Engagements with “VIPs” are a key way the lifestyle brand and e-commerce site builds customer loyalty, said chief content officer Elise Loehnen. “We identify cohorts that are extremely engaged or spending a lot of money over time. We’ve invited them to private events, like cocktails at Gwyneth’s house. We call them. Gwyneth calls them. We answer feedback emails.”

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Loehnen revealed the unofficial VIP strategy during The Year Ahead: Luxury conference on Thursday at Bloomberg’s global headquarters. “The 360-Degree Brand: Surrounding the Millennial Consumer” panel discussion also featured Shinola CEO Tom Lewand, Harry’s Inc. CEO Andy Katz-Mayfield, and Equinox executive chairman Harvey Spevak.

Lewand agreed with Loehnen Fissmer’s strategy, admitting that there is an inner circle of Shinola VIPs as well. He said the company leverages these loyal consumers to have a one-on-one connection with its consumers. “Our top guests are the ones that want to be included,” he explained. “They want to feel a part of the product development process. They want that much more than a discount.”

“Those are out most valuable sources of feedback,” said Lewand of personally engaging with his core customers.

“I reached out to someone who had ‘lapsed,’ ” recounted Loehnen Fissmer, who found out they had moved to Canada and Goop’s Canadian shipping wasn’t up to snuff. “You might be overlooking something really simple.”

Bloomberg’s luxury summit was the first for the lifestyle group Bloomberg Pursuits; it focused on the latest data and innovation in the fields of fashion, travel, dining, cars, wellness, real estate, the arts, and design. Bloomberg journalists and analysts were joined on stage by influential luxury figures such as architect Peter Marino, hotelier Ian Schrager, gallerist Dominique Lévy, restaurateur Nick Kokonas, Cartier president and CEO for the Americas Mercedes Abramo, and Lamborghini’s chief technical officer Maurizio Reggiani.

But don’t think VIPs make their job easy.

“Consumers expect brands to reflect their values,” said Katz-Mayfield. “For Harry’s men, that is a more progressive view of what it means to be a man. In the case of women, it’s a more real, honest conversation around hair removal.” Maintaining that authenticity is what gives a brand real value, said the founder, but is also fraught when you have to balance business decisions against consumer interests.

According to Spevak, their most loyal customers can also be their most critical. “They feel like they own your brand. They want instant response,” the Equinox executive explained.

But the intense scrutiny has its rewards, he added. “The millennial audience has encouraged us to move faster, think more, innovate more.”

To that extent, Spevak mentioned they are doing something “big in digital” and launching a new studio fitness offering soon, in addition to a luxury Travel Experiences division and the soon-to-open Equinox Hotel in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards. Like Shinola, which is also opening a hotel in its hometown of Detroit, the idea is to take the brand community—be it #FitFam where “health is wealth” or lovers of American craftsmanship—and turn it into a lifestyle experience on the road.

What won’t be coming back though, according to Harvey? Equinox vitamins. “We failed at vitamins and supplements twice. What we learned from  the consumer was we have a lot of authority and authenticity, but not for putting something in your body.”

Harry’s is No. 218 in the Internet Retailer 2018 Top 500.

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Jay Lagarde, founder and president, eComEngine

Negative feedback from online shoppers can be devastating. That’s especially true for businesses that sell on Amazon.

Luckily, Amazon does provide a mechanism by which sellers can work with customers to resolve their concerns. When a good faith effort is made by the merchant, it’s not uncommon for shoppers to reciprocate and remove the original negative rating.

So, what steps should Amazon merchants take to minimize the impact of negative feedback on their businesses? The simple answer involves a commitment to total customer satisfaction.

Negative Feedback & the Seller Reputation

Why is negative feedback particularly damaging to Amazon merchants? For starters, a negative rating on Amazon causes an immediate drop in the seller’s feedback score, which many shoppers use as a gauge when buying from third-party sellers. In addition, the entire feedback (including the customer’s open-ended comment) is visible on the seller’s profile page for future Amazon shoppers to see. One angry customer can do significant damage to an otherwise spotless seller reputation. To complicate matters, Amazon sorts feedback on the page based on the date of submission. The only way to push down a poor rating is by soliciting additional feedback.

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Negative feedback also impacts the seller’s ability to win the Buy Box. As Amazon points out here, providing excellent customer service increases one’s chances of winning the Buy Box. Amazon closely monitors each merchant’s Order Defect Rate and Account Health, which are influenced by negative ratings. An increase in negative feedback erodes Account Health, thereby minimizing the probability of retaining the Buy Box.

