Macy's, JC Penney, and Best Buy are making a huge mistake that's hurting sales
But stores have failed to find a way to make reviews readily available in stores, and that's killing business for many traditional retailers like Macy's, JC Penney, and Best Buy.
"Social feedback and validation has become an embedded step in our daily consumption - no longer an afterthought but simply part of how we buy," Doug Stephens, author of the blog The Retail Prophet, writes. "And yet when we walk into most retail environments we are entering digital deserts, barren of any meaningful content at all."
Shoppers need to be able to pick up a product and instantly have access to user reviews and other relevant information. If it's a piece of clothing, for example, it would helpful to see how other customers have styled it.
This problem doesn't just affect sellers of big-ticket items like flat-screen TVs. Most people today wouldn't even consider renting a movie without checking reviews, Stephens points out.
Many traditional retailers have added digital displays in their stores, but they serve little utility.
"If we're lucky we get a digital screen or two dropped into the store looping irrelevant imagery," Stephens writes. "If we're not so lucky, we get is a price sticker, a label and a full-time employee with a part-time interest in helping us."
Retail consultant Mark Hurst lamented this problem back in 2012, when he tried to buy a skillet at Williams-Sonoma and ended up ordering one from Amazon. He described the experience on his blog:
Some stores, like Nordstrom, are using social media to better merchandise their products.
Nordstrom has been using Pinterest to find out which products are most popular, and marks those products with a red tag in stores so customers can easily find them.
But stores need to go even further if they want to survive, according to Stephens.