There are some very good online retail sites out there. And then there are the others

By Andrew Rideout

Shopping has progressed from the village square to the high street and from malls to big-box retail plazas. Now we have online shopping, which is not yet ready to displace bricks and mortar, but is certainly growing in popularity. Statistics Canada predicts the e-tail market will double between 2005 and 2009.

So it’s time Canadian retailers got in on the action, because while the big players all have Web stores, many of those sites are inefficient or downright disappointing. Typical problems include prohibitive shipping costs, bad organization, complicated sign-up processes or the simple fact that items are often out of stock.

Backbone set out to review a selection of e-tail sites popular with Canadians. It quickly became clear the e-tail market is not a mature one.

Sears.ca
The Sears.ca experience is a shaky one and the company commits the cardinal sin of online retail: making people fill out an excessive number of sign-up forms. Registration and the check-out process are the biggest hurdles at Sears.ca.

I tried to buy a $1,300 mattress. The site made me endure a sign-up process in which I had to enter the same information twice, and then it failed to automatically log me in after completing the forms. When it reluctantly allowed me to log in (I already wanted to leave at that point) I went to the shopping cart and the mattress was there, but when I tried to check out it asked me to re-enter my address…again.

The shipping chart and the multi-tiered shipping deals are also excessively complicated.

Overall, it feels like Sears jumped into this too quickly. A smarter approach would have been to take certain sections of the store online, see what worked and then readjust; introducing new sections after sufficient market research was conducted. Buyers are left with a rather slap-dash and inconsistent effort, especially because so many items seem to be either out of stock or unavailable online. This offsets the fact that Sears sells a lot of different items, but I guess there’s just no guarantee they’ll have what you want on that day.

You can buy lobster from Sears over the Internet but there’s no guarantee the curtains you want will be available online, and that just about sums up the Sears.ca shopping experience. And in one last missed detail, html gibberish is occasionally visible in their title tags.

Futureshop.com
The Futureshop online retail site is great to look at and uses video of a Futureshop employee named Aaron to answer questions while you shop. If you type in a question, Aaron pops up and says something like “Here you go” or “These are the closest matches to your question.”

I decided to ask him:“Where can I buy a laptop?” As the main banner on the home page was advertising laptops, he shouldn’t have had to look far, and it would have been a stroke of genius if Futureshop had Aaron say: “We’ve got some deals on laptops to my left—your right.” Unfortunately, I was sent to a search results page populated by Futureshop forum entries that turned out to be completely useless. Worse, the results seemed to be ramblings from users about how bad their laptops were: not a good move. I had to click over to the recent questions section to access relevant information. Still, the Aaron concept is amusing and it adds a human touch to the site.

The Futureshop online store has all of the items you would find in any of their locations and the perennial “out of stock” notification often seen on other sites was absent here. There is a very wide variety of items and the store is laid out effectively. The check-out process is relatively painless and the shipping charges seemed to be in line with the prices of the items. I also noticed a fair amount of sale items while browsing through the different merchandise categories. I was able to find a 19” widescreen LCD monitor for $199, marked down from $229. Shipping was an extra $12.99 for ground or $32 for faster air-mail delivery.

After Futureshop gives Aaron some more useful things to say and revamps its search format, I think we’ll have a real winner here.

Chapters.indigo.ca
The Chapters/Indigo online store is a solid offering that effectively integrates the online store and bricks-and-mortar locations. There is a wide variety of payment options and shipping is free on orders of more than $39. The layout is fairly smooth and search works better than most other sites. The range of merchandise is wider than you would expect, but then again, Chapters always seems to have more non-book paraphernalia every time I go into one of their locations.

Checkout and shipping are treats as well. They get big points for their express checkout option. Enter your address (once) and on every subsequent visit you are right at the checkout page, one click away from completing the purchase. It’s a relatively painless process that won’t require you to sign up and confirm accounts and all that e-mail brouhaha.

Another great feature is that the site actually wants to help you save money. Certain online stores tend to hide their discount sections, but Chapters/Indigo goes out of its way to highlight their discount section. You can pick up clearance titles from categories such as “Recent best sellers under 10 dollars” and even a section where nothing costs more than $2. This is a great Web site if you want to bang through most of your Christmas shopping in 20 or 30 minutes without your mother-in-law knowing the assortment of decorating books you bought her cost a grand total of $8.

And back to the free shipping on orders of more than $39: this is a textbook example of how shipping should not be a disincentive to purchase and, if anything, should be used strategically to encourage customers to spend more.

Toysrus.ca
Toys R Us is guilty of some of the same mistakes that made Sears.ca an underwhelming shopping experience. On the landing page there are about three dozen different sections and categories, “out of stock” notifications are prominent and some parts of the site are half finished. For a time, the landing page for the “returns” section looked like a blank HTML template that somebody forgot to fill out.

On the plus side, the search function works reasonably well. A search for the generic term “storm trooper” produced two Star Wars Toys and a GI Joe action figure. The site’s Wishlist function is enhanced by the ability to create a baby registry. Shipping is relatively cheap and there is free shipping on many items. It would be smart for Toys R Us to group the free shipping items onto a specific page.

