Half a year after opening up it’s online operations, the website of Danish retailer Superbest comes in ten of ten in reach compared to the websites of other Danish retailers, even though Superbest is the only of the competitors to offer full-blown online grocery shopping. This is among the findings in my latest report. I say: lower the prices (convenience alone won’t do it), start building trust through social networking activities and make the services known through advertising.
Largest grocery store retail-websites in Denmark. Adult users (15 years+). Source: FDIM/gemiusAudience, April 2010.
Ten of ten is really not impressing
Superbest.dk reached 90.000 adult danes during april 2010. That’s not a high number. In total 795.500 Danes visited at least one of the top ten Danish grocery store websites. Superbest.dk in this way only had a grab at 11,6 percent of all visitors. A number which is spot on the Superbest market share in the “real” world measured in terms of total sales (11,5 percent in 2009). Only none of the competing websites offered more than at most sales of non-food items from their websites. By that token superbest.dk should have performed better.
Also the visitors to the superbest-website was found only to visit the site some 1,4 times in average during April 2010. A score which once more puts superbest-dk near the bottom of top-ten list. If users really had embraced the online grocery shopping concept, they’d have visited the site several times a week.
Convenience won’t do
The reason why superbest.dk isn’t doing any better is, I think, threefold. First, the declared value proposition of superbest.dk is to make things easier – not cheaper – for the consumer: do the grocery shopping in the night or during the day-time, whenever it suits you best, at work or at home. Manage your own time – and be willing to pay for it: the regular offers from the physical outlets don’t apply online.
Looking at the data, however, there’s nothing to suggest the actual users of superbest.dk feels this way. Those most in need of time – families with two or more kids – are underrepresented at superbest.dk with 13.000 visitors in total in April while those with plenty of time – the singles – are overrepresented, featuring some 25.500 adults living by themselves.
Convenience, it seems, won’t do the trick alone. However much Danes want to save time, they also want to save money! While they might be willing to pay to have the goods delivered to their doorsteps, they don’t like the goods themselves to be overpriced.
(I suspect the fear of cannibalization to be a part of the the reason for adopting the convenience strategy. Fear however has never been a good advisor. And lack of cannibalization not a measure of success in it’s own right.)
Confidence is needed
Several surveys have shown confidence – broadly speaking – to be one of the main obstacles to e-commerce. People want to be sure they get what they’ve ordered, delivered at the right time to the right price with no hidden fees. And online, consumers are always have this nagging fear, that something in the online store, it’s payment or delivery processes may be broken in some way. Or, worse, that someone in the process is deliberately trying to hustle you.
This is particularly true about Superbest, who fights a distrust legacy. In September 2009 – just prior to the launching of the online store – it was revealed how seven Superbest-stores had re-packaged, re-labelled and sold old meat, causing a public scandal and forcing Superbest to fire those responsible for the handling of meat. As a consequence consumer trust in supermarkets dropped, and Superbest suffered a severe loss of credibility.
Online, however, nothing is done to address concerns like these. The online grocery store looks fine and professional – and actually works just as you’d expect. But the dialogue is missing. The ability of the site to let consumers raise concerns and ask questions – and to let Superbest answer those question, sorting out misunderstandings or -perceptions whenever they occur – are non-existing. Customer testimonials are non-existing. Likewise, there is no integration to external consumer-sites, who could endorse – or criticize! – the workings of Superbest.dk. No official Facebook group. No Twitter-profile.
Customers are consequently left without any way to find out whether Superbest.dk is or is not worthy of being entrusted with their shopping list.
Tell us about it!
One final factor contributing to explaining the Superbest.dk-lack of success is – advertising. Superbest simply hasn’t been running any ad-campaigns telling customers to get online. And it goes without saying, that as long Superbest themselves tries to keep their online store a secret, nothing much happens.
As mentioned, Superbest may have had other corporate communication priorities for the past half year than to ensure maximum launch of superbest.dk. Namely trying to minimize the consequences of the “old meat scandal”. This also could explain the lack of social networking: when threatened on it’s life, many corporations seek as much control over the situation as possible. Even though a proper use of social media might actually have helped Superbest regain consumer-trust at large.
When (and if) things settle down, Superbest might have a second shot at the online retailing market. When the meat scandals are forgotten they might find a way to go forth and meet the market and the consumers face to face. Embracing criticism, comments and dialogue, and shouting out loud that Denmark has now a first-class online shoppping store.
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“E-handel og dagligvarer på nettet i Danmark. Superbest.dk-casen” 18 pages, 4 illustrations.
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Use of social networking elements on either your own site or on Facebook clearly correlates with customer satisfaction. This is one of the remarkable facts I’ve dug up in my latest report: “E-commerce, trust and social networking – the case of Danish online video game stores” investigating Amazon, Coolshop and Fona among others.
