Showrooming Scurge
Most retailers HATE people showrooming in their stores. That's stupid as it is like trying to hold back the tide. Better to embrace showrooming - the practices of shopping in the world and then buying online for better price.

One way to embrace showrooming occurred to this morning watching Bruno Torturra discuss how easy it is to stream a live event to the web. Torturra is streaming protests, but retailers brave enough to encourage showrooming could use the same tactics to build a powerful Ambassador layer.

The recipe is simple:

1. Create content explaining how to stream live video.

2. Create a community to share your "shopping videos".

3. Provide social rewards (encouragement and features) to filter.

4. Rinse and Repeat

Your customers could help keep your prices in line, alert you to cool merchandising by competitors and a million other near real time benefits. You can't go into something like this halfway.

It's an all or nothing idea and that means listening more than you talk (some sites, brands and companies are better at 2 way communication than others). Early today team Curagami wrote a piece about competing with Amazon (http://sco.lt/58qhn7 ).

Add this "video showrooming army" to that and you get differentaion from the monster. Cool thing is cost of creating such cool and cutting edge competition is minimal (webpage and some serving). I wouldn't host on YouTube unless you were strapped for cash since you want the SEO juice flowing in your site's direction.

Soon retailers will be glad people are in their stores FOR ANY REASON, beat them by embracing showrooming now.

StealThis: Got The Best Deal Page
Car abandonment drives ecommerce teams crazy. People get to the last stage of your checkout see the "coupon code" window and leave to look for coupons. This idea is so powerful RetailMeNot.com made a business out of giving YOUR traffic coupons at checkout.

Poster Print Factory put up a simple page that said, "If you are a new customer we automatically apply your new customer discount. No need to look for coupons, you have the best deal." That is BRILLIANT since it brings customers RIGHT BACK to you with confidence.

Be careful about your page title, but you should win yoursite.com coupons as a search AS LONG AS YOU HAVE A PAGE like this one. Brilliant simple marketing. And change your page title to include coupons and promo codes and guaranteed you will win the search since Post Print has a generic title and they win.

If you have a "promo code" box its an IMPLIED promise. When you explain the promise in a relevant way, in my case for new customers, you win and cart abandonment goes down.

When I was a Director of Ecommerce every .5% reduction in cart abandonment was $1M bucks, so this is one of those areas where TINY differences can mean big money. If you have a promo code option in your checkout make sure to have a page that explains your coupons your way instead of handing your traffic over to RetailMeNot.com.