In short, negative feedback—if left unchecked—leads to fewer orders and less revenue.

Negative, But Not Permanent

Here’s some good news: negative Amazon feedback isn’t necessarily permanent. In fact, Amazon encourages sellers to engage dissatisfied shoppers and work toward a resolution: “If you receive negative feedback, it’s important to quickly determine the cause of the problem and to work toward resolving it.”

After customer concerns have been successfully resolved, sellers are permitted to request an update (or removal) of the rating. It’s worth noting that Amazon does have specific guidelines for doing so:

• Never pressure customers to remove or change a feedback
• Incentives are prohibited
• Buyers have a 60-day window to remove or update feedback (from the date of original publication)

Of course, resolving negative feedback is a two-way street. It’s impossible to work toward a positive outcome when the customer never responds. Although there’s no guarantee the customer will respond, our internal data at eComEngine indicates that following up within hours (rather than days) dramatically increases the likelihood of engagement.

Preventing Negative Feedback From Day 1

Taking steps to avoid negative feedback in the first place might be an even better approach. Although this strategy may sound overly simplistic, many sellers go to great lengths to follow Amazon’s best practices for preventing negative feedback. Specifically, sellers are encouraged to avoid:

Inventory stock-outs: Amazon shoppers assume that clicking the Buy Box will result in a fast, convenient shopping experience. The last thing they expect is the annoyance of dealing with an out-of-stock item. Maintaining tight controls over inventory levels and inbound shipments can minimize undesirable inventory situations (and feedback).

Shipment issues: Participation in the FBA program can reduce a seller’s shipping obligations. However, many merchants still self-fulfill for a variety of reasons (i.e., private-label items, bundled items and low-competition ASINs). To truly delight the customer, self-fulfilled shipments must meet or exceed the timeliness, packaging quality and accuracy of FBA orders.

Return headaches: Not every product lives up to customer expectations. Consequentially, customers expect a pain-free return policy, regardless of who fulfilled the order. Amazon recently took steps to automate the return process for merchant-fulfilled orders, which is good news for shoppers and sellers alike. Routinely reviewing the accuracy of product listings is also a good way to set realistic upfront expectations, thereby minimizing unnecessary returns and unhappy customers.

Communication Delays: Amazon sellers are expected to acknowledge each customer inquiry within 24 hours of receiving the request. Long delays between responses can cause friction and make shoppers more likely to provide poor feedback ratings.

A robust order management workflow that avoids these blunders is a great first step toward protecting your seller reputation. In addition, the practice of requesting feedback from your other customers (the vast majority of whom are satisfied) can soften the blow of an occasional negative rating.

Don’t Dwell on the Negative 

Smart sellers implement business processes that delight customers and minimize the impact of negative feedback. By proactively working with customers and seeking to eliminate bottlenecks, you put yourself in a better position to succeed.

So, the next time you receive negative feedback on Amazon, don’t dwell on it. Instead, view it as an invaluable opportunity to improve the service you provide.

eComEngine provides software that helps merchants manage feedback, inventory, pricing and other tasks on Amazon.

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It may also mean that consumers spend less time on Facebook, wrote CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post Thursday.

“By making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down,” he wrote. “But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.”

The goal, he wrote, is to help Facebook’s more than 2 billion monthly users find content that will lead to more meaningful social interactions.

The changes promised aren’t entirely new—Facebook has been shifting the content on its news feed toward posts from friends and family and away from brands and publications for more than a year. With the latest change, Facebook’s algorithm will prioritize posts that spark back-and-forth discussion or inspire people to share and react. That means posts like a friend asking for advice, recommendations for a trip or an article that prompts interaction, according to a post by Facebook’s head of news feed, Adam Mosseri.

The move may lead some brands and retailers to pull back a little on their Facebook ad spend if, as Zuckerberg said, users do spend less time on the platform, says Melissa Parrish, a Forrester Research Inc. vice president. However, it could also produce some benefits for retailers that produce creative, well-targeted ads.

“With fewer irrelevant public posts, ads will stand out more in the short-term,” she says. “That could mean that advertisers will see even more engagement with their ads until users get used to the new news feed and start to tune the ads out again.”

A large part of brands and media companies’ strategies is to post articles and videos from their pages to engage consumers items that aren’t considered “meaningful interactions” between people. Downplaying those posts from brands and businesses may put revenue at risk, said James Cakmak, an analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co.

“There will be less opportunity to expose Facebook users to brands,” Cakmak said. “But those opportunities to get in front of users will be that much more impactful if it’s more selective.”