What I’ve done
What I’ve done is first to identify the eight largest online stores selling video games or accessories in Denmark. Then I’ve evaluated their use of social media, either at their own site or at Facebook, and categorized them in groups ranging from “none” to “a lot” integrated social networking. Trust-scores I’ve gathered from Trustpilot.com. And the results are strikingly clear: the more social networking elements employed, the higher the trust-score.
Frequently returning to the store
The findings is even more remarkable since I’m also able to show a clear positive connection between trust-scores and the usage of the online stores: the higher the trust-scores, the more frequently users returns to the store.
Happy customers returns more often online
Thinking about it, It’s hardly surprising that happy customers return more often than unhappy ones. However this probably is more so in an online shopping environment where issues like “what stores are within walking distance?” won’t be able to distract you from following your gut feelings: shop at the stores you like the best.
Spread the good news; dampen the bad
As for the connection between Facebookish behaviour and trust-scores the logic runs as follows: mechanisms whereby customers can express themselves to other customers helps to spread the good news, when customers are actually happy and serves to show the store in question to be responsive, listening to customers complaints, when complaints arises.
The three Facebook-effects
This leads to the following:
Existing customers are hence reinforced in their positive impressions, to the extend they are positive in the first place. This leads to higher trust-scores.
If existing customers have negative experiences with the store in question, they might feel relief simply by being allowed to raise their criticism at an officially endorsed site. At best, they’ll eventually forgive mistakes made by the store. This might lead to less negative evaluation and higher trust-scores.
Users who are not yet customers will be directly influenced by positive endorsements (“this sounds like a good place for me to shop”), while criticism (to the extend, off course, the store’s able to provide adequate explanations for it’s behaviour) creates a feeling of responsiveness and willingness to deal with mistakes when they occur. Both off which will lead to higher trust-scores, when the customers eventually makes his first purchase.
The eight sites dealt with in the report are amazon.com/amazon.co.uk, cdon.dk, coolshop.dk, komplett.dk, elgiganten.dk, fona.dk, gucca.dk and wupti.com.
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“E-commerce, trust and social networking – the case of Danish online video game stores” 15 pages, 6 illustrations, 2 tables.
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Literally: moms spend twice the amount of time e-banking than does their male counterparts. And they’re outnumbering the dads in the check-out lines of e-commerce sites as well.
These are among the main findings in “Money and gender in Denmark: e-banking and online shopping″ – my latest report, published today. Find reference below.
If anyone should still be led to believe this whole Internet-fuzz is mostly a boys-with-pizza thing, now is the time to think over: the Internet simply solves problems, attracting the ones who need its services. And if men have ever been in charge of running the family economy in Denmark (and I believe this has been the case somewhere back in the 20th century), this is clearly not the case anymore. On the contrary: paying bills and seeing to it that the kids are well-dressed is predominantly a woman’s affair, it looks like.
And it’s not just about your sex. It is about the kids. Looking at the online check-out lines, you’ll find more than 14 percent more women with kids living at home than women in general. Or rather – that’s my hypothesis – it the changed structure of the family, propelled by the presence of kids in the household that makes the difference.
E-banking figures at the same time shows the activity of men to decrease with some 10 percent as they assume the father-role. Women stays on level when kids enter the equation, but spends more time, resulting in mothers spending 82 percent more time in the e-bank.
The report builds on data from the two leading check-out payment systems, DIBS and Paypal, and – for the e-banking part – data from the six most popular e-banks: Danske Bank, Nordea, Jyske Bank, Nykredit, Sydbank and Portalbank (powering a host of smaller Danish banks). Primarily as measured by gemiusAudience for FDIM.
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“Money and gender in Denmark: e-banking and online shopping”. 15 pages, 9 illustrations.
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Socialistan is the largest country in the new world accounting for 31 % of total time-spend. Here by far the most Danes are actively engaged in updating their facebook-status, twitting and blogging. The women of Socialistan leads on, while men are more passive.
You won’t find a Dane who hasn’t spend time in Googledom within the past month. For 24 % of their online-time they’re googling around, looking up numbers and facts and using the tools of the Internet.
Especially men are fond of Newscorpey. They like to stay informed (though top issues evolves around sex, gossip and crime stories). The country is ruled by the “old media” who find a hard time in the fact they’re not the key media providers anymore, accounting only for 15 % of the time Danes spend on the Internet.
In Disturbia you’re engaged in buying and selling. Danes loves this – however there’s nowhere enough online outlets to satisfy their needs: one third of all Disturbia-activity is spend second-hand shopping, consumer to consumer.
The mobile moon is orbiting around our new globe – especially powered by the iphon-ish way the internet are spreading to the pockets of Danes.
