By now, most companies know that putting up a static billboard of a Web site won't play well with the surfing public. Yet companies still have a lot to learn about building a Web site that customer can navigate with ease.
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Consider this: in January, User Interface Engineering Inc. of Bradford, Mass., conducted a test. It sent 100 shoppers out onto the Internet to make purchases. These were people that were raring to buy a product -- they just had to go to a site, identify what they wanted and buy it. But only 34 of the 100 shoppers were actually able to make their purchases. The rest were stymied by one aspect or another of the site, be it finding the product or negotiating the checkout.
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Those are surprising findings, considering the money that's at stake: online consumer spending alone hit $17.5 billion in the second quarter of 2002, according to Reston, Va.-based comScore Media Metrix. Clearly, companies willing to build a customer-centric Web site could rake in some serious cash.
Building a customer-centric site will naturally vary depending on the type of site in question. Customers of B2B sites, for example, will have different purchasing goals and habits than those frequenting a consumer site like Amazon.com, said Jack Aaronson, a New York City-based Web site consultant.
Regardless of the customer base, any e-commerce site can benefit from taking a customer-centric view of Web design.
"Customer-centric design doesn't start with a product line, service or company and work out to the customer," Aaronson said. "That's how you get banks with 35 Web sites that reflect each line of business.
"Instead, understand who the users are, and work with that knowledge to build the site from the front back, not back to front."
For those who don't know how to start an online conversation with their customers, the following tips may help:
Speak the customer's language
Aaronson tells a tale of a fruitless attempt to replace a favorite shirt using Banana Republic's Web site.
"It wasn't under T-shirt, and it wasn't under polos, and Banana Republic doesn't have a search engine," he said. "I finally called a store and gave them the style number from the shirt I already had. I discovered it was called a 'Pima cotton crew.' Unless you knew those exact three words, you couldn't have found that shirt."
Aaronson said that's a classic example of a business that used its own language instead of that of its customers, and the dialects weren't at all similar. "People view your prods and service in different words and ways than you do," he said. But with enough work, "customers will inform you about their language and how they think of things, and the associations they have with those things."
Investigate methods of learning that language
"Ask the customer. As simple as that is, it's the best way," said Anthony Cospito, vice president of marketing at CRM Metrix Inc., a customer experience consulting firm based in New York City. Some ways of asking work better than others, however. For example, Cospito prefers something he calls "user scenario modeling."
"Smarter companies actually sit down in somebody's home and watch them buy something," he said. "They'll see, for example, the slower loading that comes if somebody has a dial-up connection. It really puts a face on the customer and helps companies understand what their habits are. If they understand the lifestyle of their customer, they can modify their Web site to fit that. It's not just the demographics, it's the psychographics."
Aaronson suggested tweaking the traditional focus group to help get at the language of the customer.
"Get five friends in a room who don't work for you, and show them pictures of the product. Tell them to give you five words that describe the product as well as scenarios where they'd use it," said Aaronson, going back to his Pima cotton crew example. "I use that shirt for nightclubs because it's kind of dressy, and under a jacket for a client meeting. But none of that language has any relationship to the term 'Pima cotton crew.' I wouldn't say, 'I wear that shirt when I feel like wearing Pima.'"
ECompanyStore, an Atlanta-based outfit that runs online and brick-and-mortar company stores for firms like Microsoft and Xerox, uses pop-up surveys that ask customers about their buying experience.
"After a customer hits 'buy now,' a survey comes up, " said Stuart McLelland, marketing manager at eCompanyStore. "It's been designed to be as quick to answer as possible. It's five questions, all radio buttons. We don't make it cumbersome, which is why we've been able to enjoy a 68% response rate."
The company uses that information to modify product selections and pricing to fit customer needs.
Build a relationship from the first page
Generally, relationship-building involves Web site personalization of some sort, in which customers see a page that's been tailored for them based on past buying habits. Amazon, for example, is the master of personalization, offering lists of what others have bought, recommending products based on previous purchases, even letting a buyer read the first couple pages of a book under consideration. But it's tricky to do correctly, Aaronson said.
"Personalized Web sites have to figure out what personalization means to the company before they do it," he said. One of the big mistakes, he said, is that companies don't first discover how to use personalization as a revenue driver: "They just think personalization is cool and they want to do it."
Smart companies can even start building relationships with anonymous visitors who have no past buying record. SmarterKids.com, for example, gets visitors into its product selection by asking them the name of the kids, not by showing product categories. This starts a conversation from the first click, Aaronson said.
Customers can also shop by theme, character or brand. "They're really good at guiding people, helping buyers see what's popular for their kids," Aaronson said.
Don't lose them at the checkout
Ah, checkout. People have found the product they want, have credit card in hand and are willing to buy. All set, right? Wrong. The UIE study found that 13% of its test shoppers faded at the checkout -- within sight of the finish line, as it were. "Drop-off rate is huge once people get into the checkout funnel," Aaronson said.
Companies can fix that by analyzing not just what the user wants to do on that page, but by studying common user mistakes.
"You need to anticipate the needs for the customer besides finishing the transaction, which is something that's really the company's need," Aaronson said. "It's about anticipating user needs."
For example, many people drop out of the checkout line because they may wish to add something else to the shopping cart. Trouble is, it's very hard to backtrack once you get into that purchasing funnel.
"And if you can't go back, the only other option is to close the browser," he said.
Strike a fine line with registration
Most e-commerce sites require some form of registration before a purchase can be made, but that can be dangerous. UIE found that many prospective purchasers ducked out of the buying process when faced with long and cumbersome registration procedures, so Web site developers need to walk a fine line between collecting valuable information from customers and driving them away.
Cospito recommends a "give more, get more" policy. "If you want people to give more information, make sure they get something in return," he said. For example, Cospito said that at his old company, TargetSurf.com, people were offered prizes for registering, as well as two different registration choices. One was short and sweet. The other was more detailed, but people who filled it out were given far better chances of winning a prizes such as a DVD player.
"We found that people on average gave six pages of information when they were given better chances of winning things," Cospito said.
Aaronson said that, like any other part of the process, registration should not be scary to the customer. At SmarterKids.com, for example, customers can fill out a basic registration, or they can give more detail, which helps the company personalize the Web site for them.
"But at each page, there's an exit button. The company understands that while you might want to go through an entire section, you might not want to. So at any point, you can just stop," he said.
Aaronson compared that with the nine-page registration required by Topica.com. "The only place you can hit "continue" is at the bottom of all that. It's very easy to get lost," he said.
And lost customers will nearly always translate into lost sales.
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