Okay try to ignore the sweet graphic above that is linked to a very cool “French Twig” doggie food bowl made especially for your loyal friend and rug warmer. Also, try to ignore that you want to buy lots of sweet modern products and doggie clothing for your oh-so-perfect puppy. Lets try to focus for one minute on the fact that miaandmaggie.com is a great modern designed website and e-commerce experience with interactive features. The product photography is great, the product pages are simple, to the point, have a great zoom feature that make these products easy to buy. What more could we want as customers, but a smooth process for buying online.
An added bonus to the convenience of buying online is the ability to give our opinion. We see this ability to comment or review products and blogs everywhere and most of us have used and appreciated this feature at least once, somewhere. We can all agree, its great to have that little bird in your ear telling you what happened when that other person bought it.
If you look just below the product on Mia and Maggie there is a quick tab view rating system that allows the user to interact with the company a little more. Even though this is a great way to get feedback as a business owner, this is also a fun way to let your return visitors and/or loyal customers give their honest opinions of your products. This, in turn, makes it easier to predict next season’s hot items and brings the consumer closer to the business model: high-quality products as well as high-quality customer service.
Another obvious place where this strategy has worked is Amazon.com. It’s a known fact that there will always be those two or three customers with the 1-star rating, who had a terrible time dealing with the shipping company or got the product and thought it totally sucked…but with many products ranging from 500+ reviews or more, Amazon is giving customers more than enough reasons to buy. What’s great about Amazon is the honesty you feel when reading other customer experiences. For myself, those few bad reviews that get through are what make me believe they are real people with real experiences…which makes it easier for me to dismiss the few bad reviews.
There are other sites that show customer reviews like AmericanApparel but almost all products get a 4+ star rating… this could be that they customize their inventory per review ranking to optimize sales and return visitors… but somehow it comes off as a little more phony at that point. ALTHOUGH, I’ve never received badly-made, low-quality clothing from American Apparel…I’ve always gotten incredibly wonderful feeling t-shirts that don’t get holes in them after a few wears or discoloration or wrong shipments or late shipments….so it might just be that they have a great customer following, a strategic business model, highly-trained professionals answering the phones, talented America-based sewing factories and shipping services that they really do deserve all the stars. If that’s the case (and now that I’ve thought about it, probably is the case), big time kudos to AA.
So overall, I see great potential for Mia and Maggie and their customers’ interact-ability with it’s company as well as it’s products…yet I wish, as consumers, we could read other people’s reviews. That is what will turn the undecided online shopper into the shopper that checks out~! Maybe that will be Phase 2 in this web project - they are a brand new site and a great looking, usable one at that. I look forward to seeing the progression.
That’s it, I’m out!
