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.

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?

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

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.

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.

E-commerce Best Practice for Maximising Conversion Rates

E-consultancy

E-consultancy.com provides information, training and events on best practice online marketing and e-commerce. They are the UK’s leading online publisher of best practice internet marketing reports, research and how-to guides. They also publish buyer’s guides and have the largest directory of UK e-marketing suppliers.

Founded in 1999, they now have over 42,500 registered users and around 150,000 unique site users per month. Their weekly newsletter is sent to 20,000+ e-marketing professionals.

E-consultancy also provides a range of public and in-house training programmes, which is where I will be involved in. Take a look at the training area at E-consultancy for more detailed information.

Course Description

Usability for e-commerce sites is one of the largest contributors to customer conversion rates.

By applying best practice usability principles throughout the customer journey site owners can increase the amount of visitors who convert from browsing to shopping. In turn, increasing in customer conversions leads to increased returning visitors and average lifetime value, which subsequently establishes greater brand credibility.

Focusing on 3 key stages of the buying journey, Product Page, Shopping Basket and Checkout Process, this interactive workshop will expose some of the most important best practice techniques which retailers can adopt in order to maximise their conversion rates.

Further Course Information and Booking

Full details and course content hasn’t yet being finalised, but what I can say is that if you are in some way involved with or responsible for an e-commerce website then the course content will provide a variety of key best practice techniques which you can adopt in order to maximise your conversion rates.

Further Usability Training Courses

Aside from this specific training course I will also be delivering other courses on the following topics:

• Advanced Navigation and Findability for Blue Chip E-commerce
• Adopting User Centered Design Principles for E-commerce
• Achieving Lean Manufacturing through User Centered Design

If you would like any further information on these training courses then please give me a call in the office on 0161 918 6729.

What is multifaceted navigation?

In short this is an advanced navigation method where shoppers can filter out large sets of products or content by a variety of product attributes (sizes, colours, features, price range, specifications).

User benefits of multifaceted navigation

1. they can choose to be specific about the products which they are being shown
2. your users are empowered by the way you allow them to dynamically manage your product database
3. users can compare products by specific features, for instance when looking for a TV you can specify to see only TV’s that are 1080p and that are 46 inches
4. your users can shop how they are used to in a good high street store. ie. they tell the salesperson that they have so much to spend and are looking for particular product features or sizes, and they are then shown the products which suit their requirements
5. your user can find the products specific to their needs in a more efficient way, speeding up their browsing journey in what may well be a small space of time they have to shop online
6. your users don’t need to to visit multiple product pages and read each product description to know whether it matches their requirements
7. long, scrolling product listings pages (pre-product page) are eliminated as they can filter out the products which don’t match their needs
8. combined with the more widely used sorting techniques (price hi-low, price low-hi, latest, bestsellers, closest to your location ie. for a hotel) faceted browsing providers users with all the tools they need to hone in on the products/items which they are in a position to purchase
9. potentially confusing and bewildering amounts of products or items can be managed in a way which allows the visitor to focus their shopping experience on just the items which are suitable to them
10. users will reflect positively on the browsing experience with your website, in turn reflecting less favourably on your competitors who don’t provide this type of advanced navigation

Best practice advice

• Indicate how many products will be displayed when choosing a specific filter – users not only will get an understanding of your catalogue size but they will see whether by filtering by a particular attribute they will be narrowing their potential options too much to give them enough choice to make a buying decision
• Provide the ability to choose multiple filters across different attributes – this ensures that users have a truly dynamic and personalised browsing experience rather than only filtering a single attribute ie. colour or size
• Allow the user to switch filters on an off on the same user interface, rather than having to click back to be shown the different filters available for a particular attribute
• Encourage users to use this form of navigation with a clear, user friendly interface, rather than this form of advanced navigation being lost in a cluttered navigation menu
• Where applicable provide slider filters to allow users to specify exactly the upper and lower limits of a particular attribute they want to control, such as the lower and upper limits of their new house budget, rather than limiting them to specific tears of prices ie. £200,000 – £300,000
• Allow a user to select multiple filters for 1 attribute, allowing them to be even more specific in the features they are looking for within a range of products (whether this be clothes, insurance, holidays or houses)
• Don’t overlook the overall usability of your web application just to include multifaceted navigation – if implemented poorly these advanced navigation options can confuse and frustrate visitors

Typical web applications that benefit from multifaceted navigation

• E-commerce stores – selling a large number of products in each category range, allowing users to filter the products to focus in on what suits their budget and requirements
• Holiday, flight and hotel websites – users can input a variety of requirements (for instance, distance from beach, hotel star ratings, user reviews, near by attractions, distance to town centre) and see hotels which match these specific requirements
• Estate agent, housing websites – users can specify a variety of criteria (price bracket, number of bedrooms, distance from a local amenity, front or back garden, conservatory) and be presented with only the houses which satisfy the different criteria
• Price comparison sites – dependant on whether the user is looking for car insurance or their next mortgage, they can specify their unique requirements
• eCRM systems – where you are looking to filter out customers which match a series of requirements, such as contact method preferred, industry, annual budget and distance from a particular city

