E-commerce and Usability
November 5, 2001
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Ease of use is central to the success of any e-commerce site. You
need a shopping cart that mirrors the supermarket experience,
and a checkout sequence that keeps the customer in full control
of the transaction. That sense of control across all aspects of
your site is essential if you want to provide the best shopping
experience. Andrew Starling looks at the details.
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Here we'll look at making your e-commerce site easy for customers
to use, including presentation of goods, visitor registration,
shopping carts, shopping software, the "tunnel" of checkout, and
the need for the customer to feel in control of the transaction.
Many of the aspects of usability previously covered
in Usability - The Basics and
Usability and Navigation apply to e-commerce too, but
it also has its own special requirements.
Your Customers are Control Freaks
We'll start with the issue of keeping your customers in control
of the transaction, because it's crucial to the success of any e-
commerce site. This may not appear to be a usability issue under
a strict and narrow definition of the term. But broaden the
definition a little to: "making your site easy to use — in the
way your customers would like to use it," and the issue of
control begins to fit.
The reason it's so important is that customers will abandon an e-
commerce transaction if they feel they're losing control. It's
that old human defence mechanism — when things get scary
and confusing, run away. And run away they do. The figures on
abandonment can be hard to interpret, see
The Truth Behind Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates, but are
generally reported at around 30%.
You don't see 30% of customers in a real supermarket abandoning
their carts, so why is the figure so high on the Internet? There
are many factors including security, reliability, and high
shipping charges (a major influence) but another big factor is
the intimidating nature of the Web. It's technical and lacks
human contact. For most people that makes it a scary place. And
if people start a transaction already feeling intimidated, you
don't have to do much to push them over the edge and lose them.
All you have to do is reduce their control over the transaction,
or even appear to reduce it, or just fail to make it clear that
they're in total control.
Examples? Asking for credit card details too early, failing to
inform the customer at what stage the transaction will become
final — before it happens, and adding personal profile
questions to forms that gather essential information needed for
purchase. None of these things are acceptable to customers in the
real world, and they all contribute to that high figure of
abandoned transactions.
So, what do you need to do to keep the customer in control?
- Provide a shopping cart with the same freedom of action as a
real one.
- Get the elements of the purchase transaction in the right
order — with credit card details collected close to the
end.
- Say when the transaction will become final — possibly
say it twice, right at the beginning of the checkout process and
just before the point of no return.
- Don't demand non-essential details until the transaction has
been completed.
- Offer customers a choice where privacy is involved —
for example whether their e-mail address is added to your mailing
database.
- Be careful when offering complementary goods, such as camera
cases to go with a camera.
- Add online help windows where necessary.
- Don't ignore your customer after the transaction has been
finalized. Good fulfillment and delivery tracking are usability
issues too.
Get all these items right and you've won half the battles of e-
commerce usability.
Let's look at some of the details.
Early Registration
You may have visited an e-commerce site that forces you to
register before you can view the goods. And did you? Most people
don't. They go somewhere else where they're free to window-shop
without harassment. If a high street shop tried asking for
customers' names before they let them in the door, they'd soon be
out of business.
Or at least you'd think so. But there's an exception here that
must be mentioned. A UK supermarket —
Tesco — forces you to
register before you can shop online for groceries, yet it's one
of the most successful online supermarkets in the world, possibly
the most successful.
The moral is that an intimidating front door policy won't kill
your site if you have a good name and get everything else right.
Tesco has done well because it has a near-perfect distribution
system, which brought many word-of-mouth recommendations, enough
to get over the registration hurdle.
Registration at a later stage, for example just before payment,
is a more complex issue. There are security reasons for getting
visitors to register before they buy — it can help trace
illegal transactions. This reason alone probably overrides the
usability penalty.
Client-side Shopping Software - Page 2
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