Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

Econsultancy have published a new usability article of mine entitled:
Pureplay and high street fashion retailers – who values usability more?

In the article I’ve taken a look at the following high street and pureplay retailers from a usability perspective…

The pureplay fashion retailers I’ve taken a look at are:

• ASOS
• Net-a-porter
• My Wardrobe
• The Outnet
• Koodos

The high street fashion retailers I’ve taken a look at are:

• Harvey Nichols
• Miss Selfridge
• Topshop
• Next
• New Look

The five questions I posed to each of these retailers are:

1. How seriously are they taking cross-selling and up-selling in order to encourage higher average order values?
2. Do they make standard delivery costs clear before you get into the actual checkout process?
3. Are payment options and cards accepted clear prior to checking out?
4. Have they enclosed their checkout as a way of potentially reducing checkout process abandonments?
5. Do they provide clear customer service contact details during the checkout process?

Take a look at the article and see how these retailers stack up!

If you are a fashion retailer you might also like to read about the Online Fashion 100 event on the 17th June in London, organised by Leon Bailey-Green.

Just a short post even though if there were more hours in the day I’d be writing about quite a few key topics at the moment, with lots going on the retail space.

Having recently delivered in-house e-commerce training and on the eve of a public training course with Econsultancy, I thought I’d share a fine example of an online retailer following usability and best practice principles to drive improvements to their conversion rates and customer retention.

Enter The Boook Depository. Only a young pureplay brand, launched in 2004 and with a recent redesign in 2009, The Book Depository certainly does alot of things right when it comes to providing an enjoyable, intelligent and usable shopping experience.

A screengrab of The Book Depository website, good usability and best practice

Using our new e-commerce benchmarking application I’m looking forward to comparing how The Book Depository fair to other online book sellers. One thing is for sure though, their approach of always tackling the question “what do our customers want” has led their e-commerce experience to be a fine example of good usability and following best practice.

Which online retailers would you put forward as more examples of a great user experience?

2009 more than the last few years looks like being a year where retailers are more focused on improving the performance of their existing e-commerce site rather than re-platforming.

Top Tips for Increasing Your E-commerce Conversion Rates

Below are a few top tips for improving both the usability of your e-commerce site and small changes which can help improve conversion rates. Further resources are provided at the end of the article.

Search and Navigation

• Make search an integrated and intelligent piece of functionality – if it isn’t, visitors will quickly dismiss the tool as something that will help them find what they want, and in turn could consider jumping over to a competitor site.
• Provide predictive/suggestive search results – benefits include reducing the number of ‘no results found’ pages, promoting saving information which will appeal to shoppers, plus exposing some of your product catalogue which the shopper may not have realised existed
• Allow visitors to filter your product range by relevant attributes (price bracket, specification, colour, size etc) – the easier you can make it for shoppers to find products which match their requirements the more likely they will be to purchase from you

Shopping Basket

• Don’t hide your delivery costs until the checkout process – even if a shopper can specify a more expensive delivery option in checkout, at least ensure your standard delivery charges are provided
• Make it clear what payment options are available, before the checkout process – especially important if you don’t accept debit card payments like www.booking.com
• Promote free delivery options clearly, if you provide them – this can play a significant part in persuading visitors to both make a purchase, but also increase their order value if it means triggering a free delivery level

Checkout Process

• Rule number 1 – enclose your checkout process. There are a range of key reasons why this is so important for retailers, one of which is ensuring you are focusing the shoppers mind on the 1 key action you want them to do – place their order with you. More advice on why you should enclose your checkout process can be seen in the resources at the end of this article
• Make it absolutely clear the levels of security you provide – concerns over credit card fraud are here for the long term, and you should make sure your visitors have every confidence in you to keep their details secure
• Pay close attention to how to present forms – by adopting form field best practice you make the checkout process more streamlined and you keep the shopper in a positive buying mood. Straight to the point error messages that point the finger at the visitor is one way of putting a small usability barrier in front of them

All Areas, Especially Shopping Basket and Checkout

• Carry out split testing and multi-variate testing – alongside best practice principles, this is one of the primary ways of affectively measuring the differences in click-throughs and engagement when adopting different designs, buttons, colours and messages

Looking for More Best Practice Tips and Advice?

If you are interested in gaining a much greater understanding of how small but integral changes can be made to e-commerce sites to help improve conversion rates, then the upcoming training course on the 23rd April in London is for you.

There is also funding currently available which could cover the cost of the course.

Below are further details on what will be covered in the days training course:

Product page best practice

• how to introduce best practice into your customer experience
• how some of the biggest e-tailers are following or defining best practice
• how to cross-sell and up-sell affectively
• how to introduce persuasion architecture

Shopping basket best practice

• pros and cons of the most popular implementations
• understand the impact you can have on consumer confidence
• how to channel customers into the checkout process

Checkout process best practice

• the rational behind enclosing the process to reduce checkout abandonments
• a framework for delivering a best practice checkout process
• how to reduced usability barriers to completing forms during your checkout process

Advanced user experience techniques

• how to engage and delight customers with memorable interactions

Useful resources

• best practice tips for search implementation
• benefits of suggestive/predictive search (scroll down the page)
• benefits and best practice for multi-faceted navigation, for both users and retailers
• the importance of enclosing your checkout process
• form field best practice, vital for checkout processes

Last night I attended a fantastic event with Manchester Fashion Network, a Q&A evening with River Island’s CEO Richard Bradbury.

