Process And Cost Transparency Boosts Online Retail

In spite of the economic slowdown, online shopping is still going to be huge this New Year’s Eve, as people look to save time and money by doing as much of their gift buying as possible online. Internet expert WebTrends is warning e-commerce websites that they must provide a seamless online experience or face losing out on a huge slice of the festive cash.

Conrad Bennett, senior technical director at WebTrends, offers a few basic rules for online shops, based on his experience of working with numerous e-tailers. “Although simple, these rules can have a huge effect if followed over the current festive period,” Bennett said.

“I Want it Now”: “Competition online is intense. If customers can’t find what they want – and quickly — they’ll be off to Google to find it somewhere else. There’s nothing worse than sending online customers on a complicated paper chase – and there’s no quicker way to lose them. So if you offer a search function on your website – which is highly advisable – good indexing is crucial. And don’t force customers to log in to use the search function.”

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Transparency: “Always let customers know where they are in the buying process. They must be able to see where they are and how many steps remain. The buying process should be kept brief and to the point. And there should be complete clarity about the final cost from the outset. Customers hate nasty surprises at the end of the purchasing process and will often simply break off the procedure, never to return.”

Dropouts: “Understand why visitors interrupt the process and abandon your website. Determining why these visitors drop off your website at a particular point – and how you can remedy this point of abandonment — can make these customers more valuable to your business than those who buy something.”

Beware the Back Button: “Keep it simple – buying online is not a recreational pastime for most people. The technology should be basic and adapted to suit visitor behaviour and support normal browser navigation functionality. Make sure that using the Back button doesn’t ruin the process – it’s the most oft-used button on any website so why disallow its use?”

Don’t Get Flashy: “Static websites are a thing of the past – but beware of excessively data-rich applications. Customers will not wait an age for pages to load. The key is to find a page design that matches the product. While online videos, animations and other rich media are right for some online retailers, they’re completely wrong for others. In fact, don’t even think about using Flash unless it really does add value. Otherwise, you will lose users every second it takes the animation to load.”