Examples of multifaceted navigation

Multifaceted navigation on Argos.co.uk

Multifaceted navigation on Hotels.com

Multifaceted navigation on Hotels.com

Multifaceted navigation on Uswitch.com

Multifaceted navigation on Skyscanner.net

Examples of where multifaceted navigation would significantly enhance the user experience

Kodak.com, a site which would benefit from multifaceted navigation

Currys.co.uk, a site which would benefit from multifaceted navigation

Homes4U.co.uk, a site which would benefit from multifaceted navigation

Mytravel.co.uk, a site which would benefit from multifaceted navigation

Advanced techniques to further enhance the users experience

• Maintain users key filter selections when they return to the site or begin their browsing process again, such as the price range that suits them or their preferred holiday destinations, for instance
• Where applicable provide sliders to allow for unique values to be chosen for the likes of price ranges, rather than having specific brackets of prices ie. £50 – £60
• Use interactive colour pickers as a more engaging way for your users to filter your product range.
• Consider user generated tagging, allowing your users to tag products/items as they see fit which in turn provides completely new attributes on which to filter content within your site

Further reading on navigation techniques and best practice

• tagging content and providing tag clouds to represent large sets of data
• suggestive/predictive search
• dynamic categorisation and shopping by user profiles and customer groups
• Navigation comparison between Kodak and Fujifilm

What are your experiences of multifaceted navigation?

I would really like to hear about your experiences, both as users, faceted navigation providers and from people on the client side involved in implementing navigation methods.

• How beneficial do you find this style of navigation?
• What sites do you feel are pushing the boundaries in navigation?
• What further user benefits would you add to the list above?

Early last week it was reported that eccentric Lord David Piper was selling his title and property on eBay which attracted bids of over three million pounds. This is nothing in comparison to some of the weird and wonderful items listed over the years on the likes of eBay. In fact there appears to be some sort of competition to think up even more bizarre sales.

Here’s a list of some of the more interesting online sales of recent times

1. A man willing to fly anywhere in the world and let anyone punch him in the face for one million dollars
2. Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich. The item was purchased for $28,000
3. Ghost in a jar
4. 18 Year old British Girl’s Virginity
5. Doritos Cheese Pope Hat
6. The meaning of life which sold for $3.26 however the seller would only ship within the U.S.?
7. Stuffed squirrel in mini racing car dressed in racing outfit
8. John F Kennedy Assassination Shooters Perch Window: the winning bidder paid $3,001,501.00
9. First name of a couple’s unborn child
10. Singer James Blunt’s sister. Listed as a damsel in distress seeking a knight in shining armour. Her Knight flew her to Ireland after she couldn’t make a relatives funeral. She married her hero last year!

Firstly, turn down the panic button; online spending is on the increase (sales in the first quarter of 2008 are up 50% on last year, NMA 15.05.08), so there’s currently a good opportunity to earn your keep, but you’re going to have to work extra hard for your share, as competition online is hotting up.

Here’s my 3 primers on how to do it

1. . Position your business for long term growth and opportunity. Many businesses go the wrong way by not taking advantage of opportunities they would have otherwise snapped up. Don’t forget things can only get better! You’ll need to be ready to swoop in and pick up all the business your competitors won’t be prepared for after this period by pushing forward with your business growth instead of shying away.
2. Invest but wisely. There’s no point simply having an e-commerce website unless it is efficiently converting your traffic. Ensuring the usability of the site is at its best so that consumers have a problem-free shopping journey is a must. But spending your pennies to make improvements can seem like a hard call in times like these. That why here at PRWD we drive cost savings by using the open source web frameworks built with PHP. Investing in web improvements using such technology will save you money whilst providing substantial return on your investment, if a User Centered Design approach is used.
3. Take advantage of marketing you business online for free by using social networking and blogs to stimulate interest in the online world. According to research by Hitwise (Hopkins, 2006), social networking site MySpace is responsible for more Traffic flow into the HMV.co.uk music portal than both the Yahoo and MSN UK search engines.

I recently removed my birthday from Facebook (so that identity thieves couldn’t steal it) only to discover none of my friends were notified about my birthday. It meant that many of the people I would have expected to congratulate me, didn’t.

The fact of the matter is most of my friends and even some of my family members rely completely on web applications/networks to communicate with me and sometimes this can have pitfalls but all in all these are extremely powerful tools. Online retailers should be capitalising on the host of possibilities for strategically designed and placed selling applications which could transform the way we shop, communicate… and celebrate birthday’s!

I think many online retailers greatly underestimate the power and influence online operations can have to their business. Those who are profiting online, are those who not only have e-commerce stores that are user friendly, but intuitive and intelligent in equal measure.