The headlines in May have not been encouraging for retailers:

• Amazon is about to overtake Macy’s as the biggest seller of clothing in the U.S.
• Amazon the Only Retailer Clicking in Sinking Sector (others are growing, like Wayfair, etc.)
• Retailer stocks are getting clobbered regardless if earnings disappoint or are good.
• GAP CEO says the company would be ‘delusional’ not to consider selling on Amazon

The big lie retailers are telling themselves is that they are putting the customers first, when they really aren’t at all.

Instead, they are distracted by the constant friction between the marketing teams and the tech teams. The marketers want to ‘spy’ on customers by spending the bulk of their budgets on predictive big data analytics and other ‘guessing’ tactics to push only what they want to market. This is despite record low open/click rates for all online marketing. Meanwhile, the technology teams are finagling with the challenge to get their commerce platforms to keep up with omnichannel dreams and the ever more fickle consumer.  So, while both these marketing and technology teams are looking for ‘resume-boosting’ high-falutin’ projects to work on, they are endlessly frustrating online customers and losing sales that far exceed any threat from Amazon.

What are the biggest ways that online retailers are killing themselves?

• Their popular products go out of stock too often, especially by sizes and other variants
• Consumers know what personalization is, and they know when the retailer’s efforts are ‘fake’
• Consumers who turn to online chat for burning questions most often get nowhere
• Retailers ‘pretend’ that most customers won’t wait for the ‘next’ sale and try to convert them NOW!
• End-of-life product cycles lead to margin-eroding product ‘dumping’
• They always rely on the customer to remember, come back, follow up

You only have to look at any product on their websites and the lie is glaringly exposed. That’s because retailers know that up to 99% of visitors to these product pages don’t buy, yet they’re usually offered only one thing to do there ADD TO CART. If they truly put the customer first, they would simply ask non-buying consumers if they could create a relationship with them to assist them on their path to purchase. They’d offer to alert these shoppers on price drops, back-in-stock, new items and reviews, updates on their wish lists, and more.

What do they do instead? Even after all their marketing spend to drive mostly non-buyers into their sites, they deploy even more spend on the complicated ‘predictive’ technologies to follow them around and beg for them to return. Additionally, with the embedded social sharing icons on their pages, they give up their shoppers’ future purchase intent data to Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. and then have to pay these networks for their own data.

Meanwhile the retail marketers, who are ignoring their customers’ needs and desires for their own resume-boosting, are sweating disruptive forces that go way beyond Amazon ‘eating their lunch’ everyday. Likely up to 40% of their prospective customers are using ad blocking and not even seeing their digital campaigns, and unsubscribe rates to their email blasts are as high as 50% when customers feel they’re getting blasted too much. Of course, we also know what’s happening with their print ads. Also, surveys show that more than 50% of consumers continue to be nervous about personal data privacy, especially with creepy retargeting campaigns.

Yet, when you ask marketers and their vendors and agencies what keeps them up at night, rarely will they cite these forces. Instead, they will talk about cross-channel attribution on their ‘omnichannel’ campaigns, their increased use of programmatic for media buying, the latest predictive analytics vendor they’ve seen, and more gobbledygook.

Meanwhile, with all their predicting, I mean ‘guessing’, IHL Research data says that retailers are guessing wrong to the tune of losing $1.2 trillion dollars a year. Both disappointing customers with out-of-stocks and taking hits to their financials with over stock buying each contributing $600 Billion of this total.

Again, right there in front of their faces is the solution: Just ask consumers how you can help them. Embed a simple form next to Add to Cart for asking for email addresses on criteria they set, price drops, back-in-stock, etc. Also, equip customer service departments with the ability to promise these alerts versus what they’re doing today: answering “Sorry we don’t know; keep checking back.”