibility
Since dabs.com has tech-savvy customers, it has to sup-
port them as they adopt new ways of browsing.
Dabs.com found that by 1995 nearly a fifth of its users
were using the Mozilla Firefox browser, so a further
requirement for the new site was to make it accessible to
users browsing with a range of browsers such as Firefox,
Opera and Apple’s Safari.Marketing communications
Marketing communications approaches used by dabs.com
are summarised in Chapter 8 in Mini Case Study 8.5
‘Electronic retailers cut back on their e-communications
spend’. For customer acquisition, the main communications
tools that are used are:
Search engine marketing (the main investment)
Referrals from affiliates (this has been reduced)
Online display advertising on third-party sites (limited)
PR
Sponsorship (shirt sponsorship for Premiership team
Fulham).
Sources: Channel Register (2005), IT Week(2003), NCC (2005)Questions
1 The management of dabs.com have invested in
several major upgrades to its online presence in
order to improve the online customer experience.
Assess the reasons for the need to invest in site
upgrades by referring to the dabs.com example. To
what extent do you think major, regular site
upgrades are inevitable?
2 Compare the quality of the online customer experi-
ence of dabs.com by visiting the site and those of
its competitors such as http://www.ebuyer.comand
http://www.euroffice.com. Explain the categories of crite-
ria you have used to make your assessment.Summary
Summary
1 An effective online customer experience is dependent on many factors, including the
visual elements of the site design and how it has been designed for usability, accessi-
bility and performance.
2 Careful planning and execution of web site implementation is important, in order
to avoid the need for extensive reworking at a later stage if the design proves to
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