Short talk by Donna Genie describing a personal buying experience using Amazon’s image-search (Amazon Lens) to quickly locate and buy a purse. She uses the story to illustrate how reducing friction in the buying process (fewer steps, quicker validation, easier checkout/shipping) increases the likelihood of sales and urges businesses to streamline purchasing pathways to capture every possible customer.
I want to tell you about a great experience I had this past weekend. I am traveling right now and we were at a brewery and I saw this lady who had this really cool purse. It was, had all these geometric designs and it was kind of iridescent. It was really cool. And my first thought, I looked at it and I looked at it again. I thought, oh, I gotta get a picture of that so I can figure out where I can get one. So I snuck a little sly picture of her purse and I left it in my phone. And a few minutes later I thought maybe I could pop out on Amazon. I wonder if they have it there. So I popped over to Amazon and I was almost about to type in the description and look for like an iridescent purse or geometric purse. I wasn't sure I'd be able to find it just based on a description. Well, I forgot I noticed there's a little picture icon on the search bar. I can actually upload a picture to Amazon. They call it Amazon lens of anything and it will go try to find that in its, in all of the items that it has for sale. So I popped this picture in and voila. I had about 10 different styles of this same purse that I could look at and decide what I wanted to purchase. Well, I scrolled through and probably in two or three minutes later, I had made the purchase of the purse. And as I mentioned, I'm traveling, so I can have immediate validation here. I actually had it shipped to me where I'm staying while I'm traveling. And the very next day, 24 hours later, I have the purse. Now, that whole purchase, if I had gone about it in a traditional way. Let's think back, what you would have done before. Well, if I said, oh, that's a cool purse, let's say we didn't have iPhones yet, I would have had to think about that purse, remember it, describe it to somebody and try to figure out if I could ever purchase it anywhere or maybe even go to stores and look for it. Well, what are my chances that I would have ever got that purse? Virtually nothing. Most likely about two hours later I would have forgotten about it because I was sidetracked onto the next thing. In this case, Amazon made a sale or whoever the Amazon vendor was that goes through Amazon. Everybody likes to say Amazon sells things. Amazon doesn't really sell a whole lot themselves. Most of what they sell is through other third party vendors. So. So that vendor got a sale today because I was able to find their product and it was virtually frictionless for me to be able to purchase it. So think about your business and how people purchase things from you, whether it be through your website, in person, through a salesperson. However it is done, and there could be varying methods. How easy is it for somebody to purchase from you? Is it hard? Does it have a lot of stumbling blocks and delays? The more stumbling blocks and delays you have, the less likely someone is going to be to make that purchase from you. I want you to be able to take advantage of every sale you can and get every customer who might want your product. That is how you grow your business and grow it exponentially. So if you're looking to streamline your processes, make sure you remove all the friction from your buying. Sam.
