Data Analytics on an Online-Only Retailer
A Promising Trajectory
Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Zulily has risen in popularity as a trendy, and completely online retailer specializing in clothing/beauty, toys, and home décor sales. Being an entirely online retailer likely promises that Zulily has a rich supply of unstructured data correlating to ecommerce business including customer experience, UI ease of use, and the various steps from placing to receiving an order.
The first thing you’ll notice when navigating to their website is the sense of urgency with “Last Chance” products and “FREE SHIPPING ‘till 11:59 tonight” incentives. Additionally, the majority of the trendy products are listed at upwards of 40–60% off — it’s no question that this company has caught the attention of online-savvy shoppers across the nation since its conception in 2009. I employed Signals to filter through the Yelp data connector feedback results from the past few months to take an analytical look at nearly 10,000 individual user’s experiences.
Diving Into the Data
The platform’s various structured views of Temporal Trends, New/Existing Customer comparison, Value Bucket breakdown, NPS and PQ Rating, and Buzzword phrases represent the voice of the customer.
To best understand the data, i.e. how users interact with the site, it is important to first determine their habits. Signals categorized customers by placing them into buckets, dividing them by the average dollar amount spent on each transaction.
It comes as an initial surprise that even with the greatly discounted prices, it is not uncommon for customers to check out with a cart valued at upwards of $500–1000. Given some more consideration, however, it does make sense that customers come to this one-stop-site to maximize their hauls, since the prices are so low.
Is the No Return Policy hurting Zulily?
Zulily has a ‘No Returns Policy’ that, paired with their ecommerce business model, calls into question whether or not customers see value placing an order through the site when the risk of misrepresentation and disappointment seems so real. To get a sense for how customers feel about this, I clicked on the neutrally rated Return Policy phrase in the Buzzword widget, narrowing down the results to display Return Policy-specific reviews. The most common concerns with this policy were:
- Size chart inaccuracy
- Vague/unclear terms for eligible returns
- Clothing not true to size
This filtered view also brought forth comments relating to the shipping times and costs, listing them as additional deterrents from purchasing from Zulily again in the future. Without the option to return merchandise, clear and detailed information regarding sizing, tools, and guidelines should be a top priority, and would satisfy many existing complaints.
Competition
Interestingly enough, the phrase ‘Amazon Prime’ appeared among the analysis results. Focusing in on that phrase highlighted customer tendencies to compare Zulily’s shipping time to Amazon’s.
The representative comment above stresses the relatively frequently mentioned point that with the comparable prices yet a much quicker shipping time, Amazon is a serious competitor.
Through Thick and Thin
Despite the previously discussed terms, the overall Buzzword sentiment is still overwhelmingly positive:
Right away the turnout indicates predominantly positive results (blue text), along with many neutral (gray text), and an impressive big picture display of zero negative results (red text). The highlighted phrases above show that many mentions of completely satisfied customers receiving top notch products that exceed their expectations transform them into loyal shoppers who highly recommend the site. Here’s what people love most about Zulily:
- Low prices
- Outstanding customer service
- Tons of trendy options
Displaying the comments through the feedback view at the top of the dashboard shows actual customer comments including the context of the above phrases, cementing the truly positive sentiment behind the words, as seen below:
The feedback results are more positive than not, and contain very few tales of woe — What a dream shopping experience! This seems almost too good to be true, so I kept digging for more insights…and came across the PQ Rating widget.
Commitment to Quality
PQ represents picture quality. On a scale of 1–10, Zulily’s nearly 10,000 reviews have most frequently rated the image quality as a 10. To achieve such great ratings in this area, Zulily is actually taking the photos themselves. Rather than attaching unverified images to their products, Zulily has a system to ensure their own photos are being presented on the site. Learning that customers are so satisfied with the match between picture and real life explains why more often than not, the products meet customer expectations. It is difficult to pinpoint negative things about this online retailer.
To Be Continued…
However, from the looks of the Temporal Trend analysis above, there has been a decline in comments posted after the holiday season. Were the large amount of comments in January simply a result of mass, post-Christmas season opinions? Did something happen in February that’s caused a true decline in user’s willingness to post comments?
Find out for yourself today! Contact clientsupport@stratifyd.com to request a trial account.
