I discovered an interesting UK Shopping 2.0 site called the Imagini Gift Finder. It’s kind of like social wishlisting meets Myers-Briggs — you work through a series of “questions” and you get results based on your answers. But the twist is, you choose from a set of images what appeals to you most. The system uses your choices to determine your “Visual DNA” and present you with relevant gifts.

You can get suggestions for your own gifts and build a wishlist that you can send to your friends *hint.* Or, you can invite a “Valentine” to take the quiz and build a wishlist for you so you don’t have to obsess over whether your honey likes a burger with or without a bun.

Here are just a few of the questions and images. If you don’t like any of the pictures, you can click on a gray box to skip.

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Imagini Helps You Find Gifts Using Visual DNA »

Following up on previous posts about permission marketing and welcome emails for ecommerce websites, I’d like to share my personal experience registering for 87 accounts with the top online retailers and offer some tips for registration form design.

Your site may have several forms that ask for personal information - for email subscriptions, creating an account, entering billing information, requesting help, general contact, creating a wishlist or order tracking. It’s important to note that in my test I was taking initiative to sign up for an account by clicking “Register” or “My Account”. I did not reach these forms in the middle of a checkout process (required registration).

Popular Form Fields and Frequency

1. Password - 100%

Obviously this is a requirement for all sites, but 100% required users to invent their own passwords rather than sending computer-generated temporary passwords (which are terribly annoying). But Dell and Nieman Marcus failed to mention clearly that their passwords require at least one number until you fail at your first password attempt.

2. Repeat Password Field - 89%

Though it takes a small amount of extra time, this is recommended because it’s easy to make errors when you only see **** as you type. How frustrating for customers when they cannot log in because the password they *thought* they entered is wrong.

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Registration Usability - 87 Registration Forms Tested »

While reviewing the registration process of 87 of the top online retailers, I observed 66% of these sites took advantage of the registration form as a way to remind customers to opt in to email marketing programs by including a check box on the form. However, 57% of these retailers pre-checked the opt-in box, which is poor ‘Netiquette when it comes to permission marketing.

Registration with an ecommerce website is NOT opting in to receive future offers via email. Some marketers may intentionally pre-check the box to increase sign ups, knowing that a number of customers don’t notice the box or will forget to un-check it. Although this might build a bigger list, this practice can backfire.

If your customer was unaware he had opted in, all future emails from that website will look like spam, which is a step backward in building trust and long term customer relationships, hurts your corporate image and dilutes your overall email campaign success. Low open and response rates from uninterested people skews your performance metrics.

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Registration Usability - Permission Email Dos and Donts »

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 »

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.

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Small Etailer Packs Big Usability Features »

Many retailers are starting to use blogs to interact with and market to shoppers. In fact, 15% of the Top 500 Online Retailers have ecommerce blogs. Some are fresh out of the gate, while others have thousands of posts and comments. We rounded them all up and have listed 75+ ecommerce blogs for your retail inspiration. Alright, let’s check out who’s blogging now…

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ECOMMERCE BLOGS: 75+ Community Sites of the Top Online Retailers »

View full screen via SlideShare

Elastic Path’s Jason Billingsley and Netconcepts‘ Stephan Spencer. (along with a cameo by EP’s Gord Janzen) presented this webinar to accompany the white paper and research series called The Ecommerce Checkout Report (free download).

The report inspected the Top 100 online retailers and reviewed for 23 tactics commonly used in Checkout. The results attempt to begin a dialog in order to answer questions like: Does a shorter checkout process really decrease shopping cart abandonment? Should you use an order confirmation screen? Does live chat improve conversions? Study samples included a variety of vertical market groups including apparel and accessories, computers and electronics, and both high and low ticket value product retailers.

See also:

nitobi’s Robot Replay

Jason’s post on travel “Stop the checkout to save the customer money?“

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).

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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.”

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Optimizing Site Search for Non-Product Information »