While preparing their upcoming report Customer Focus Study, 2007, Future Now observed “nearly half of the top online retailers still require people to register before they checkout.

The issue is not whether site registration itself is a bad idea, there are clearly benefits to both customer and seller which I will mention in a moment. The question is: Why are ecommerce websites still making registration a requirement, and asking for registration before the checkout process — especially when most of the user’s information will be entered in a standard checkout process anyhow?

How Registration Benefits the Customer

• Facilitates post purchase order tracking
• Allows visitors to bookmark products for later / add to wishlists and so on
• Enables one-click re-order convenience
• Makes for a quicker checkout process next visit
• Allows user to submit product reviews
• Registrants may be entitled to loyalty discounts and other creative membership perks (you gotta motivate ‘em!)
• Shipping and tax estimates are easier when the user’s zipcode is remembered
• Makes it easy for B2B customers to open and maintain accounts for scheduled orders

Continue Reading:
Required Registration: Top Etailers’ Favorite Usability Mistake »

Amazon’s new redesign launch is all the buzz this week. The site that popularized horizontal tabbed navigation has now ditched them completely.

You can check out the larger image with feature tour over at Amazon. The redesign is being rolled out in phases, so you may or may not be able to see the changes just yet.

The 4 S’s of Amazon Customer Experience

Why these changes? Amazon conducted extensive usability tests and concluded that people are interested in 4 things:

“We concentrated on shopping, searching, saving, and buying–the four activities that customers have repeatedly told us are the most important to them. They’re now prominently featured at the top of every page on the site.”

SSSB just doesn’t make a good mnemonic, so I propose we refer to these factors as the 4 S’s: Continue Reading:
Amazon Tabs’ Extinction Means Better Customer Experience »

The beauty of an ecommerce website is that you have the potential to sell products to people around the world, even from your own basement. But many online retailers expect to make international sales yet are not doing all they should to help convert international shoppers. Here are a few ideas to help make the online shopping experience smooth for your international customers.

These tips apply to “international” websites — websites that are based in one country but accommodate orders from other countries — as opposed to localized websites which may be a country-specific subdomain, have a country-specific domain extension (Yourstore.co.uk) or have their own domain (YourstoreUK.com). Localized websites have their own complexities which will be covered in a follow up post.

1. Have an International Shipping page

Sure, you could have it buried in an FAQ section, in the Help area or some other hard-to-find place, but why not make it easy for users to find by making it its own link visible from every page on the site? (The footer menu is a great, conventional location). Backcountry.com hides its international information in the “Help” section which is generally associated with technical site help rather than customer service info. And Provantage.com has an impressive international shipping page, but you can’t find it through their Shipping footer link. Instead, it’s hidden behind an inappropriately labelled site map page labelled “Index” (doesn’t Index usually mean home?) and then under an equally inappropriate sub-category called “Doing Business.”

Continue Reading:
International Ecommerce Usability Tips »

I love it when the “little guy” does something that I haven’t even seen on some of the larger sites I cite as examples here on the Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog. I recently bought a few items from C28, a Christian-lifestyle-clothing shop in California and noticed they were doing a couple of cool things I’d never seen before.

Even when scoping out sites for personal purchases, my usability consultant’s hat is always on. (It’s like those people who take film studies and can never watch a movie the same.) So I was really impressed by this virtual unknown offering features like “Email Me if My Size is Re-stocked” and “Email Me Before This Item Sells Out.” I even went to the search engine to see if I could find another site with this features (after trying a variety of word combinations) and so far haven’t found any. If you’ve seen another store doing something similar, please comment.

Continue Reading:
Small Etailer Packs Big Usability Features »

Everyone gets distracted when shopping online. That’s one of the nice things about shopping via the web - you can take a phone call, refill your coffee, walk the dog, quick nap in the hammock … then come back and your order is still there. The flip side of this scenario is the theme of sorts for Crazy, Messed-up World of Ecommerce video #7 “Abandoned.”

Video #7 - Abandoned

For online retailers though, abandoned carts are the root of endless worry and concern. These conversion killers piling up in your logs beg questions like: Why did they leave? Were they just comparing prices or features or is it something I did? Maybe there’s something wrong with my site’s usability! How can I make it better? How can I get them back? How can I raise my conversion rates? Would adding “wishlists” or “saved cart” features reduce cart abandonment? and so on …

Well for sure usability is important (check The Ecommerce Checkout Report for more on best practisesc) and certainly retailers loathe leaving money on the table, but sometimes, cart abandonment just happens. Just hope they come back, right?

Continuing the series on site search usability, I decided to test out color-specific searches on a number of apparel etailers from my favorite list of top etailers of 2006. I wanted to compare the results for “black capris” across the board of etailers and see what I would discover.

