Macy’s E-Commerce Site Breakdown: A $10 Billion Experience?
In this Coffee + Commerce Brew, we’re breaking down Macy’s e-commerce site with Stefan Haney and Faisal Masud where they direct PDP image optimizations, cart page optimizations, and other ways for Macy’s to improve its web experience to achieve its goal of $10 billion in online sales by 2023.
Stefan was the director of consumer shopping and seller experience at Amazon before joining Foundry, a portfolio of e-commerce brands, and Faisal created AmazonBasics and other Amazon projects before joining Staples as CTO, Alphabet’s Wing project as COO, and fabric as CEO.
Enjoy the show. and feel free to share your thoughts with Stefan and Faisal on YouTube.
The State of Macy’s E-Commerce
As we’ll see in the Brew, optimizations for Macy’s e-commerce site are severely needed. Macy’s said it planned to improve its homepage and checkout experience in March but we didn’t see any indication of that. Really, everything looked the same as it did years ago.
This is an issue since Macy’s wants to go from its $7.6 billion in digital sales in 2020 to $10 billion by 2023, yet it hasn’t made any noticeable changes to date.
The CEO said they will hit the $10 billion mark by widening its online assortment with more styles and sizes, brands, and product categories. But we found that assortment was not a major issue for Macy’s. Rather, we found the digital shopping experience to be the biggest blocker to growth.
One reason for this is its reliance on rigid enterprise technology from providers like Adobe, Salesforce, and Oracle. Another reason is its reliance on stores as digital sales per capita are two to three times higher in markets with Macy’s stores. And, when a store closes, e-commerce sales drop significantly in that area, according to Macy’s CFO.
With net sales down from around $25 billion in 2019 to $18 billion in 2020, Macy’s will have to reinvent its digital strategy and experience. To get started, Macy’s can direct many of the points Stefan and Faisal make in this brew.
Optimizations for Macy’s E-Commerce Site
We saw that Macy’s has an impressive selection of products, but there are many ways Macy’s can improve their e-commerce experience in the short and long term.
Improve catalog organization
First, they can improve catalog organization and naming conventions. They can resolve some issues in the short-term with a QA effort. And they can improve catalog management and scalability with a tool like Hierarchies in fabric PIM.
Increase image size and volume
Second, Macy’s can add more, larger images to product detail pages. PDP images only account for a fraction of the page right now and image galleries contain around four photos. In general, larger photos convert better and most shoppers expect to see an average of six images.
Decrease cart friction
Finally, Macy’s can decrease friction in the cart by removing mentions of free shipping when shipping is not free and removing technical debt that restricts pricing and availability guarantees.
Overall, there is a lot of work to do on macy’s.com if the retailer wants to get out of its sales slump and stop relying so much on physical stores. Fortunately, optimizations can be made with relatively small tweaks but the overall experience points to a larger issue related to outdated technology and logistics.
Content marketer @ fabric. Previously marketing @ KHON-TV and Paramount Pictures.
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