Closing the Deal at the Virtual Checkout - NYTimes.com

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By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Shoppers rarely drive to the mall, load up their carts and then abandon them in the middle of the store. On the Web, though, it happens all the time.

In online stores, it is much easier for shoppers to fill their virtual shopping carts — and much easier for them to get distracted by an e-mail message or comparison shopping on other sites. Then there are the design flaws and technical glitches that can get in the way of closing a sale.

These problems have been around since online shopping was invented, but they have taken on more urgency in the last year as consumer spending has shriveled. So e-commerce companies are trying a variety of techniques to push shoppers through the virtual checkout line.

There are still plenty of people browsing online, but not so many buyers. In the second quarter, the number of visitors to e-commerce sites who eventually bought something shrank for most sites from the year before, by as much as 30 percent for Zappos.com and 26 percent for Gap, according to comScore.

“It’s pretty clear that people are looking at more alternatives, evaluating more options, getting better prices — but not buying,” said Gian M. Fulgoni, executive chairman of comScore.

Shoppers spent $130 billion online in the last year, according to comScore. But e-commerce sites missed out on billions more because customers abandoned their carts once they ran into problems while checking out, according to Tealeaf, a company that makes software to help e-commerce sites monitor customers’ behavior.

“The small transactions add up,” said Rebecca Ward, chief executive of Tealeaf, whose customers include Wal-Mart and Best Buy. “This is revenue that people really wanted to commit to the company and were unable to do it, and it often ends up being in the millions of dollars.”

Many shoppers fill their carts just to keep track of things they like or to check shipping rates and taxes, with little intention to buy. While there is no industrywide data, some e-commerce companies estimate that only about 3 percent of shoppers who visit an e-commerce site buy something, and when they do load their shopping carts, as many as two-thirds abandon them.

One of the biggest reasons people procrastinate more when shopping online is the fear of regret, said Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke, a visiting professor at M.I.T. and author of the book “Predictably Irrational.”

It is much simpler online than offline to discover that an item you bought yesterday is on sale somewhere else today. In fact, he said, people often spend more time researching a product after buying it online than before, to prove that they should not regret the purchase.

Online retailers do a few things to fight this inclination. Zappos.com and Overstock.com inject urgency by alerting customers when an item they have put it in their shopping cart is almost sold out.

“The Internet gives us this ability to kind of have wish lists — you can look at 15 products, throw them in your cart and then sleep on it,” said Stormy D. Simon, senior vice president for branding and customer care at Overstock.com. “We incentivize them.”

Other sites have developed a new, extreme version of limited-time sales. Gilt offers items for 36 hours or until they run out, and Neiman Marcus runs two-hour, online-only sales.

“All these strategies get people to fear that they will regret not acting” instead of acting, Mr. Ariely said.

Customer reviews can also nudge would-be shoppers who are on the fence about making a purchase. A company called Bazaarvoice helps e-commerce customers, like Macy’s and Dell, publish user reviews and ratings on their sites. For a customer unsure about new shoes or a new sofa, social validation can make the difference.

Some sites try to make the check-out process easier by offering alternative ways to pay. Bill Me Later, which eBay bought last year for $820 million, lets people click one button to check out. Later, they get a bill in the mail.

TrialPay, a start-up company, lets people get a product free if they buy another product. A shopper can buy WinZip software online for $29.95, for example, or get it free by signing up for Netflix. Then Netflix pays TrialPay for bringing in the new customer.

Though the Web makes it easier for shoppers to abandon their carts, it also makes it easier for shops to track would-be customers and encourage them to buy.

“In the real world, the jeweler or optician has no way of knowing who I was or how to get me back in the store, but online you can do all that, which is why it’s such an amazing retail opportunity,” said Saul Klein, a partner at Index Ventures, which has invested in e-commerce companies, including TrialPay.

Index has also backed a start-up called Criteo, which lets e-commerce sites “follow” visitors who leave without making a purchase and show them banner ads when they visit another site. Say a shopper has been perusing digital cameras on a consumer electronics site, then goes to lunch. Later, he checks the headlines on a news site, where he is shown an ad for the digital camera site, luring him back.

