18
2009
Retail
An article by Gazimoff
During the previous week Apple’s been at the forefront of my mind. Some of it’s good, particularly with the iPhone updates (which I’ll come on to later), but a lot of it’s not been so great. It’s a shame really, as Apple are trying to convert people like myself who have been firmly wedded to PCs since the year dot and don’t really want to move to something unfamiliar. But I’m currently in the market for a new gaming laptop (nothing special, just some simple MMO/RTS stuff), so I thought that I’d give them a shot.
It was with some nervousness that I reached the Apple Store in Regent Street, London. I’d heard a lot about the place from Stephen Fry’s twitterings about the place, and was hoping to find someone on-hand to take me through the various machines on offer. I’d been willing to give Apple another chance after I started using an iPhone in the middle of last year – a phone that I’m incredibly pleased with and find an absolute joy to use. I’ve tried many Nokias, Motorolas, Samsungs, Sony Ericssons and so on but find the little touchscreen device the best one I’ve ever used. I guess that my expectations had been set high from that – after all, if a firm can get something so right on a phone, surely they can manage something as simple as a retail experience?
Well, in a word, no.
The first thing that struck me was the layout of the place. On each side of a central staircase were rows of high wooden tables, each laden with Apple kit tethered so as to prevent it escaping out of the front door. Next to each item was a small card informing you of the name of the item you were looking at and how much it would cost to walk away with one, but little else besides. The biggest problem though was being able to actually use one of the machines. Although there were banks and banks of them, every single one was in use. And the users didn’t appear to be ones considering a future purchase, as almost all of them seemed to be plugged into Facebook. I briefly thought about the potential chaos that could be made from the tactical installation of keylogging software, but quickly dismissed it as I attempted to gain the attention of a turquoise clad expert to show me the ins and outs of Mac OS X. Alas, a couple of attempts to engage one of the Apple sales team resulted in abject failure. Crestfallen, I beat a hasty retreat to a nearby Starbucks where I discussed with those with me about the state of retail today. Needless to say, it’s unlikely I’ll be purchasing a Macbook this year.
My other experience with Apple this week was about the iPhone 3.0 software update that’s due to hit our phones sometime in the Summer. While I’m really glad about the inclusion of new features such as Bluetooth Stereo (finally my Motorola S705 has a purpose again) and MMS, I’m a bit concerned about the new micropayments system that’s being brought in. This new system basically means that applications will be able to allow you to make purchases from within the application. There’s a couple of uses for this, from an episodic game that allows you to buy more levels or content online, through to games like The Sims that could provide you with an in-game catalogue of items that you could pick up for a few pence. It also means that developers could release one version of a game for both trial/demo and full versions, with the user making a micropayment in order to enable the full game. But, like with anything else that requires me to fork out cash, I’ve got some concerns about the approach. I’m wondering how easy or hard it would be for an application to spoof an iTunes login page and harvest your details as well as taking a payment for the content you wish to unlock. More than that though, I’m wondering how it’ll impact the shopping experience. Currently I know how much I’ll pay for an app, as it’s all done up front. The nightmare scenario I can see coming is an app that costs a tiny amount to buy, but has some astronomical micropayment costs associated with it. In this regard, the costs need to be clearly presented up-front on the iTunes store, or it’ll be a riskier business for consumers. All that said, it may be that this can be used for subscription based services as well. If it can, this paves the way for MMOs to finally make their way onto the platform.
In both tales today, there’s a common theme: Retail is Detail. It’s an old adage that I picked up when working at an electrical goods retailer when I was young. and it’s still valid today. And although the giants of Cupertino may produce some absolutely fantastic kit, if they can’t get people to sell it then it’s a wasted effort. In the current climate, being able to convert visitors to your stores into sales is absolutely crucial. And while having an open door policy may get people in the door, it’s meaningless if all you’re doing is taking them to Facebook instead of the till.
The whole retail experience isn’t helped if you’re reluctant to look at the product with a massive amount of interest in the first place. That said, if the place is busy, as you’d expect it to be in Regent Street, unless you’re actually keen, you will always find it hard to get the sales person to involve you and sell you something.
What’s more likely however is that the sales staff, especially as I’ve found from past experience, will have little no no technical knowledge of the product you want them to sell you. This also fetracts from the whole offline retail thing. If you go online, most good websites, as in those that are well setup and thought out, with lots of technical specs to hand, will be able to give you most of the information you want, if not all of it. A poorly trained or less than knowledgable salesperson who has no idea what screen resolution means, let alone what the screen resolution of product X actually is tends to take us more technically minded punters out of the store and into the realm of online shopping. The problem with sales staff is that they’re told how to sell the product on things like it’s really big screen, it’s blue-ray DVD, and it’s light weight construction, as opposed to what we actually might want to know about a product, such as the HDD capacity, the memory size, whether the GPU is a full spec version or a mobile (and usually despecced version). We can see how big the screen is, and how light the thing is, but we need to know as potential buyers, whether it’s the product we want that will do what we want it to do when we want it to do it.
It’s one of the most annyoing aspects of retail, not just in techie gadgetty type purchases, but any purchases. A total lack of product specific knowledge puts people off buying the product from that store. It says a lot about the sort of customer service that the store is actually offering as well. If they’re more inteested in taking your money off you, whether it be straight away or for the next 18 months on that contract you’re not sure you want anyway, then there’s no customer service there. Retailers need to realise that in the current financial climate potential customers are made and lost on things like product knowledge. If the product knowledge isn’t there for the customer who may even be persuaded to buy a more expensive gadget just on the specs alone, then that customer is going to take his money elsewhere. If enough people do that, your retail store won’t be retailing for very long.
You’re right, in that I can go online, check things out and see if the spec matches roughly with what I want it to do. And at the end of the day, I can always install XP or Vista or even Windows 7 beta (which is very good) and customise my experience that way. What I was hoping to do – and which doesn’t take a lot of training – was to actually look at the physical ergonomics and layout of the kit, try out OS X and see if it was something I could get on with and see what else was bundled in it that I might want to use. That was what I completely failed to get done.
I’m now looking at laptopsdirect.co.uk and taking a more traditional route to getting a laptop, but again I’m going to be buying blind as far as aesthetics/ergonomics go.