I found that the majority of the 22 sites tested delivered results for “black capris” just fine (I even clicked through on each result just to make sure):

Talbots
Nieman Marcus
J.Jill
Land’s End
LL Bean
JC Penney
Eddie Bauer
Victoria’s Secret
Blair.com (I did find one error in Blair.com’s results. Perhaps the color was sold out and the search engine was still reading old meta data).

Continue Reading:
Color Keyword Search: Who Passed With Flying Colors? »

Last post I discussed the need for optimizing your internal search engine to work for non-product searches like shipping, returns and other customer service queries. As promised, today I’m digging into how to make this happen. Because site search optimization will depend on what type of content management you are using, what type of search engine you are using and so on, this is not a how-to guide for programming, more of a “what info you need to gather for your web developer to make it happen.”

Continue Reading:
Optimizing Site Search for Non-Product Information »

Ecommerce can be a crazy messed up world indeed. The Elastic Path team recently produced a series of e-commerce shorts including my personal favorite: “Zero Results Found.” Because art imitates life, and search box failures are all too common on even the most sophisticated ecommerce sites, I decided to start my own series on ecommerce search, beginning with how easy (or difficult) is it to find non-product information.

When comparison shopping, you can compare prices and find a store selling an item for a dollar less than everyone else (for example). But it’s possible that another store sells the exact item for a bit more yet is significantly cheaper to ship, even free. So a savvy consumer would be interested in comparing shipping policies between etailers, as would an international shopper. If the searcher is “search dominant” (as opposed to a menu-browser), he or she is going to head straight for that little white rectangle to find the desired information.

Continue Reading:
Shipping Policy Usability - Results Not Found! »

After a “too close” connection in Montreal I sat on the plane wondering how poor airport usability actually is. Those thoughts quickly turned to ecommerce usability and how poor online stores often are as well. The following chart is surprisingly accurate on how both these environments stack up to the paces users put them through.

Do you have any other examples of how these two environments are similar?

Observing users is one of the most under-rated means of improving site usability. Today’s eCommerce managers often rely too heavily on technology to help them make decisions. Faceless A/B and multi-variant testing is used to incrementally increase performance of key areas of the ecommerce store such as product pages and checkout procedures. Though valuable tools, they are only as useful as the deployed functionality.

A very simplified scenario.

Curtis, an online retailer marketing manager, decides that the product pages do not have a high enough conversion rate. In keeping with the mantra “test ’til best”, he wants to see if the ‘Add to Cart’ button is the culprit. Perhaps the color of the button has an effect? A simple A/B split test on two colors is done: green vs blue. In this instance they convert at approximately the same rate. Next, he plays-off blue vs yellow, then orange, then purple, etc. Conversion rates remain somewhat consistent across the board. What could be causing the poor conversion rate?

Mel, a competing online retailer, has the same concern, but she takes a different approach. A simple 30 minute observation of 8 different users given $200 dollars of virtual cash to buy anything they want from the store. 4 out of the 8 users found the product they wanted to buy but were distracted by other things on the page - too much merchandising (up-sells, cross-sells, others bought these items, bundle discounts, warranty), in-store inventory lookup, add to wishlist, add to registry, etc. These users simply wanted to add an item to the cart and they verbally expressed frustration because the page had so many choices. Testing the color of the button would never have reveled this.

Why is this on my mind today?

I am in the process of planning a wedding and honeymoon, so my fiance Amy and I are doing a LOT of online research and shopping. I love observing how she tackles tasks and what she likes and dislikes about the online shopping experience.

While looking for flights, cruises, etc. we have been using a number of sites: Airlines, online comparison engines, and even Google (yes, you can look up flights directly in Google - type Vancouver to New York, the result page gives you input fields to enter dates - cool).

Amy has settled on Kayak.com as her travel website of choice. While seeking out airfares, she was thrilled by the auto-complete on the airport input fields. She started to type v-a-n-c and automatically Vancouver (YVR) was show as an option for the input field (by setting YVR as our home aiport, it is defaulted for future visits as well).

Compare this to other sites where it is often a game of hide-and-seek when looking up airport codes - enter the ‘From’ city, new screen with airport code options, select option, click ok, go back to previous screen where all date information has been magically erased and wash-rinse-repeat on the ‘To’ airport - frustrating and time wasting.

This simple bit of Ajax functionality has made Amy loyal to Kayak for all her travel lookups - a case of usability being the primary cause of loyalty. People want ease of use and intuitive behavior.

The next time you want to improve your online store (which should be always), watch people, listen to what they say, observe their facial expressions. By seeing what makes them smile or grin could save you tons of time on faceless testing.