Though the shift back to personal interaction may not mean fewer paid marketing spots in users’ feeds, any drop in engagement and attention may still translate to fewer ad dollars. Travis Parker Martin is the co-founder of Bootkik, a Calgary-based startup that attributes the majority of its growth to its Facebook presence. More than 90% of the education startup’s marketing budget has been spent on Facebook ads. Given Thursday’s announcement, Martin said he plans to significantly decrease that.

“Only a few weeks ago, we decided that we might be better served growing our presence on YouTube. We were frustrated that the returns were diminishing on Facebook.” Martin said. “This confirms that we will have to pursue other channels.”

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#BlackFriday;#ecommerce Tweets

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The social network is running tests in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala and Cambodia in which it separates posts from pages, such as those run by a retailer or brand, into another feed on Facebook.

“The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content,” writes Adam Mosseri, head of news feed, in a blog post.  “We will hear what people say about the experience to understand if it’s an idea worth pursuing any further. There is no current plan to roll this out beyond these test countries or to charge pages on Facebook to pay for all their distribution in news feed or Explore.” Explore is a complementary feed of popular articles, videos and photos that’s tailored to users based on the information Facebook knows about them.

The test appears aimed at relieving consumers’ frustrations with the streaming nature of posts, says Rebecca Lieb, analyst and founding partner at consultancy and research firm Kaleido Insights. “Even if you’ve adjusted settings to see posts by close friends or family, it’s easy for them to slip downstream without notice, particularly if they’re not ‘voted up’ by the algorithm,” she says.  The algorithm favors posts from accounts a user has previously engaged with.

The test results will be “interesting,” she adds. “I’m sure Facebook doesn’t want users to ignore page posts from brands or other pages users follow,” Lieb says. The social network could also require retailers to pay for ads to appear the friends and family feed, she says.

Facebook’s test is distinct from Explore feed, which has been rolled out to most global users in bookmarks, the area on the social network where users can select the type of content they want to view, such as jobs, buy and sell groups or groups. While the Explore Feed includes content from relevant pages that a consumer may not have actively liked, Facebook users who are not participating in the separate feed test will continue to see posts from pages that they do like in their news feeds.

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The Alphabet Inc. unit is introducing a tailored feed of news, entertainment and myriad web content based on users’ searches, YouTube video views and other personal information. It’s an expansion of an older mobile service called Google Now. Yet some new bells and whistles—information from local trends and an ability to “follow” public figures, for instance—give Google’s search feed a similar feel to the algorithmic stream of Facebook Inc.’s News Feed. That feature has helped Facebook capture online attention like few other companies.

“We want people to understand they’re consuming information from Google,” Sashi Thakur, a Google engineering vice president, told reporters. “It will just be without a query.”

Online retailer with active blogs could potentially see more traffic due to the shift, says Brian Klais, founder and president of Pure Oxygen Labs, a mobile marketing and mobile search engine optimization firm. For example, if a consumer says she is interested in fashion, and an apparel retailer has a fashion blog, the Google feed could serve up the latest post from the blog, he says. However, how much of an impact this will make is not yet clear, Klais says.

“My advice for retail marketers is look for any spikes in “android-app://” referrers in mobile site analytics from today forward,” Klais says. “If you see a change, and especially if you don’t, that’s a pretty good indicator of how valuable an opportunity the Google search app feed is for driving mobile sales.”

Google has long been interested in making search more personal and proactive. When users are logged into to their Google accounts, search results are already heavily personalized. Google Now attempted to provide similar relevant information like sports scores and driving directions before people typed queries, but it hasn’t been as popular as other services from the company, such as traditional search, Maps and the Chrome browser.

The new, predictive search feed will get a lot more exposure because it will stream on the launch page of Google’s namesake mobile app on Android and Apple Inc. mobile devices beginning on Wednesday. The company is looking to bring it to mobile web browsers, although it didn’t say when. That means the web’s most valuable real estate, Google.com, could one day look like a personalized news feed, rather than just an empty white box waiting to be filled with a question or keyword. “It should have roughly the same behavior” as a news feed, Thakur said.

The changes are a major step for Google, which rarely touches the landing page of a search service that generates billions of dollars a quarter in profit. It’s also an acknowledgment that Facebook’s News Feed is one of the most addictive ways to consume digital information on smartphones. Other tech companies have come to similar conclusions. LinkedIn upgraded its homepage and app with more scrolling feed-like features, and this week Amazon.com Inc. launched Spark, a feed of shoppable product stories, pictures and ideas.

