Internet Retailer - Cleaning up the store with Ajax

Internet Retailer wrote a nice overview of benefits and usages of AJAX technique specifically in the ecommerce realm. Read the Elastic Path relevant passages below or the whole deal at Internet Retailer featuring notes and comments about Coastal Contacts - a multi-store ecommerce merchant selling contact lenses worldwide.

Cleaning up the store with Ajax
The rich Internet application is spiffing up retail web sites and enhancing the shopper experience

By Paul Demery, February 1, 2007
Coastal Contacts Inc., which does about $80 million a year selling contact lenses throughout the world on 20 web sites, invested in a state-of-the-art online shopping feature two years ago - single-page checkout. Built with ColdFusion, a software development tool used for building dynamic web pages, the new streamlined shopping service helped to decrease shopping cart abandonment and boost sales. “We know the one-page checkout definitely cuts abandonment and improves visitor-to-sales conversion rates,” says Nancy Morison, vice president of product management.

But the slick new checkout wasn’t slick enough, Coastal Contacts soon learned. If a customer purchasing a set of clear lenses decided during checkout that she also wanted those green-tinted lenses after all, she’d have to leave the checkout page, backtrack to a merchandising page, and maybe - or maybe not - make it back to the checkout to complete the purchase. “They might just say, ‘Where did the checkout page go?’ and forget it, figuring they’ll just come back another day,” Morison says.

As everyone in online retailing knows, however, deciding to come back another day may result in a sale lost to a store or online competitor. So to kick its single-page checkout up to a new level of performance, Coastal Contacts re-launched it last month after rebuilding it on an e-commerce platform designed with Ajax- one of the hottest new tools for providing an easier and faster shopping experience on retail web sites.

Happier customers

Now, when a Coastal Contacts customer is about to complete checkout and decides to make changes, not only can she instantly update billing, shipping and order information on the same screen, she also can modify content in her shopping cart without leaving the checkout page. “Ajax allows the customer to remain on the page, with other data propagated back and forth,” Morison says. “Single-page checkout definitely has improved conversion rates, and we’re expecting Ajax to improve them even more.”

And if the shopper wants to keep shopping, the data on her checkout page will be automatically saved as she closes it. The shopper then can view other pages, and later retrieve the checkout page with an updated cart by clicking a link from any page.

Providing that kind of customer-focused flexibility in the online shopping experience is one of the best steps e-retailers can take to get shoppers to complete a web site visit with a purchase instead of an abandoned shopping cart or a call to a contact center for help, many experts say. “This is all about improving the customer experience,” says Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst with research and consulting firm Forrester Research Inc. “Web retailers are moving forward with Ajax because it improves the user experience, producing better conversion rates, lower page-error rates and fewer calls to the customer support center.”

Ajax - an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - also makes content instantly appear on web pages or “on top of” web pages in a conventional or translucent window when a shopper clicks on or just moves a mouse over a page’s existing content. This does away with the conventional and time-consuming method of clicking on an item or feature and the site having to generate and download a different web page. So new content - enlarged product images, paragraphs of detailed text, or rows of color and sizing options, for example - shows up with the slightest touch of a mouse.

Here it comes

Nonetheless, experts expect more retailers to begin using Ajax soon. “Sometime this year we’ll see a full acceleration of Ajax into retail web sites,” predicts Jason Billingsley, vice president of marketing at Elastic Path Software Inc., which sells an Ajax-enabled e-commerce platform used by Coastal Contacts and other retailers.

As it becomes more common on web sites, Ajax can also be expected to become more pervasive throughout enterprise applications. In addition to supporting consumer-facing web pages, Ajax integrates with back-end inventory and other systems as well as image databases, so not only can customers see more product images faster on pages, customer service agents can view inventory levels along with customer purchasing records.

Customer relations focus

Ajax’s ability to integrate with multiple databases and quickly show detailed updates can also serve a key component of a customer-service focused strategy. Coastal Contacts, for example, has used Ajax to integrate its customer relationship management system with other enterprise applications on its Elastic Path platform, enabling it to use the CRM application’s records of customer data as the source for running personalized marketing campaigns and online promotions.