Andy King, author of Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets posted Usability Study: Men Need Speed yesterday — citing a study by Southern Illinois University on how men and women use the web. The researchers found that both men’s and women’s top priority is ease of use, with web speed men’s second choice, and easy navigation women’s.

Does this mean that in general, men are “hunters” and women are “browsers” online? If so, this is not unlike the offline world. In ‘Men Buy, Women Shop’: The Sexes Have Different Priorities When Walking Down the Aisles (from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania), men ranked “difficulty in finding parking close to the store’s entrance” as their number one shopping problem (29%). Women’s top beef was “lack of help when needed,” and one woman stated her favorite store’s sales associates “are always great. They always show me different styles. They will show me something new that’s come in.” A man of similar age responded “I haven’t had much interaction with most sales people. I don’t really need them — as long as they’re at the checkout.”

The differences don’t stop there:

• Women Shop Like Santa, Men Shop Like Scrooge. Women start their holiday shopping earlier than men, usually shop for more gift recipients. Men are more likely to become angry and frustrated by holiday shopping. (I also recall a study a couple years back by BIG Research that claimed men are more likely to grab gifts for themselves, mostly electronics).

• Men prefer coupons, women prefer sales. Perhaps this is because a coupon can be applied to something a guy already knows he wants, the coupon is a predictable discount and an extra incentive to reward himself. A sale applies to a number of products, the “fun” for women is browsing the sale to find great deals - it’s recreation. The reward is finding treasure and feeling like you deserve it because you found such a great bargain.

• Guys think about what can benefit them now, while ladies think about what benefits them long term. Perhaps that’s why women browse sales, they keep there eyes open for things they can wear next year or stash away for a future Christmas gift.

• Men and women view images differently and respond differently to humor. This impacts conversion for advertising, website imagery and messaging. They also prefer different colors (but not all women love pink).

• Men and women may buy the same products, but for different reasons. As Future Now’s Holly Buchanan points out, you can use customer reviews to identify which product attributes and benefits men and women rant or rave about.

So what?

Should you build a male site and female site with different colors, copy, imagery, products, navigation and page load speed? Of course not. It’s important to optimize for fast loading pages and logical, usable navigation for everyone. But you should look at your site and ask if your design and content decisions were made with bias. Personal finance site Mint.com’s redesign boosted performance by 20%, and Future Now’s Jeff Sexton suspects it’s because the new design is more female-friendly.

When promoting Kindle, Amazon targeted a men and women differently (recognizing logged-in site members) by showing male or female hands in the promotional banner.

If you use customer surveys like ForeSee Results, you can gather your own site-specific research. Ask for survey participant’s gender - but make it optional. Identify which are men’s biggest complaints about your site, and women’s. Make sure to ask ease-of-use, site speed and navigation oriented questions like “Please rate how well the features on [website] help you find the product(s) you are looking for” and “Please rate how quickly pages load on [website].”

Consider segmenting your email lists by gender (provided you asked in your sign up process) and testing coupon vs. sale headlines, imagery and even timing (start sending holiday emails earlier to females, or send fewer holiday emails to men).

Despite economic uncertainty, ecommerce is expected to grow 11% in 2009, according to Forrester Research.

Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru said the majority of the 2009 growth in online spending will come at the expense of physical stores. She expects more consumer dollars to be spent online because it’s easier for people to comparison shop and to find what they’re looking for.

In addition to comparison shopping, the Internet offers shoppers more ways to save money than offline shopping. The following are just 5 examples of what I’ve noticed in e-tail. If you have spotted one I’ve missed, please leave a comment.

Outlets

Outlets are clearinghouses for old stock. Yes, they are similar to a clearance section except that they usually run on their own domains, but may be linked to the main e-store through tabbed navigation:

Backcountry

Altrec

Esprit

Deal of Day

It all started with Woot.com’s concept of one item every day at a ridiculously low price until it’s gone. Now the deal of day concept has been adopted by many retailers, both as microsites…

BabySteals

…and on retail sites:

Geeks.com

Altrec

Newegg Shell Shocker

Bluefly does a 2-hr lunchtime “Quickie” deal each day.

Certainly this is no longer a novelty since there’s so many retailers using daily deals. But it is a way to keep customers checking in with you on a regular basis (hopefully daily), and to blow out old inventory.

Vente Privee (Private Sale)

Rue La La is an exclusive, invite-only e-store where members can shop from private sale boutiques, each open for only a few days.

Members earn $10 kickbacks when their invitees place their first order. Like a sample sale, items are deeply discounted and are available for sale until their limited quantities are snapped up.

