‘webrooming’
noun, informal
Definition: When shoppers research items online so they can check out and compare lots of options, but then head to a physical store to complete their purchase, leading it to also become known through the practice of researching online to buy offline (ROBO). Often, consumers will use this method when they want to see exactly what the product looks like in real life before they make the final purchase.
With ROBO, the retailer must win during the search phase of the shopping trip, by beating Amazon on either price, product range and information or location – the first of which we already know, given the online giant’s dominance, is far easier said than done. Playing to the ROBO trend, Amazon established an early advantage when it came to price in 2010 with the introduction of its Price Checker barcode scanning app. It even offered a one-off 5 per cent discount (up to $5) on each of three items for a total of $15 off purchases for one day at the end of 2011 to encourage shoppers to use the app. It also asks customers to report advertised instore price and location information back to Amazon to ensure it is offering the most competitive deals.
Amazon’s early-mover advantage in recognizing the power of customer ratings and reviews to enhance available product information has also informed the company’s move offline. According to the Bazaarvoice study, 45 per cent of bricks and mortar shoppers read customer reviews online before purchasing products, marking a 15 per cent year-on-year increase through to 2018. Being a forerunner in its pre-eminent use of customer product and marketplace seller reviews as a determining factor in how high a product appears in its search rankings, Amazon has an obvious advantage over retailers with less well-developed equivalent e-commerce features. But a retailer can still exploit online reviews to their own advantage. One e-commerce systems provider has suggested that 50 or more reviews per product can generate a 4.6 per cent increase in online conversion rates, while a customer is 58 per cent more likely to convert after interacting with a review.6
It’s easy to see understand why, then, Amazon put its customers’ ratings and reviews front and centre of its first foray into physical retail with the 2015 debut of Amazon Books in its home town of Seattle. As we touched on in Chapter 5, each title is accompanied by a label, or ‘shelf talker’ in bookseller parlance, that features an Amazon.com customer review and its star rating, alongside a barcode. The absence of shelf-edge pricing forces customers to scan the code via Amazon’s app to access the price and other information, or store associates equipped with handheld devices can scan items for you.
Having been accused of killing off the traditional bookstore, however, some in the industry were quick to point out that Amazon’s move into their territory betrayed a lack of experience in physical retail spaces. The store was criticized for shelving positioned too close together, with an illogical configuration that paid no mind to arranging titles in alphabetical order, and rival booksellers questioned how it could only stock a very limited selection of 5–6,000 titles displayed in the most wasteful way as regards space, facing cover out and not spine out.7 In addition, the first store was not a location to pick up Amazon orders, and Amazon Books also didn’t offer preferential pricing for Prime customers until it had opened its third store at the end of 2016. Some described the debut location as a ‘store without walls’, for the fact that customers can browse endless online aisles in the store and place orders to have them delivered. Others called it a ‘marketing expense’,8 in the same way as Apple focuses the role of its stores on showcasing its hardware – Amazon Books also sells its Kindle reader and Echo smart speaker ranges among other Amazon devices – but, in comparison to Apple’s expansive and glass-lined ‘Town Square’ stores, commentators also highlighted the first Amazon Books store’s relatively utilitarian look and feel.
Further supporting the view of Amazon Books as having more value as a marketing showcase for Amazon than a book store, when it broke out its physical store sales for the first time towards the end of 2017, it emerged that its relatively small store estate generated almost no revenue.9 In its wider marketing context it is easy to see how Amazon Books’ objective was not necessarily to make money, but to test how it could transfer the best of its online experience offline and start building out physical spokes on its flywheel. Here we see how mobile is key to this, unlocking the wider Amazon range for customers in the store, at the same time as getting registered Amazon and Prime app users to associate their online preferences and purchase history with their physical store visit, giving Amazon visibility across its customers’ entire shopping journey so it can accurately measure attribution, across both online and the store.
