Digital Real Estate - Chasing Fire-Flies

Here, we visit catalog brand Chasing Fire-Flies. These folks clearly have a creative bent to their presentation technique.

I know, I know, there's going to be dozens of you who tell me this is ugly, who tell me that this looks like something from 1999. Have at it. Ugly is not correlated with selling, is it?

What matters most is if the presentation style results in somebody buying the merchandise.

So that's the presentation style on the home page. What do you think the presentation style look like on my Samsung Galaxy Note II? Let's take a look:

What do you observe?

Well, as always in a mobile environment, compromises have to be made. Here, the compromises are creative in nature.

Again, in my Merchandise Forensics work, the more you remove imagery and product opportunities from the experience, the more you reduce sales.

You know, on Twitter a few weeks ago, folks were telling me that they simply cannot convert on a mobile device like they can on their home page. I kept hearing about how traffic is being seriously cannibalized, but sales are declining because conversion rates are in the tank.

We're all going to have to think carefully about our mobile experience. The only reason we are in business is to sell something. When we compromise the sales experience, we put ourselves on a path toward being out of business. And with mobile comprising more and more of the brand experience, we have a challenge we have to figure out.

Need Merchandise Forensics work completed? Contact me (kevinh@minethatdata.com) for your own, customized, Merchandise Forensics project - it's the #1 project I work on in 2013.