If you haven’t heard of Net-A-Porter don’t sweat it. I hadn’t heard of the brand until Josh Cole’s Weekest Links post. But if you’re a fashionista, Net-A-Porter is possibly already part of your online fashion wardrobe. Here’s how Net-A-Porter positions themselves:
NET-A-PORTER.COM is the world’s premier online luxury fashion retailer. Our award-winning website, presented in the style of a fashion magazine, offers the style-savvy customer exactly what she wants – unprecedented access to the hottest looks of the season from international cutting-edge labels via worldwide express delivery.
The company has been around since 2000, and magazines like Vogue and W (both fashion magazine stalwarts) have touted Net-A-Porter’s innovative online work and eCommerce model.
NET-A-Porter’s online Experience
Net-A-Porter isn’t new to the digital magazine (or digital publishing) space. In fact, since 2001, they’ve been creating a weekly digital magazine designed to inspire fashion forward folks to browse the magazine and build a shopping cart while they peruse. It’s the equivalent of dog-earing content that you’re interested in buying later or finding at the store.
Check out the latest magazine online if you have a few minutes.
The Point of Inspiration
What’s inherent in Net-A-Porter’s concept is that they’ve brought the eCommerce experience as close as possible to the point of inspiration. The point of inspiration is the moment a consumer, reader, or magazine browser decides they’d like to learn more about a product or service that’s profiled. The closer (and more seamless) the shopping cart is to the point of inspiration, the higher the likelihood a consumer will make the purchase (and in fact the larger their cart will be).
Destroying the Experience
Unfortunately, in the online experience, I think Net-A-Porter has destroyed one of the key elements in creating a seamless experience. Here’s how:
As I browse the magazine, I see this outfit.
Remember, I’m in the magazine. I’m engaged, really enjoying my browsing experience in a linear fashion (flipping pages as I go). I decide I want to “Get The Look” and click the “Shop Now” button.
Suddenly, I’m thrust out of the ‘browsing’ experience and I’m pushed into ‘purchase’ mode. Net-A-Porter has completely ruined my experience. How do I get back to the magazine? What page was I on? What was on the next page? I didn’t want to be pulled out of the browsing experience, I simply wanted to add this to a “shopping cart” with the hopes of deciding later (after I finished browsing) what outfits I wanted to buy.
This is a giant disconnect derived from the fact that Net-A-Porter hasn’t considered my media modality.
The iPad App is So Close
After my online experience, I downloaded the Net-A-Porter iPad app. Basically, the magazine experience is exactly the same. It’s an enjoyable experience and nicely engaging. Here’s a quick 2-minute video from Net-A-Porter that gives you a good idea of the experience on the iPad:
This app delivers a completely seamless browsing and shopping experience. I’m in magazine ‘reading mode’ while I consume the content. However, I’m constantly adding things to my shopping cart with the knowledge that at the end of the magazine I’ll determine which items I’d like to purchase. Every time I’m ‘inspired’ to take action, I can. Instead of ‘dog-earing’ or ‘bookmarking’ the content, I’m actually creating a shopping cart.
Unfortunately, none of their embedded videos worked for me. I tried a number of times before I decided none of them were going to work. Also, more than a few times I tried to add an “outfit” to my shopping cart, but the application provided me with hundreds of choices for the single outfit I was interested in. This completely ruined my reading experience. Suddenly I was forced to browse “similar” items instead of simply add the actual outfit.
eCommerce & Content for magazines and catalogs
If you’re in the magazine business, think about what the relationship is between your content and the point of inspiration for the products and services you create content about. If you’re a catalog company, think about the content that inspires action and gets your customers closer to larger carts and more sales.
Drew,
Great analysis! The shopping-while-reading model has so much potential. That’s exploiting a medium’s potential!
One thing that you touch on but I think needs to be underscored is knowing the difference between the consumer’s mindset while “reading” and “shopping.”
Technical issues with the app aside, the real problem is in creating something I’ve been talking about a lot recently in terms of UX: “the next logical step.”
All digital content needs to be part of a larger experience with a very specific goal in mind. In this case, conversion to eCommerce sale. If the app/website creates the expectation that the experience should be content consumption / add to cart / go back / consume more content, this is far too jarring. Activities need to be continuous (i.e. all content consumption is one activity) and flow seamlessly BUT separately into the next activity (shopping).
Dog-earing or marking products for future evaluation is really, really smart and builds the next logical step in the experience from consumption to evaluation. However, these experiences needs to be very delineated and obviously different experiences.
Did any of that make sense? I typed it really fast.
Brad
Brad,
It all makes great sense! I really think the iPad is one of the best places to execute the Net-A-Porter vision. In fact, they were 10 years early in envisioning the premium experience for browsing to shopping!
The experience is crucial to making something like this a success!
- Drew
Great analysis, Drew.
You are 100% spot on. In fashion, in particular, the online magazine and the online shopping experience are merging these days. This is probably the business area to follow if you want to see the most recent trends in this sort of inspirational online shopping.
I recently found an interesting point on usage of apps in commerce. According to a research made by Adobe, consumers seem to prefer browsers over apps for retail purposes. Consumers want to read product reviews, see what their friends think of the brand or product, compare prices – and they are already familiar with those tasks from the web. These are key aspects when thinking about designing your online magazine: It needs to look great and be userfriendly, but certainly needs to drive the consumers closer to check-out, and a closed app-environment does not do such things as great as mobile-optimized web-content.
Adobe research from eMarketer.com
Joakim Ditlev
@jditlev
Joakim,
Thanks so much for passing on the Adobe research. That’s really interesting! I really appreciate it.
I think you’re right. Purchasing is a very interesting beast and the higher the price point, the potentially longer engagement with the consumer.
I really like what Net-A-Porter has done on their app, it keeps me in the flow of the app experience but allows me to consider the purchase.
Thanks again for the research!
- Drew
I think any time a brand has rich photographic assets or video content an app or optimized browser experience makes sense to develop now. It is easy to forget that the iPad hasn’t had its first birthday yet. There is a lot to learn about how consumers navigate, consume content and purchase on the iPad or smaller mobile devices. Right about 10% of visitors to any given site are on a mobile device/iPad. I think that will grow to 25% by the end of this year just on a full year of iPad sales, the iPhone on Verizon and Android growth. What will it look like by 2013, it may be 50% of traffic. I say invest now to reap the rewards in the future.
Andrew -
I agree the mode adjustments the user experiences on the web and frankly also the app irritating. I’ve written a post about Net-A-Porter talking about extending the native ability of the iPad platform to support an out-of-the-way experience. For me the iPad experience, while better, is nothing more than a extension of traditional web based ecommerce capability. There are too many self serving road blocks that don’t build enough trust to cause me as a user to want to explore product content in this way.
If they just got out of the way of my reading experience and passively supported my growing desire to know more – I could see this “Finding” vs. browsing/searching experience really take off.
Check out the post and let me know your thoughts:
http://visioning.fusionapps.com/2011/02/11/net-a-porter-using-platform-strengths-when-porting-physical-publications-to-the-digital-world/