This instore, mobile-enabled view of the customer, which we will come to understand as a major enabler of Amazon’s customer-centric proposition, is in fact the real Amazon Books differentiator – not the books or the Amazon gadgets. Just as it allows Amazon to match a customer identified instore by their purchase history and preferences to the offers and recommendations it gives them online, so it can refine its physical offer according to how customers actually shop the store, as well as what it can offer each individual store customer in terms of pricing, product information and promotions. Amazon’s aim has been to create a physical retail environment where customers readily identify themselves, so it can iteratively use the data they then share to personalize their experience and tailor it, so it complements whatever stage they’re at during their shopping journey. By pushing pricing and other such information to an app that lives on a customer’s own personal device, Amazon can potentially personalize every offer, recommendation and price to each customer in real time, whether they are in an Amazon or a rival store, to optimize conversion and every transaction.
Even though ratings and reviews had been the preserve of the e-commerce pureplay to inform the research phase of the shopping trip, we can see how Amazon has transposed them via mobile into its Amazon Books store environment to personalize and so enhance the customer experience. But it has also used the data its customers generate from their shopping activities online to inform every aspect of these stores – from ranging and merchandising, to pricing and promotions – so it can then tie the offline results back to its online execution and vice versa in what should become a virtuous loop of constant refinement and improvement.
Bear in mind that under the influence of digital, marketers now view the research phase of the shopping journey as a ‘zero moment of truth’ (or ZMOT, a term coined by Google in 2011).10 By virtue of the fact that shoppers can look for products anonymously online, just as they can do instore, it should come as no surprise to see Amazon exporting such features, which can positively influence this ZMOT by promoting conversion, offline. When it comes to exploiting the store’s physical advantage at the ZMOT – to potentially aid a ROBO sale for example – location-based or ‘near me’ search is a powerful tool at the bricks and mortar retailer’s disposal that capitalizes on the store’s physical advantage of being able to provide instant gratification (if the sought-after product is in stock). This is because, in the days before Amazon even existed, location has always been a powerful proxy for relevance and why, therefore, the world’s largest retailers have such extensive and, in some cases, densely located store networks.
As Google itself has suggested, ‘near me’ search is no longer just about location; it is about connecting people to things in a timely manner as much as it is about finding a place in and of itself. In 2017 the search giant called out the fact that ‘near me’ searches containing variants of ‘can I buy?’ or ‘to buy’ terms had grown by 500 per cent within two years.11 This is because shoppers will often use searches to find answers to an immediate need. But when it comes to immediacy, the store will trump online nearly every time – especially if the retailer also offers the opportunity to ‘save the sale’ on out of stocks by making store inventory available to order online. This is another reason why customers expect to see the same range and have an equivalent experience instore as is on offer online – the digital experience enables it, so why doesn’t the retailer?
It is also why the digital presence of a physical store must not neglect basic search engine optimization (SEO) requirements to ensure it and its inventory can be found. Other Google features, such as its patented Knowledge Panel feature that appears to the right of its search results, are designed to help discover brands or locate businesses; and, like Amazon, its paid search and Shopping and Express platforms can make a bricks and/or clicks business discoverable in the moment, where Amazon’s two-hour delivery range does not yet stretch. We explore how Google is further capitalizing on its ‘What Amazon Can’t Do’ (WACD) advantages through fulfilment in Chapter 13.
Ramping up this pressure on Amazon and other retailers whose businesses are online first or online only, in 2018 Google introduced shoppers to the power of local store inventory search with a new tool called See What’s In Store (SWIS). Shoppers can search for a specific product and discover which local stores have that item in stock, or search a single store’s entire inventory when using Google’s main search bar or Google Maps. Selecting the closest store location will generate a second search bar in the Google Knowledge Panel where shoppers can search that store’s inventory, a feature that Google currently offers for free. Shoppers can also type the name of a specific product into the Google search bar, and the results will show which local stores have that item in stock. However, stores must pay to show up in these Local Inventory Ads results.