Some e-commerce sites encourage shoppers to log in before they fill their carts. Then, if they leave, the site can send them an e-mail message reminding them that their cart is still there and perhaps offering a carrot, like free shipping. Tealeaf’s software can identify each registered shopper who got to a certain point in the buying process before giving up.

It also alerts shopping sites about technical problems that might otherwise have been invisible. A month ago, the clothing retailer Bluefly realized that some international shoppers were unable to check out. Using Tealeaf’s software, Bluefly discovered that the glitch had been there for a year. Instead of reporting the problem, customers had simply been leaving the site without making the purchase.

After Bluefly fixed the problem, revenue from international shoppers increased 10 percent in a month, and Matt Raines, Bluefly’s vice president for technology, estimated that the fix would result in $1.1 million in additional revenue this year.

Bluefly also runs daily promotions and timed sales and shows Bluefly ads to previous visitors when they are on other sites. It is starting to offer customers the option to save the items in their cart to buy later, and is considering running customer reviews.

“When customers are trying to purchase something, we need to do everything in our power to make sure they can do it,” Mr. Raines said.

Civil War in Uganda, the Stuff of Vertigo’s Unknown Soldier Comic

By GEORGE GENE GUSTINES

Not many monthly comic books come with a glossary, but not many comics are like Unknown Soldier.

The series, written by Joshua Dysart and illustrated by Alberto Ponticelli, is set in Uganda and includes a reference guide with more than 20 entries, including background on the brutal rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army; the peace activist Abdulkadir Yahya Ali, who was killed; and the Acholi, an ethnic group from the northern part of the country.

Unknown Soldier, published by Vertigo, an imprint of DC Comics, is about Dr. Lwanga Moses, a Ugandan whose family fled the country for the United States when he was 7. He returns as an adult in 2002 with his wife, Sera, also a physician, hoping to put their medical skills to use in a part of the country that has experienced civil war for 15 years. He finds a world filled with violence, boys used as soldiers and girls punished for innocent acts like riding bicycles. Along the way he also encounters an Angelina Jolie-type character in Margaret Wells, an actress and activist.

This hardly seems like the stuff of traditional comic books, but Unknown Soldier is a regular series; a collected edition, which reprints the first six issues, will be in bookstores beginning on Aug. 26. Dr. Moses, the title character, whose face is wrapped in bandages, is actually a reimagining of a DC protagonist from 1966 who was disfigured during World War II, wrapped in heavy bandages and sent on espionage missions.

No one is more surprised than Mr. Dysart that Uganda is the subject of a comic book. A self-described history buff, he said that after 9/11 he became obsessed with researching religious extremists. He found references to Joseph Kony, the notorious commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army, and thought him fascinating. So after a World War II-centered pitch was turned down, he focused on Uganda, expecting a similar answer. “But it was green-lit, and then I was terrified,” Mr. Dysart said during a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles.

Karen Berger, a senior vice president at DC Comics and the executive editor of the Vertigo imprint, said, “When we explore something at Vertigo, we want to explore something that has not been done before in comics.” She added, “The beauty of the series is that not only does it explore questions like do you fight violence with violence, it also explores how the people of Uganda have been affected by this way of life.”

With his pitch accepted, Mr. Dysart visited the public library, pulled all the books he could find and combed the Internet. “There was a thin Wikipedia page,” he said.

Mr. Dysart decided that “if I was going to deal with the absolute worst aspect of these people’s lives, I was going to have to go there.” He visited Uganda in early 2007, months after a cease-fire was declared the previous summer. Mr. Dysart spent time with the Acholi and visited the cities of Kampala and Entebbe.

But the access embarrassed him, he said; he felt undeserving of being allowed to visit an AIDS hospice, for instance. “It was overwhelming how ready they were to welcome me and open up their lives,” he said.

He returned from the trip with more than 1,000 photographs that Mr. Ponticelli could use as references for the illustrations.