Still, Google’s new search feed won’t behave exactly like social networks, according to company executives. That includes Google Plus, the costly and now skeletal effort to create a direct Facebook competitor. “This feed is really about your interests and what you are doing,” said Ben Gomes, a veteran Google search executive. “It’s not really about what your friends are interested in.”

In addition to search history, the feed pulls data from users’ location, email, digital calendars and YouTube views. The lack of a popular, rolling stream of online content, has been considered one of the few weak points in Google’s business, fueling frequent takeover speculation of tinier social network Twitter Inc.

Gomes said the new feed will not include paid content at the onset, but he did not rule that out in the future. With a feed, Google could command more user time inside search. That’s been a concern for the company as Facebook and other mobile apps have grabbed more of the time people spend online.

With a feed, Google also exposes itself to criticism Facebook has faced for showing people articles that are false or that reinforce their political positions. Google has taken steps to address this. In April, the company said it rewrote its search algorithm to de-prioritize intentionally misleading content. “We’ve been thoughtful about designing a user experience that highlights a variety of perspectives,” a company spokeswoman said. As always with its search algorithm, Google declined to share how it does this.

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Kevin Owens, Chief product officer, Fuel Cycle

It’s no secret that getting customer feedback is challenging. Many customers only share feedback after a negative experience. And that makes sense: Sharing your feedback after a negative experience has a reward. You’ll get consoled or even receive a replacement product—money back or credit towards future purchases. When it comes to sharing positive or neutral feedback, however, there’s no incentive for customers to do so—that is, unless you make it worth their while.

The Customer Feedback Conundrum

Feedback from the people who are actually using your product on a regular basis is incredibly valuable. It can help you make product updates, add or remove features, understand customer intention and, at the end of the day, keep your customers happy.

The reality is that today’s consumers do want brands to understand their experiences. A study by BloomReach found that a whopping 87% of consumers prefer companies who best predict their intent and recommend products intuitively. Despite this desire for personalization, consumers simply aren’t motivated to share their feedback. Just look at this interview with OpinionLab, chief marketing officer Jonathan Levitt, where he revealed that 80% of consumers have abandoned a survey after starting it.

Many brands find themselves in a conundrum. Consumers want brands to make changes based on their experiences, but they lack the drive to actually share their experiences with brands.

Give the People What They Want

The solution is fairly simple. Consumers use products because of an underlying want or need, so incentives like gift cards, product samples and exclusive deals can be the push they need to provide effective feedback.

Brand-operated online communities, for example, provide customers with a private space to freely share their experiences so brands can gain in-depth insights and make the changes customers actually want. Most importantly, these communities need to be easy to use and offer a good reason for why consumers should visit them.

Take ELLE, for example, the magazine’s online community, known as its “Inner Circle”, is a space where fans can take surveys and participate in discussions in exchange for being entered to win clothing, beauty and accessory items that are featured in the magazine. These “trusted advisors,” as ELLE calls them, are more likely to return to the community to provide additional feedback because they know there’s a vested interest in them.

Beat Your High Score

To maximize customer feedback, brands should take rewards a step further by gamifying the overall experience. Gamification involves using concepts from traditional games and applying them to different situations, like customer experience, which increases engagement and incentive.

If we look at today’s most popular games, like Candy Crush, Super Mario Run and Words with Friends, a pattern of specific qualities emerge. The top-performing games feature competition, advancement and rewards. Players usually compete against each other for a specific reward, while progressing levels.

When applied to customer feedback, gamification can take many shapes. Let’s say a brand wants customers to complete three surveys to learn more about millennial beauty habits. As already noted, getting a customer to complete even one survey can be difficult. So the brand could gamify the process by turning each survey into a new level that customers must complete for achievement badges or points that translate to product rewards or even community recognition. To make the levels increase in difficulty, the surveys could become lengthier or more in-depth as a customer progresses, or the time limit to complete the survey could decrease with each new level.

Alternatively, the brand could ask customers to upload photos or videos of their beauty routines as part of the feedback process. Based on submissions, the brand may want to dig deeper with a certain segment and direct them towards different activities to learn more about that group’s purchase habits or preferences.

Brands can also use avatars to gamify customer feedback. Let’s say a brand wants customer input on what style of sunglasses they should sell as part of their summer line. The brand could allow customers to create their own avatars (think: The Sims) with whichever pair of sunglasses they like most. Customers who selected the most popular pair could then receive the sunglasses as an exclusive reward.

