Benchmark Report shows 2004 ECommerce Mistakes persist

Online Retail User Experience Benchmarks (2006), which investigates UK online retail from the perspective of a consumer, concludes that even the largest online retailers have a lot to learn about ‘the mind of the customer’.

Mike Baxter, writing the report for e-consultancy, looked in detail at the websites of major retail brands such as Tesco, Amazon, Comet, Currys, Dabs, Argos and Next. Each of these well-established websites has a variety of fundamental problems that can be easily fixed.

Online retail trends include:
· We are now a broadband society. Broadband users visit online stores more often and are more likely to purchase products (compared with dial-up users).
· Customers don’t just want the lowest price. Online retail isn’t simply about finding the lowest price, but about ease of use. This means helping customers make up their minds. Product comparison, not price comparison, is the key to a successful e-commerce operation.
· Research has shown that the average shopping session encounters six problem areas. Problems come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but one thing is clear: problems are damaging to brands.
· Search is a last resort. Although half of all purchases start on a search engine, consumers prefer to browse once they arrive at an online store. Search requires cognitive effort, which everybody tries to avoid. However, prompted search will combine the best of both worlds (do a product search on www.become.com to see prompted search in action).
· Lack of standardisation is causing confusion. Retailers are not always speaking in the same language as consumers. Their websites all use different layouts and categorisation, forcing customers to think. In one example we tried to find a toaster on 11 top retail websites, and each one was in a different position / category!

Recommendations from the consultancy sound like something from the turn of the century, but are justified by the fact that little progress has been made by etailers. Their suggestions include:
· Use highly visible persuasive content. Key information should be positioned ‘above the fold’, so that consumers do not need to scroll to find it. This should always include price, availability, delivery times and charges, ‘add to basket’.
· Minimise distractions. Avoid positioning distractions above the fold, such as promotions, tell-a-friend, etc. Keep customers focused.
· Upsells are great, downsells suck. Some retail websites actively try to sell you lower-priced products, when you are considering purchasing a more expensive item. This is madness, and will not help increase average basket sizes.
· Broken promises and misleading statements damage credibility and trust. Consumers hate buying something only to find that the product is not in stock. If products are unavailable then make it clear from the outset.
· Increase feature-filtering options. Consumers are typically on one of two types of purchase journey (‘help me buy’ or ‘help me choose’). In the case of the latter they want to see solid feature-filtering and product comparison tools.

Commenting on changes for the new version of the report, Baxter says 'On the one hand, it's quite surprising just how many new ideas and technologies have both hit mainstream and are appearing on the horizon in just 18 months. On the other hand it's disappointing to find so many of the basic customer-experience problems that we identified previously are still there on e-commerce sites.'

Baxter attributes the slowness of improvements to two things:
* firstly, the web analytics that most e-commerce sites are using are still a rather blunt instrument, in terms of identifying which aspects of the customer experience are causing most damage to sales.
* secondly, the retailers have difficulties getting a handle on all this customer experience 'stuff'. One of the emerging issues that we cover in the 2006 report will, in our view, help retailers to manage the customer experience more rigorously: these are called 'design patterns'. A design pattern is simply a description of best practice for solving a particular problem in a particular context.

Associated Link: The report (which costs £99)

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