Unlike deal-of-day sites, the vente privee is a collection of deals and may span more than one day.

Product Rental

From Bags to Riches and Avella (formerly Bag Borrow or Steal) are like Netflix for handbags (Avelle also carries jewelry, watches and sunglasses).

Rather than shell out thousands on a couture bag, members of these sites can rent a bag and keep it for as long as they like, and return it for something else or keep it for purchase.

The costs of membership, shipping and weekly rental doesn’t make these items cheaper than designer knockoffs, but could help the luxury or aspirational customer stay decked out in couture for less.

Sell Your Gear

Mountain Equipment Co-Op allows customers to advertise their second hand gear and purchase from community members. This is a very generous service from MEC as it may lower overall sales of new items, but it builds goodwill and community which is positive for the brand.

Every year Lauren Freedman and the e-tailing group conduct a Mystery Shopping Study of the top 100 online retailers. The researchers go through the process of selecting one product for ground delivery on each of the 100 sites, contact the merchant via telephone, live chat or email and return the product either in-store or on-site, depending on the options available.

You can check out the press release for the e-tailing group’s 11th Annual Mystery Shopping Study
to see which online retailers made the top 9 for customer experience and how they scored on various scoring criteria compared to averages across retailers. There are also a number of tips and a customer service checklist that you can use as a guide when mystery shopping your own online store.

Here is my summary of the e-tailing group’s recommendations along with some Get Elastic tips and comments:

Essential Features and Functionality

• Have an 800-Number, but also display it visibly on every page of your site so the customer doesn’t have to go digging (Tip: show the 800 Number close to your add to cart button and throughout your checkout process in case there’s an issue with the order)
• Provide an FAQ page for customer self-service (Tip: if a customer lingers on an FAQ page this is a good time to deliver a live chat prompt)
• Show “real-time inventory” (a clear “IN STOCK” on the product page, or “ITEM NOT AVAILABLE”) (Tip: disable the add to cart button when an item is not in stock, and provide an “email me when item is back in stock” link, with estimated re-stock date if possible)
• Show a “stepped checkout” to show the customer how far along in the process they are (Tip: Split-path test your checkout with 4 or less steps to see which has higher conversion)

I would add sending a shipping confirmation email as 100% essential, and watch the sender name!

A Cut Above The Basics

• List customer service hours on-site
• Stand behind your products, offer a 100% guarantee
• Use a perpetual shopping cart (show quantity of items in the cart and display on every page of the site). (Tip: make it very obvious when the cart has been updated)
• Display thumbnail images in the shopping cart review page (Tip: also show the exact color added, especially for apparel)
• Recap the cart contents on the thank-you page

I would add providing a shipping cost calculator based on zipcode on the product page and showing an estimated arrival date rather than number of business days to ship.

And don’t forget to include shipping cutoff dates for holidays.

Express/Customer Conveniences - Giving Customers More Control

• Allow customer to check-out without creating an account (Tip: do explain benefits of sign up when giving customers the option)
• Consider direct to cart buying from category page (depending on your market)
• Consider one-click settings for faster checkout, customer convenience (and incentive to create an account)
• Use a “persistent shopping cart” which stores the contents of the customer’s cart for a future visit (Tip: check your web analytics for your typical “days to purchase” when deciding how long to set your persistent cookie)
• Make online return forms available for customer convenience

Don’t forget to make your non-product information accessible from your search box so customers can locate policies quickly.

If customers are using your site to research offline purchases, you should also mystery-shop your store locator.

If you really want to go above and beyond to stand out in customer service, be like Zappos and hire CSRs for culture and empower them to go the extra mile for customers. I’ll say it’s paid off for Zappos.

Sell across the border? You may also be interested in these international ecommerce usability tips.

This post was originally posted on February 21, 2008. With the holiday season underway, and most of you new readers to Get Elastic, I’ve reposted it today in case you missed it the first time.

We do so much to encourage holiday gift shopping (or birthday, anniversary etc), but do we drop the ball in catering to the special needs of gift givers like gift boxes, gift wrapping, gift announcements / messages and gift receipts?

There are many ways you can accommodate gift givers to improve customer and recipient experience with gift options.

Gift Boxes & Gift Wrap

While it may be fine to ship something in a plastic bag or a brown box or a manila envelope (that’s what they send those MacAir computers in, right?), this doesn’t fly with gifts sent directly to the recipient. It also stinks for gift givers who ship items to themselves to wrap and give personally. The customer now has to find an appropriate box to put that personalized t-shirt in, and all he has kicking around is an empty GAP box from last Christmas. Providing a gift box solves a customer problem.