Toys R Us gets points for organizing its items into age categories. This is great for buying items for children you don’t know very well, so if you have no ideas for your five-year-old niece this is a pretty good place to start. On the downside there is no guarantee your item will be in stock. This hampers the site significantly and it kept me from buying a Pirates of the Caribbean Jack Sparrow Clash & Flash Cutlass for my um...niece. 

Amazon.ca
Because Amazon.ca is the only retailer I reviewed that exists solely online, the company has a sort of home field advantage. While the scope and focus of Amazon.ca is different than Canadian Tire or Sears, for example, what it does it does really well. Amazon.ca is a class act and my only gripe is the fact that I can only buy books, DVDs, CDs, software or videos there. The speed with which you sign up for an account and complete a purchase should serve as an example to other online retailers. Chapters/Indigo is a close second.

Amazon’s killer app has always been the customer review section. This feature has been copied by pretty much every other online retailer but a lot of them miss the point: it’s one thing to offer the functionality, another to get people to actually use it. Amazon.ca’s customer review section is so deep that virtually everything on the site has been critiqued by at least one other person. I even managed to find a user review for the PC game Nancy Drew and the Wolf of Icicle Creek. Now that’s thorough.

Another useful and well-thought-out feature is the “people who bought this item also liked this item” section. Amazon was one of the first Web sites to prove the power (and value) of crowd-powered opinions. This was Amazon’s home turf and they defended it well. A top site.

Canadiantire.ca
Canadian Tire boasts a range of inventory so extensive it verges on comical. If you’re looking for a garden hose, an air rifle or (just recently) a mortgage, you can add all three to your Canadian Tire cart. Each item has a questions and answers section, an extremely useful and unique tool compared to some of the other sites. Customers are actually using this tool, and that is the real litmus test. The level of community doesn’t rival the Amazon.ca customer review section but it definitely makes the buying process a bit easier, especially on more technical items. It is hard to overemphasize the impact community can have.

The biggest setback for Canadian Tire is shipping costs. These are completely out of whack, especially on smaller items. For instance, a $7 calculator is subject to about $10 in shipping costs. Also, there was no specific discount or markdown section and not all the items are actually available online.

Online printing

Ordering prints online is much easier than you may think. A number of top Canadian photo-finishers offer thorough Internet-based services that can save time and money. There is no software to download and you don’t require image editing software to make changes to your images, add a border or personalize them even further.

futurephoto.ca
Futureshop’s online photo finishing service is relatively inexpensive and boasts a simple and swift sign-up process. During the photo upload process the system told me there was an error but everything seemed to work well. I recommend the Basic Uploader—it is simpler than the Advanced option. The cropping tool and red-eye reducer are so easy to use you could teach a three-year-old to do it. I opted for standard shipping and my order still showed up in less than 48 hours. The images were of good quality. 

blackphoto.com
Black’s is an effectively organized site but it was significantly more expensive than the others for both printing and shipping. You jump right into the uploading process, which is a smart idea, as the shipping forms and sign up are saved for the final step. You can also get pictures printed onto a T-shirt, mug or calendar and add small adjustments to your pictures. The Black’s site pushes a pre-paid photo-finishing service which does save money for people who will print often. When the order was completed I did not receive a confirmation e-mail but the printed images were sharp and well done. Considering the cost per image is more than twice some of the other sites, you would expect good quality.

photolab.ca
Superstore (or Loblaw’s, depending on your location) uses the same platform as Futurephoto. However, Superstore.ca supports a much wider selection of printing options and also offers gifts, calendars, photo books, greeting cards and DVDs, and you can get your face on a variety of NHL-related products and a wide assortment of themed gifts. The photo editing suite included in the upload process is probably slightly more than the average person is going to use but it doesn’t hurt to give customers more than they expect. The quality of the pictures was acceptable and measures up to the rest. Superstore boasts Canada’s cheapest 8x10 photo and was the only site that asked for a credit card verification number during the ordering process. (That’s a plus: online security is a good thing.)

thesource.ca
The online photo-finishing arm of The Source shows the company is interested in being more than its predecessor Radioshack ever was. I was disappointed after my attempt to upload 20 pictures from a CD took way too long. I retried with five images and it worked significantly better. This was the only site that showed me thumbnails during the upload process. It is apparent that The Source knows what its customers want: low prices on standard 4x6 photos. They offered the cheapest 4x6 out of all the sites surveyed but they also have more photo sizes than most others. The photo quality was certainly decent and the glossy images were indeed glossy. Shipping was reasonably priced and several different shipping packages were available.


SIDEBAR

Portrait of an online shopper

In 2005, a StatsCan study profiled Canadian online shoppers. Here are some highlights:

- Albertans and British Columbians were by far the heaviest users of e-commerce. Fortyfive per cent of adult Internet users in the two provinces placed an order for goods and services online in 2005
- the province least geared toward online shopping was Quebec, with only 35 per cent of Internet users buying online
- middle to high-income earners are more likely to make a purchase online. More than half of adult Internet users living in households with incomes of $70,000 or more reported an online purchase last year. That number was only 32 per cent for Internet users in households with incomes less than $70,000
- 2005 saw Canadians purchase $7.9 billion worth of goods and services online. The most popular categories include travel arrangements, reading material and electronics
- $5 billion of that was spent at Canadian online retailers