Richard has certainly ‘done his time in retail’ as he’s worked his way up from his retail position in Great Yarmouth all the way through to becoming the Chief Executive Officer at leading fashion retail company River Island. At River Island Richard is responsible for the growth and expenditure of the continued success of the multi million pound turn-over that the top high street retailer secures.

It was a Q&A style evening, attended by around 90 people, where Richard talked very openly about his background, the River Island story and how it was originally born from the Chelsea Girl brand, the growth and importance of online for River Island, along with a range of questions from the floor, including a couple from me.

Questions ranged from what advice Richard would give to aspiring fashion designers (including a group from Manchester Met that I was sat with), how can new supplier’s best get their foot in the door and compete against supplier’s in the far east and eastern Europe, along with me asking about the their online operation.

My 2 questions where:

PR: You have mentioned about how successful your e-commerce site is for River Island. Can you provide some insights into what growth you have seen over the last 2 years with online, and what % of sales come through this channel compared to the high street?

In response Richard replied:

RB: Online is hugely significant for our business and is growing constantly, although I can’t share more than that! We have won awards for our website and we are currently on the 3rd generation.

PR: Your website is flash based, which is almost exclusive in the online retail sector. Is this an intended differentiator for your business (Richard had earlier talked about some of the ways River Island ‘do things differently’ and ‘do what works for them and their customers’), and what else can you tell us about your approach to online?

RB: We are actually in the process of moving away from our current flash based retail site. This evolvement has taken longer than we had anticipated although we are due to launch our new site later this year.

Later in the evening after the official Q&A’s had finished I grabbed a few more minutes with Richard, (who I must say is one of the most down to earth CEO’s I have had the pleasure of speaking to!) where I asked a few more questions regarding their e-commerce operation and the strategy for moving onto a much more trackable, personalised and best practice driven e-commerce operation.

Without disclosing too much here Richard shared some really interesting insights, and I’ll be watching with interest to see how 2009 shapes up for River Island business, in what is extremely challenging market conditions.

As part of a fiscal stimulus package designed to boost the UK economy, the British government has announced a reduction in the rate of Value Added Tax from 17.5% to 15%, effective from Monday December 1st, to last 13 months. This is the first time that the VAT rate has changed in 18 years – a whole generation has grown up knowing no other rate.

Retailers and consumers alike will be pleased to see a reduction in costs and prices as a result of the VAT cut, but there is a problem – retailers will have to update their prices in response to the change and they have only a week to do it. Receipts, invoices and direct debits will have to change, as will calculations made by e-commerce websites and online billing systems. As pointed out in the article linked to above:

The British Retail Consortium welcomed the cut, which will last 13 months and cost £12.5bn in a full year, but warned that getting the price cuts in place by Monday would be “a mammoth and costly task”.

…

“Shops will cope, but implementing a new VAT rate in just a week will be exceptionally difficult for customers and retailers at their busiest time of year.”

…

The logistical problems stores will face include changing IT systems that read barcodes, and shopfloor staff will have to change prices on store shelves, change swing tags on goods and put stickers over prices pre-printed on packaging. The BRC said there would be “rounding issues”.

Fortunately for our clients using UCDCommerce, we’re already prepared for the possibility of a change in the VAT rate and will automatically update their e-commerce sites for them. Automatic adjustments to listed prices and billing mean that there’s no difficulty at all in keeping up with the VAT rate change.

But the story might not be the same for everyone. The rate has been the same for so long that many software developers may have simply built the 17.5% value into their programs, making it costly and time-consuming to change. And some smaller retailers may lack the knowledge or expertise to modify their software, so may be forced to pay for a software developer to make the modifications or risk charging the wrong rate of VAT. Not only that, but the rate has to be set back again in January 2010! The government has managed to create a whole new ‘Y2K’ bug and has given the British retail sector a week to fix it – good news for retailers who have well-managed e-commerce operations, bad news for those who don’t.

If you’re a retailer and you find that you’re having problems with the VAT change, it’s worth considering a few options:

• Talk to your e-commerce provider and make sure that they are updating your site with the new VAT rates
• Your IT department may have access to the e-commerce software and may be able to adjust the VAT rate
• In situations where the original developers of your e-commerce platform are no longer involved in the day-to-day running of the site, you may need to contact them for assistance
• If you’re using an open source e-commerce platform, you may be able to contact a freelance developer with knowledge of how to update the software

Of course, none of this is necessary for people who have well-maintained e-commerce systems. PRWD’s clients won’t have to spare a moment’s thought to consider the implications of the change because we take care of these issues for them. But this issue does highlight the importance of being able to react to changes far beyond your own control and it may well end up exposing many businesses who are not able to keep up.

If you would like to talk to us about your e-commerce operation, you can find our contact details here.