Then there’s gift wrapping. For some people, it’s a hassle. Gift wrap’s not cheap, and it may require an extra trip to pick it up at the drug store. And for customers who ship items direct to the gift recipient, it’s essential.

A couple examples: GAP offers one complimentary unassembled box for every three paid items ordered (why not one for one)? The other option is premium gift wrap service for $5 per order. Victoria’s Secret will send you a gift wrap kit for $3, or wrap the gift for you for $6.

These add-ons also give you an opportunity to brand yourself to the recipient. If you sell items carried by many other retailers, the recipient has no clue where the gift giver bought the item. Why not put your logo on your gift box, or as a watermark on the white side of the gift wrap?

Whether you include gift wrapping or boxes as upsells or freebies is up to you - one will bring you easy additional revenue, the other a fantastic customer service experience.

Continue Reading:
Giving Gift Givers More Options »

This is a guest post by Ayat Shukairy of Invesp Consulting.

Cross-sells and up-sells are popular because they can increase average order size for a single customer. But can they be distracting and hurt conversion? Many online retailers avoid placing cross-sells or up-sells at sensitive buying stages such as the start of the checkout process. …

But let’s go back a bit: Tracking your visitors’ every move on your ecommerce site to understand what they liked, disliked, browsed to, selected, etc. (behavior tracking, personalization) can be considered to be either:

1. Really cool because visitors may feel they have their own personal shopper that will continue to recommend other items they may enjoy
2. Intrusive because every movement the visitor makes on the site is tracked and recorded
3. Annoying because the selling just won’t stop

Retail Examples of Cross-Sells and Up-Sells

Cross-sells and up-sells are used on the majority of ecommerce websites, and are rather successful. In the most primitive cases, an ecommerce store will manually set up cross-sells and up-sells via product catalog administration. In the more complex scenarios, ecommerce companies rely on recommendation software that monitors a customer’s activity on the site from what they are browsing, to what items they select to place inside their cart. Based on that activity the recommendation software suggests cross-sells and up-sells to the site visitor.

Below is a cross-sell on a product page of Lancome.com:

In this case, I was looking at the product page for eyeliner product. Lancome successfully recommended complimentary items.

When I added the eyeliner to my cart, again Lancome successfully displayed cross-sells recommendations under a title “Complete this Product with.”

Amazon.com bases cross-sells and up-sells on information they gather from the activity of other customers who purchased or viewed the same items being viewed or selected:

On the product page of a denim skirt I wanted to purchase, Amazon.com displayed the following recommendations:

After I placed the items in the cart: two types of recommendation displays appear:

1. Recommendations for items across our store…
2. Customers who bought items in your shopping cart also bought…

So when I place a denim skirt in my cart, I am presented with:

• 2 other non-denim skirts
• A whitepaper (which is really random)

Sometimes the recommendations are repeated, but the above screen shots display the standard Amazon response to cross-sells and up-sells.

Where is it most effective place to display cross-sells and up-sells?

Clearly, with every ecommerce company, there are variations to when and where to suggest recommendations for the user.

Common practices of placing cross-sells and up-sells:

• Product page
• Shopping cart view
• Initial stages of the checkout process
• After an order is placed

Many ecommerce companies in general feel that displaying product recommendations during the checkout process can increase cart abandonment rates and lower conversion significantly.

A deeper look at Shopping Cart Cross-Sells:

Studies show that visitors who enter their shopping cart and decide to continue shopping may not return 75% of the time. Offering customers cross-sells could potentially encourage customers to navigate away from the shopping cart to view the items, possibly to never return.

However, a study conducted by MyBuys.com based on the experience of 1,345 ecommerce shoppers indicates that the majority of consumers expect online merchants to make additional recommendations. Additionally, 77% of consumers have made additional purchases when encountered with personalized recommendations.

Let’s examine two e-tailers different approaches to shopping cart cross-sells:

When I was ready to complete my order at Victoria’s Secret, I was directed to my shopping bag, the first step in the checkout process. Victoria’s Secret offers an exclusive sale item pop-up right within my shopping cart. The Cotton Rib Henley Sale item was an attempt at a cross-sell:

I click on the “Buy Now” button on the pop-up, and I am re-directed to the Cotton Rib Henley Shirt Page:

I was navigated away from the shopping cart, and I simply can’t add the Cotton Rib Henley Sweater! I have to scroll down through the other cross-sells in order to add to cart and get back to the shopping cart (and be bombarded once more with additional pop-up cross-sells).