More than 600.000 Danes surfs for travels during a single month. They account for almost all sales in the leisure category, and a quarter of all tickets sold in professional segments.
You’ll find all kind of Danes out there searching for travels. But the ones most addicted are the +50 years olds, the high-income groups and – surprisingly – those from the uppermost nothern part of Denmark – Nordjylland.
These are among the key results, when I dug into activity on the internet in November ’09. Results published in the report “Traveling in Denmark – lessons learned from the online traveling industry” (want a copy? Purchase one below).
I also found websites of traditional airline companies to take the lions share of trafic leaving package tour organizers behind. And within the airlines-websites, SAS comes out number one, followed by Norwegian with Cimber lagging far behind.
The travel industry is extremely interesting, I think. Why? Because it was among the industries most profoundly affected, as the waves of e-commerce started washing the shores of Danish retailers. What once was an art of knowing, picking and coordinating departure-times, available rooms and the right rental-cars allotted only to few chosen specialists, was, in less than ten years time, turned upside down and emulated into a do-it-yourself paradigm, generating savings and leading to an ever-increasing focus on costs.
As consumers were armored up with new weapons of searching, comparing and buying online, also the value-chains internal to the industry was re-forged. The once strict command-lines guiding the flow of data about availability of this or that hotel or this or that departure to end-consumers imploded, bypassing the middle-men, leaving smooth, effective and automatic processes in their place.
This increased transparency in turn ruthlessly exposed those not producing at minimum costs, leading the way for low cost carriers, investigating all possible ways to reduce costs, lowering the quality and turning integrated services into ancillary revenue-generators.
And now we have the results. The industry is transformed, completely e-commercialized.
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“Traveling in Denmark – lessons learned from the online traveling industry”. 14 pages, 6 illustrations.
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Traditional companies opening up departments on the Internet easily captures lots of users, but scores low on consumer-trust, finding it hard to gain confidence of their customers. This is one of the main conclusions from a new analysis I’ve just published, “Oldschool/Newschool: Top 25 Danish e-commerce sites evaluated”. The report walks through the 25 largerst Danish online stores, nine of those being “native” e-commerce sites; 16 being e-commerce departments of “traditional” physical companies. On a scale from one to ten the natives makes 7,0 in consumer-trust while the traditionals faces a 5,7 verdict from consumers.
While it’s not really surprising that native e-commerce ventures knows how to do deal with customers (if they didn’t they wouldn’t have made it to top 25), it is striking how the old warriors seems to have missed the mark. Especially as Danish consumers seems to be substantially understimulated when it comes to online shopping: they’re all there and shopping away the few places they’re really allowed to, like in telecommunications and secondhand. I’d say their money is virtually burning in their pockets.
Customer-service and logistics are key to building your online reputation
The typical sources of consumer dis-trust are the reaction time and accuracy of answers to customer inquiries. It simply takes much to long time for the merchants getting back with feedback to their customers – and when they do, the answers are sloppy. Slow and inadequate shipping is another complaint often heard, as are faulty information given on the website on prices etc.
Good news are that customer-service and logistics aren’t rocket science. On the other hand: if left broken, not only will customers be frustrated, also all the promises of rationalization entailed by e-commerce threatens to evaporate in the clear sky.
Tap into strategic advantages of the internet
Customer service and logistics, unfortunately, wasn’t the only shortcomming of the traditionals. Comparing their ability to tap into the strategic advantages offered by the Internet I found their product range to be limited (although shelf space is free on the internet), their prices to be high (although this sets them back in searches and price-comparisons), and I found their social tools for online dialogue with customer to be less elaborated (although dialogue creates trust and loyalty). Finally I found all of the investigated “native” online stores to have benefitted from disrupting one or more established business processes. The same can be said about only 64 percent of the traditionals.
This finding points to a problem somewhat more complex than just delivering the goods and getting back on customer inquiries. It points to a lack of engagement in the online presence on part of the tradtionals. Being vested in a physical world seems to tie your focus and limits your abilities to address the potentials of the digital age.
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“Oldschool/Newschool: Top 25 Danish e-commerce sites evaluated” is in 15 pages and includes 6 illustrations.
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This weeks “digital view” report focuses on the actual state and character of the Danish e-commerce market, mapping out the 124 largest e-commerce-sites to cover a total of seven industries and tracing the inherent logic behind the development of the Danish e-business sphere.
Read on:
Eroding powers of digitalization revealed: Secondhand-shopping, telecommunications and e-banking rules e-commerce in Denmark
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Largest grocery store retail-websites in Denmark. Adult users (15 years+). Source: FDIM/gemiusAudience, April 2010.
I also found websites of traditional airline companies to take the lions share of