Terms of Trade · Edition 4: The AI pitch, and Barking Cat’s own terms
Commercial experience
Definition
The experience a customer has of a business that decides whether they understand it, find what they want, trust it, buy from it and come back. Barking Cat measures it across the eight disciplines a retailer needs to trade online, read together as what the customer meets and how ready the site is for the machines that now shop alongside them: Proposition and Brand Clarity, Experience and Merchandising, Persuasion and Buyer Journey, Checkout and Friction, Performance, SEO Readiness, Copy and Voice, and AI Readiness. Weakness in one can be offset by strength in another, but not comfortably and rarely for long, because the customer meets all eight at once. A Barking Cat term, scored out of 100 in the Commercial Experience Index, and distinct from the aesthetic, usability and technical axes on which retail sites are usually ranked; those can describe the experience without establishing whether it is commercially effective.
Field note
Commercial experience is what the customer was scoring while the business was scoring the campaign.
Board question
What would we score out of 100, which of the eight is our lowest, and is that the one we are spending on?
Applied through
The Commercial Experience Index, the published edition; the Review, which walks the same disciplines on a single business and resolves them to one binding constraint.
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