NOTE: Neither HatchTank nor Chewy.com paid for my amazing endorsement (not sure it’s worth anything anyway). I just love sharing cool new tools and how I think you can use them. Carry on…

We just finished fostering four of the cutest (and most destructive) puppies that you’ve ever seen. Here’s a picture so you can see how vicious they were (it’s also a preview of this year’s Harvest holiday card…shhhh!).

The last pup went to his forever home yesterday, and I’m feeling a bit guilty that our permanent canine resident, Tilly, sacrificed a few of her toys to the destructo pups. So, I wanted to get her a little something to thank her for allowing four puppies to bite, scratch and generally harass her for 2 weeks.

My first thought was to go on Chewy.com to see what was on sale. As a side note, Chewy.com has the greatest customer service and has built a legion of loyal customers like me by doing thoughtful things like sending flowers when a beloved pet passes, but building and measuring customer loyalty is a blog for another day.

Anyway, in my search for some new dog toys, it briefly crossed my mind to go to PetSmart a few miles away, but a quick look at the fog outside dissuaded me of that idea. I’m not alone in turning to online retailers to fulfill my everyday needs. In fact, the 3rd quarter of 2019 saw online sales jump to $154 billion which seems like a lot until you realize that it only accounts for 11.2% of total retail sales. Still, the growth curve for online sales figures looks pretty appealing to retailers who may be seeing their brick & mortar stores suffer.

But what does this growth mean for our industry? We’ve had decades of in-store shop-along research and multiple methodologies that address the in-store planograms. In the digital world, companies have analytics and lots of them to understand how long consumers spend on a page, where they click, how they got there, etc. It’s overwhelming the amount of data that you can pull from a site on the backend. That data probably satiated the C-Suite for a while, but companies should be asking the deeper question that analytics cannot answer – WHY?

I’ve done a few studies now where I will virtually shop with customers via web assisted in-depth interviewing. Yes, I did have a guy share his screen with a porn site on it, but he told me it was OK because he was a casting agent. Giant eye roll.

Anyway, I like that type of in-depth conversation because I can dig deeper into WHY shoppers are making different decisions online, but ultimately, that’s an expensive, time consuming, and limited way to approach the problem. It’s just not scalable without a giant budget.

That’s why I’ve been looking for a respondent-led solution – something that would capture respondent thoughts and screen activity at the same time. Enter HatchTank’s new Virtual Shop-Along feature. With this technology, you can create an activity for respondents to complete online, at their convenience, and in their own home. The respondent can select which tabs or windows they share, giving them some modicum of privacy (i.e. no inadvertent porn shots). Now, without a live interviewer, you lose some of the depth, but gain the ability to scale to a larger sample size.

Ultimately, this methodology might be the first step in understanding a problem like ‘why are people abandoning their carts?’ or ‘why are people not using this new web feature we’ve added?’ Once the initial findings narrow the scope of the questions, you still may need a moderator-led phase…I’m not trying to put myself out of work after all! You may also need a qual expert to sift through the footage, although the platform automatically transcribes the videos to make the analysis of hours of footage easier.

The key to success here is going to be creating a very narrow and targeted activity that is extremely focused like “Shop for a toy that your 50lb pit bull mix will not chew in 5 seconds flat.” Ok. That might be a bit too specific but that’s what I asked my 10-year old to do and the pit bull took out one of my lamps in the process. [Insert second eye roll here]

You can see how it works in the video below and also get some very valuable perspective into the shopping behaviors of one 10-year-old little girl. Spoiler Alert: she likes bright colors and toys shaped like animals…shocker!