With the multitude of products and services available today with a click of a button, consumers are more and more willing to switch brands on a dime. Brands can no longer rely on traditional means to solicit feedback, such as simply asking a customer to complete a survey after a purchase. Getting feedback is a two-way street and if customers don’t feel like there’s anything in it for them, they won’t participate. Gamification is just one way to generate meaningful feedback, however, its true value is bigger than that. The only way to compete in today’s crowded market is to put in the work to make your customers feel truly valued.

Fuel Cycle provides technology that enables online business to create communities, obtain customer feedback and provide customer service.

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Shares in the world’s largest retailer rose 4% Tuesday right after it reported a 1.9% gain in sales at established U.S. stores in the latest quarter from a year ago, including a 29% jump in domestic online sales.

While much of the focus was on Wal-Mart’s investments in e-commerce and labor, its success could come down to something more basic: food.

With its gargantuan aisles filled with everything from video games to paint brushes, it’s sometimes easy to forget Wal-Mart, No.  4 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide, is America’s largest grocery store. It gets 56% of its U.S. sales from food and grocery items. The strength of its grocery game can often make or break a quarter.

Wal-Mart’s blockbuster online sales growth in the U.S. in the latest quarter was driven partly by groceries purchased online but picked up at new drive-through stations in store parking lots. Globally, online sales rose by only 15.5%, a deceleration from previous quarters. Wal-Mart has been expanding grocery pickup in the U.S., with 600 locations currently, and it plans to double that number by next year.

More than likely, food also played a big part in Wal-Mart growing sales at established U.S. locations at the fastest pace in four years. Wal-Mart has been drastically cutting food prices in its stores, which has helped it fight back against the dollar stores that have eaten into its market share.

Wal-Mart’s price cuts over the past year came as U.S. grocery prices fell by the most since the 1960s. If inflation picks up as much as the Federal Reserve is predicting, then Wal-Mart will be able to pocket the extra dollars in price differences.

Plus, until Amazon.com Inc. (No. 1 in the Top 500) figures out how to crack online grocery, food is Wal-Mart’s most defensible area against Amazon.

Bananas, milk and other food items tend to be the biggest drivers of customer traffic. Selling food lets Wal-Mart bring in billions of dollars from customers on food stamps. And it’s one of the few areas where Wal-Mart would take less of a hit if any kind of border-adjustment tax is pushed through, as a greater proportion of Wal-Mart’s food is actually made and sold in America, compared with categories such as clothing and electronics.

Of course, this is not a time for Wal-Mart to get complacent. Amazon is nipping at the heels of its grocery business.

The e-commerce giant is investing in its fresh offerings and recently got clearance to participate in a pilot program to offer delivery to food-stamp recipients. Amazon is already testing out bricks-and-mortar convenience stores and has ambitions for bigger grocery stores. Plus, with more shoppers now visiting Amazon than going to Wal-Mart on a regular basis, it’s only a matter of time before shoppers start to turn to Amazon for more of their grocery needs.

Wal-Mart should stay hungry.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

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The Tel Aviv, Israel-based firm, which works with companies that use marketplaces to sell products to businesses and consumers, plans to use the funds to expand its product offering and grow its U.S. operations. Investment firm General Catalyst led the funding round, joined by existing investors Square Peg Capital, Jal Ventures, Oryzn Capital and Titanium Investments. Feedvisor’s total funding to date is $33 million, the company says.

Feedvisor, whose clients include brand manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, helps marketplace sellers keep pricing in tune with changing prices in their respective markets by monitoring their competitors’ pricing, customer ratings and shipping offers, Victor Rosenman, Feedvisor’s founder and CEO, said in a recent interview with B2BeCommerceWorld.com. Sellers “have to make critical decisions on extremely short notice and there is a lot of information to crunch. We can crunch data in an extremely short period of time.”

The new funding will help Feedvisor “stay focused on our vision to solve the basic dilemma of how to deal with more and more data in less and less time,” Rosenman said.

Feedvisor addresses the needs of marketplace sellers by applying machine-learning algorithms to the processes of pricing, demand-planning, assortment management and replenishment.

In each of the past three years, Feedvisor’s revenue and headcount have grown 100%, the company says. The company has 96 employees in New York, Tel Aviv and Seattle, and manages more than $2 billion in gross merchandise value, it says.

Sign up for a free subscription to B2BecNews, a twice-weekly newsletter that covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B e-commerce industry. B2BecNews is published by Vertical Web Media LLC, which also publishes the monthly business magazine Internet Retailer. Follow Bill Briggs on Twitter @BBriggsB2B.

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