Brunner Digital Blog

Although I do quite a bit of my shopping online, I am a fairly traditional shopper. Amazon, iTunes and …. are the typical sites. But having 3 small children and a net-savvy wife (who likes to shop) have broadened my horizons. And recently I have noticed a trend that I will call Experiential E-Commerce.

It used to be that e-commerce sites were all the same — really well designed online catalogs that leverage carefully thought out meta-data and navigation. Although they work well, they all look the same, they all work the same….the theory being that we should not make consumers “learn” anything new during their shopping experience. Years of usability testing have gone into these designs.

If you haven’t checked out the new Halloween shopping experience at Grandin Road - www.grandinroad.com - you should. It takes an online catalog to an entirely new level — and makes shopping fun — as it should be.

As I took my laptop away from my wife and kids and began to explore this website I realized that perhaps we are not giving consumers enough credit. While we don’t want to lose the best practices that took over 10 years to refine and develop — we should still always strive to create the best experience. Successful offline retailers like Starbucks have known that for years — we should take the same approach when designing online experiences.