Outside Innovation

Amazon and Dell Top UK Online Retail Customer Experience

Blast Radius, a UK customer experience consultancy, has conducted and publicized a customer experience audit of the top 28 (by traffic) online British retailers. What I like about their customer experience evaluation is that it includes the entire customer experience, not just the buying experience--but the entire end-to-end experience.

We used to run similar customer experience tests for online retailers in the U.S., until the results began to get fairly equal.

Here are the top 10:
The top ten:

1. Amazon UK
2. Dell EMEA
3. Apple Computer UK
4. Next
5. Comet
6. Tesco/QVC UK [tied]
7. Currys/Littlewoods [tied]
8. Asos
9. John Lewis
10. Hewlett-Packard/Marks and Spencer [tied]

You can download the entire Blast Radius Report on UK Online Shopping 2006.

Google Checkout: Streamlining Customer Scenarios

ONE-STOP SHOPPING AT GOOGLE WITH GOOGLE CHECKOUT

Google Checkout may be the most profound strategic move that Google has made since its release of Google Earth. Google Earth was a “get it out, open it up, and see what happens” kind of offering from Google Labs. I suspect that even Google was surprised by how quickly Google Earth began attracting eclectic and creative mash ups.

Google Checkout, on the other hand, was clearly a very carefully thought-out strategic move. So far, so good, from the standpoint of merchants and buyers, judging from the discussions in Google’s online support forums.

What I like about Google Checkout as a Customer
From the customer’s point of view, Google Checkout appears to be a win. Our Customer Scenario® workshops show us that a huge percentage of “search, find, and buy” excursions begin at Google. Why not remove the friction? If I can find what I need from a merchant I trust on Google, I’m happy to click to buy, going right to the merchant’s checkout page. There I have the option of either using my stored credit card info on the merchant’s site (if it’s a merchant I already frequent), or of selecting Google Checkout to use my Google Checkout account. If I use Google Checkout, the merchant won’t see my full credit card information, nor will they receive my email address (unless I explicitly choose that option). The Google Checkout service will track the shipping status, alert me to problems, etc. through its API with the merchant.

While this is useful and reasonably painless for a one-time transaction, it becomes more irresistible for someone like me who is a frequent online shopper. I get the advantage of one-stop shopping, one-stop shipping status, etc. in one convenient location. As with Amazon and eBay, I can rate my experience with each merchant, so that others will know whether to expect any hiccups. I like the fact that Google promises not to share my personal information with anyone (although I realize that Google’s aggregated information will become hugely valuable to Google and its advertisers).