The critical response to Unknown Soldier has been positive. The Onion gave it a B+ and called it “both relevant to the real world and viscerally exciting.” The comic was also nominated for best new series in the Eisner Awards, the industry equivalent of the Oscars.

Sales estimates from ICV2.com, a Web site that covers the comics industry, indicate that the book, whose 11th issue is on sale this month, faces a tough market. While the first-issue sales were a modest 16,000 copies, the ninth sold 7,500 and was No. 207 out of the Top 300 comics in June.

By comparison, the top-selling Vertigo title that month, Fables, about storybook characters living in exile in Manhattan, sold more than 23,000 copies. But Vertigo’s monthly titles are often propped up by their collected editions. Those fare better in bookstores, where they have a longer shelf life.

Unknown Soldier is unflinching in its depiction of violence, and that comes across even more strongly in the collected edition, without the monthly break between issues. One particularly horrific scene deals with the disfigurement of the title character: an inner voice navigates him through the violence, but when he reaches his breaking point, he hacks at himself to try to silence it. That gruesome episode came from Mr. Dysart’s imagination; some details he learned from his trip, he said, were too awful for the comic.

“I interviewed a reformed child soldier who was forced to bite to death a woman,” he said.

Mr. Dysart, whose next project for Vertigo is “Greendale,” a graphic-novel adaptation of a 2003 Neil Young album, to be published in June, said Unknown Soldier would eventually move past Uganda 2002. He wants to explore who finances the rebels, among other topics. He also wants to write about corporate involvement in Africa and unethical pharmaceutical testing on ethnic populations, if the series lasts.

“Whether we can fully compete in a world of superheroes, I don’t know,” Mr. Dysart said. “The medium, sadly, has a limited readership. We’ll see.”

More of Mr. Dysart’s experiences in Uganda can be found at his Web site, joshuadysart.com, which includes photos from his trip, links to news reports about Uganda and commentary to fill in the gaps for fans of the comic.

“It’s very difficult to ask a reader, especially if they think they’re coming to a typical war adventure book, to know about the Acholi conflict,” he said. The blog has also allowed him to write about what he describes as underreporting about the area, as well as the history of the “internally displaced” person camps and to go deeper into the background of child soldiers.

The blog helps alleviate some of his feelings of guilt too. “I witnessed people at the lowest point of their lives, and I came back and turned it into an action-packed war comic,” he said. “We try our best not to be exploitative, but in my heart I don’t know if this is the right way to do it.”

NPR Is Enhancing Its Web Site

By ELIZABETH JENSEN

NPR, the public radio network, is introducing a revamped NPR.org this week, giving users what its executives say is an easier-to-navigate Web site that emphasizes written reporting over audio reports.

It is part of a digital expansion, branded with the new tagline “Always On,” that will include several mobile applications to be available late this summer.

The changes are meant to raise the level of NPR’s journalism and journalistic output, and to make public radio more widely available, not just on local stations but on any format consumers might want, said Vivian Schiller, NPR’s president and chief executive.

“We are a news content organization, not just a radio organization,” Ms. Schiller said.

But NPR is also a membership organization, partly financed by local public radio stations nationwide. While Ms. Schiller said that Web and mobile changes would make it easier than ever to find programming from local stations, they will also make it much more convenient for listeners to bypass local stations, if they choose.

“That’s the risk,” said Jake Shapiro, the executive director of Public Radio Exchange, which works with stations to expand programming options, and just released a new version of its own iPhone application, the Public Radio Player.

“It increases the pressure for stations to offer compelling and distinct programming,” Mr. Shapiro said. “There is definitely some anxiety about how easy these devices make the ability to shop around.”

The changes to NPR’s Web site are intended to make it easier for users to find NPR news reports on a less cluttered home page, or to jump to two other areas of emphasis, Arts and Life, and Music.

Breaking news is already being posted faster, after a merger of NPR’s radio and digital news desks, and a regimen of Knight Foundation-financed digital training for NPR’s journalists. Searching for, sharing and commenting on NPR articles will be simpler, and free transcripts will be offered for the first time.

