Why hasn't online shopping gotten better?
The first blog post I wrote was “Online shopping kind of sucks” I am still saying that several years later. Yes, Stylaquin ROCKS. Yes, you should add it to your Shopify site. But WHY is it the only innovation aimed at women?
AI ain’t gonna do it
Honestly, the amount of time that is being spent on AI, and how AI is going to improve the shopping experience is insane. AI is, at its core, a predictive engine. There is no possible way you can show me exactly what I want, because I don’t know what I want. That’s why I’m shopping and not just buying. I’m going to pause here to give the men reading this a moment to throw back their heads and wail “See, they don’t even know what they want!” Yes, EXACTLY! Showing me what you think I should want is going to be about as frustrating for me as trying to get YouTube to stop showing me heroic pet rescue videos after I watched JUST ONE. Alright, maybe more than one, but I do have other interests.
Let’s have a Steve Jobs moment
I don’t mean invent some amazing thing that will change the world. I mean look at what he wore. Jeans and a black turtleneck. EVERY DAY. Um, other than Elizabeth Holmes, women don’t typically have a one-and-done wardrobe. Websites are still focused on the speed aspects of shopping, getting shoppers in and out as quickly as possible. Which completely misses the point that women LIKE to shop. It’s a hobby, not a chore, we dig it—and do a lot of it. Most of it in fact.
Women don’t love to shop because we find the exact right thing the minute we show up. I mean, sure, a good shopping moment is a victory shared with friends over coffee or wine, but without the hunt, where’s the fun? We love to shop because it’s fun to look at lots of nice things and think about how they would look. There’s a whole journey of discovery that isn’t being addressed. (By anyone other than Stylaquin that is.)
The foundational challenges
Online shopping sucks because it’s assuming that we are all looking for the thing we already know we want. If I want a navy blue, short-sleeved, 100% cotton tee-shirt—three clicks and I’m done. In real life, it’s just not that simple. What if I want the perfect top to go with the pants I know look good with the shoes I just bought; which have a sort of low heel so I can also wear them to work, and the top should probably also go to work on meeting days, but needs to work for date night too, if I go straight from work to the date? Now that requires some real thought. Men, if you just felt your face go numb, stop thinking that men are qualified to be in charge of women’s online shopping experience. This is who we are, and we do 87% of all online shopping. The female brain has evolved for over 300,000 years to be the finely honed instrument it is today. What you do with fantasy football, we do with shopping.
Stylaquin is a big step forward, but it’s not enough
I don’t want to diminish what Stylaquin does. Stylaquin shoppers stay 70% longer, view 185% more items, come back 3X more often and convert 3% more when they do. But Stylaquin can’t, or at least shouldn’t be, the only innovation aimed at improving online shopping for women.
End rant.