Lancome.com does it a bit differently. My shopping bag opens up alongside the product page and indicates that I can “Complete this Product with” a variety of different items. If my cursor scrolls on top of the recommended cross-sell products, a pink icon “Quick Shop” appears.

After clicking on the icon, I haven’t navigated away from the cart nor the product page, but another pop-up with the newly selected product appears.

Each approach is completely different; Victoria’s Secret directed me to their product page ultimately navigating me away from the checkout process. Lancome’s approach, although untraditional, kept me on the first page of the checkout process in the background and I actually completed the order.

What product selection should you recommend within the shopping cart?

a. Complimentary items: Ecommerce companies and recommendation specialists find that listing complimentary items is the most effective way to avoid raising cart abandonment rates and raise average order size. I was interested to see what type of cross-sell recommendations I would receive at an electronics ecommerce site such as BestBuy.com. Not surprisingly, a cross-sell to purchase their service plan pops up:

Best Buy could benefit from including an add to cart option immediately within this pop-up rather than forcing the user to click on the service plan details, get to another pop up page and add the item. I realize Best Buy’s struggle — there are details related to the service plan that must be addressed by the buyer before the actual purchase. When I clicked on the service plan cross-sell, I am presented with another pop-up that describes the service plan and asks me to select my state before I can add it to my cart:

They do not force the user to navigate away from the cart, which is a plus.

After seeing what ecommerce electronic stores do, I moved onto a very different category: pets. Petsmart.com offers complimentary items on the right side of the shopping cart.

By giving consumers complimentary recommendations you are helping them avoid going back out to the online store and locate these items. However, I am forced to navigate away from my cart being directed to the product page to view the selected item.

b. Mismatching items: Offering items that are unrelated to the shopping cart contents can be more challenging. After arriving on the Stacksandstacks website, I added “mini basting brushes” to my cart:

Stacks and Stacks offers unrelated cross-sells within my cart, such as a closet shoe rack, wall tie organizer, etc. The issue from the perspective of the buyer is that when a buyer visits a site with something in particular in mind (a list of what he/she wants to buy), cross-selling with unrelated items may not be an effective approach. MyBuys.com research found only 2% of visitors felt that product recommendations related to them.

If you decide to offer unrelated cross sells within the cart keep a few things in mind:

• Offering sale items is more lucrative and encouraging for the buyer to consider
• Offer items with “Free Shipping” option can also be an incentive to purchase
• In our tests, we noticed that instead of labeling the recommendations as “You May Also Like”, you can do a lot better by using the phrase “Customers who purchased your item also enjoyed.” The second phrase draws more attention the site visitor because you are combining common interests which appeals to the humanistic visitor. Of course there are no set rules, so test both labels and see what works better for your site.

I visited Headsets.com where I added the Plantronics noise-canceling wireless headset to my cart:

Headsets.com recommends a list of items that are mix between mismatches and items that are complementary. They also have the recommendations labeled as: “Customers Who Bought the Above Item Also Bought” which again is a helpful way of creating feelings of commonality and association.

c. Recently Viewed: Amazon sums it up best by offering on the right side of my shopping cart a clear display of all the items I browsed through during my shopping experience. Any reluctance that I may have had in selecting one of the recently viewed items might be rehashed, encouraging me to go back and explore the item once more. Amazon.com has always pushed the fold in ecommerce implementations and design:

Notice that the items are just listed without the images except the “featured item” at the bottom of the list.

d. Matching Items or hybrid: If I’ve recently viewed golf gloves and made a selection, offering me more golf gloves may not be effective since I just placed a pair in my cart.

Golfsmith.com offers a hybrid of choices. I had selected a pair of gloves, and the cross-sells included a different pair of gloves. There are also complementary items that may appeal to a golfer in general: golf balls and a pack of tees. Usually, adding an item such as golf-gloves is because of a need that I have for them, so offering me more gloves may not be useful.

One of the biggest fears of displaying items in the shopping cart is losing the customer to a growing statistic of cart abandonment. However, if you are able to increase average order size by understand what appeals to your site visitor through optimization and testing, cross-selling is a great way to accomplish that.

Your Turn

Now it’s your turn to share: How do you make recommendations for products on your website? Is it done via software or is it a manual process? Have you had a negative or positive experience by listing cross sell items in the shopping cart?

About the Guest Blogger: Ayat Shukairy is a Managing Partner at Invesp Consulting, an ecommerce conversion optimization company. She also blogs regularly about landing page optimization, ecommerce, conversion optimization, and web usability for the Invesp Blog.