By next year, when NPR expects to have secured the digital rights, the site will offer entire NPR programs for downloading on demand.

The Web site changes are part of a strategy meant to increase NPR’s share of the midday audience, between its “Morning Edition” and the late afternoon “All Things Considered,” when listening to NPR stations drops considerably, said Kinsey Wilson, senior vice president and general manager of NPR Digital Media.

Instead of short paragraphs that direct users to click on links to audio reports taken from NPR’s programs, the Web site will now offer fully reported text versions of articles, so users can click from their cubicles. “We think the midday experience is much more text-driven,” Mr. Wilson said.

The Web site will flip “from being a companion to radio to being a news destination in its own right,” Ms. Schiller said.

It will not be as comprehensive as some sites, like CNN’s, are, Mr. Wilson said, but will “concentrate on areas where we can be particularly authoritative.” He added, “We’re not in a battle for share with established players who’ve been doing this for 15 years.”

Users can customize the Web site with a link to a local station, a feature that Ms. Schiller said was far superior to the capabilities of the current NPR Web site. Still, she said, “the bypass issue,” as it is referred to internally in public radio, “is not going to go away overnight.” Until it can be sorted out, she added, “first and foremost, we have to serve the audience” by making NPR content as easy as possible to find.

Stations worry about listeners cutting them out of the loop because they get much of their financing through local donations. NPR, however, will experiment this fall with letting users donate to specific local stations directly through the NPR Web site, which Ms. Schiller said could make it easier for stations to raise money and could encourage “impulse donors.”

In the coming weeks, NPR will release free mobile applications for the iPhone, Google’s Android and Symbian-powered phones.

Dozens of public radio apps already are available for the iPhone and other mobile platforms. NPR’s new applications, however, will emphasize news content, offering quick links to articles in written or audio form.

One element that users will not see much of on the NPR Web site is video. An experiment a year ago of adding more video to the site particularly irked local member stations, who did not want competition from video. Video is expensive, Ms. Schiller said, and she and Mr. Wilson are not convinced of its value. “We absolutely should not be heavily invested in video,” she said.

Chinese Hack Film Festival Site

Chinese hackers have attacked the website of Australia's biggest film festival over a documentary about Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer.

Content on the Melbourne International Film Festival site was briefly replaced with the Chinese flag and anti-Kadeer slogans on Saturday, reports said.

In an earlier protest on Friday, Beijing withdrew four Chinese films.

Melbourne's The Age newspaper says private security guards have been hired to protect Kadeer and other film-goers.

She is due to attend the screening of Ten Conditions of Love, by Australian documentary-maker Jeff Daniels, on 8 August.

'Vile language'

Chinese authorities blame Kadeer, leader of the World Uighur Congress, for inciting ethnic unrest in Xinjiang - charges she denies.

“ Hey, we're an independent arts organisation and it's our programme! ”
Richard Moore Head of the Melbourne International Film Festival

Earlier this month, around 200 people died and 1,600 were injured during fighting in the region between the mostly Muslim Uighurs and settlers from China's Han majority.

Kadeer, 62, spent six years in a Chinese prison before she was released into exile in the US in 2005. In 2004, she won the Rafto Prize for human rights.

Richard Moore, head of the Melbourne International Film Festival, told the BBC that he had come under pressure from Chinese officials to withdraw the film about Kadeer and cancel her invitation to the festival.

He said the attacks on the festival's website began about 10 days ago.

"We've been subjected to a number of these attacks and we can see behind the scenes on our website that there are hundreds, well, if not thousands, of people from outside of Australia trying to get into our website and trying to damage us," Mr Moore told the BBC's World Today programme.

"This has been going on... since obviously the call from a Chinese consular official who told me in no uncertain terms that I was urged to withdraw this particular documentary from the film festival and that I had to justify my actions in including the film in our programme," he went on.

"Hey, we're an independent arts organisation and it's our programme!"

He said police were investigating the website attacks, which appear to come from a Chinese internet address.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/8169123.stm

Published: 2009/07/26