The pandemic disrupted the way we buy, but it didn’t change a major feature of modern ecommerce: the dominance of Amazon.
Marketers, designers, and user experience (UX) professionals have a goliath competitor in Amazon. Even without a pandemic, ecommerce sectors like retail and banking have been bumping up against Amazon directly for more than a decade —and the next few years will be critical. As competitors and peers hit reset on their own customer experience and marketing efforts, is it even possible to get an edge on a giant like Amazon?
Gregory Ng, CEO of Brooks Bell, answers with a resounding “yes.” His experimentation agency is fresh off sharing new consumer data and insights they compiled about Amazon’s weaknesses, strong suits and strategy — it’s a must read for any marketer or UX professional tasked with improving their existing customer experience or attracting customers away from Amazon.
Gary Drenik: First, Gregory, share what you learned about customers and Amazon’s weaknesses through this research.
Gregory Ng: Two big things jumped out at me, Gary. First, the sheer volume of people browsing Amazon without a real intent to buy was higher than we thought it would be. Seventy-three percent of consumers scroll Amazon at least weekly without a purchase in mind. Are they browsing for inspiration like people do on Pinterest? Trying to gauge the value of a product by comparing items similar to how real estate geeks compare property? While only Amazon knows the exact answer, we can deduce a lot from the data we collected.
While consumers give Amazon high marks when it comes to basics — shipping reliability, availability of products — the company begins to show weakness when it comes to more complex parts of the online shopping experience. For example, 37% of consumers say Amazon could improve its product comparisons, and 36% of consumers have not been able to find what they are looking for quickly on the site. Additionally, 37% of consumers have shopped with a competitor to Amazon because they were able to find better product expertise.
These numbers are not insignificant — they represent some of the biggest opportunities for brands to improve their own experiences and offer features that Amazon can’t match.
What does this look like in practice? Are there any brands leaning into Amazon’s shortcomings that can provide a lesson?
Amazon’s reputation as the “everything store” has a double-edge — it can also make shopping seem impersonal. As dogs, cats and other pets increasingly become parts of our family, pet supply retailer Chewy is a great example of a company making their customers feel like the center of the universe. And they are doing it with better customer segmentation, more thoughtful personalization, and most of all, with experimentation on a scale that Amazon just can’t execute.
Each year, Chewy sends out holiday greetings, birthday cards for pet birthdays and even sympathy notes when customers’ animal friends pass away. The whole philosophy goes back to one of the company’s early visions — to make online pet supply buying as personal as it is in-store.
There are hundreds of great examples, but what’s great about the data we collected is that marketers and UX teams can decide what works best for their needs. For example, we know 25% of Amazon customers have received a product that’s lower quality than expected in the last month, and Amazon’s product descriptions were ranked low among features customers find helpful. This data proves that while Amazon may have everything for sale, they don’t really know everything they sell.
Drenik: The last time we spoke, you talked about how retailers were still struggling to adapt to a new reality. Do you have any new insights based on this new data?
Ng: Brands are tired of operating outside of “normal,” and I get that. But we cannot let this fatigue translate into missed opportunities. One big development since the last time we spoke is the continually chaotic supply chain. Right now, I think a lot of retailers are chalking up cart abandonment and customer loss to supply chain woes. But they could be using this time to improve those systems by looking at CX data. Did customers leave because of high shipping costs? High delivery time estimates? Could they not get all of their items shipped at once?
What we are seeing is that retailers don’t have the data granularity in their customer journeys to identify where exactly they are losing opportunities. Brands that don’t figure this out now will be left behind as the supply chain stabilizes — no CEO is going to accept logistics woes as a scapegoat for lost revenue forever. Especially with almost 80% of consumers subscribing to Amazon Prime for the free two-day shipping perk, according to a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics Survey.
Drenik: Are there other industries, like financial services, that can lean into evolving customer expectations?
Ng: A big takeaway that marketers or experience designers can learn from this data is how hungry customers are for better content. Customers want to hear from peers and product experts when making decisions, and our data shows that Amazon lacks that sort of depth. We are seeing that the content and surrounding experience of a purchase can be almost as valuable as the purchase itself — and for purchases as big as a loan for your first house, the stakes are even higher.
Customers also told us that one of the top-rated Amazon features is its payment and checkout process.
In finance and banking, the name of the game is still navigating a new normal. Another dataset we published last year shows consumers’ growing desire to return in person to bank branches, and our most recent Amazon research shows consumers are highly motivated to buy from brands who have expertise in the products they sell. These two factors should excite anyone who creates experiences for banking customers — especially as younger generations show interest in investing and alternate currencies.
Drenik; Thanks so much for your expertise here, Gregory. Like many practitioners, it is clear marketers and experience designers have their work cut out for them to adapt this year, but it appears many are already making headway.
