Simon Lilly's Blog

A $1.6 million e-commerce nightmare at 6pm.com

// May 23rd, 2010 // No Comments » // e-commerce, web thoughts

It’s every e-commerce managers nightmare – a product went live with the wrong price and customers have realised. In the bargain hungry, viral jungle of the internet a simple pricing mistake can cost you a significant amount of revenue.

6pm.com is the sister site to Zappos.com, one of US’s biggest and best online retailers. The 6pm site focuses on end of line clearance and bargain items at up to 70% off retail. Unfortunately for them (fortunate for their customers) for 6 hours every item on their site cost no more than $49.95. With any kind of incident that involves online transactions for a large number of people, how the brand deals with a mistake is critical.

Recently The Outnet ran a $1 sale to celebrate it’s 1st birthday, unfortunately they under-estimated the popularity and the site constantly fell over during the course of the promotion. They came out, apologised and offered free shipping for a whole month to say sorry, but while their customers were having problems the Twitter-sphere was full of brand negativity.

So how did 6pm.com respond to such an error? I’ll give you two options:

Option 1) Send every customer that bought an item at a discounted price an email, apologising and blaming a clause in their T&C’s for their legally sound reason for cancelling the customers order.

Option 2) Honour every single order made, at an approximate cost of $1.6 million dollars.

Yep, they went for Option 2 and the reason I am writing about it on my blog is two fold. Firstly to make such a significant decision so quickly shows a well run, finely tuned organisation. Secondly, they handled it perfectly – open, honest and most importantly the decision they made was the best one for their customers. Read the full blog announcement over at 6pm.com – http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/inside-zappos/2010/05/21/6pm-com-pricing-mistake

Are you the next Mayor of your local Starbucks?

// May 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // social media, web thoughts

Mashable today covered a story that users of location-based social networking tool Foursquare could qualify for discounts at Starbucks. Social-media savvy customers simply need to regularly check-in at their favourite Starbucks. If you are the person that checks-in most at a particular venue then Foursquare rewards you by making you the Mayor of that location. Starbucks is one of the most pro-active brands in the social media space and is rewarding it’s Starbucks Mayors with a discount voucher for a Frappuccino.

The strategy behind this is a simple one, a check-in on Foursquare is the equivalent of a status updates on Facebook or a tweet on Twitter, in that the message is instantly transmitted to your Friends / Followers. This kind of thirst quenching viral promotion via social media puts your brand at the forefront of the customers mind and is another fine example of digital viral marketing.

Is location the next big digital marketing trend? For some food-retail businesses the answer probably is an immediate yes, for the rest of us it’s a case of watching, listening and learning.