Bricks to Clicks

To understand why usability is so important to an e-commerce website, compare a trading website with a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ shop. Imagine a person visits a specialist shop, with a particular product in mind. If the shop’s products are poorly displayed and the point of sale material is non-existent and the staff are unhelpful;and if the shopper is lucky enough to find the product they are looking for they will still be unsure of what will happen to their credit card. This will put a buyer off a sale and coming back to your shop.

The ‘clicks and mortar’ environments work in very similar ways to generate sales and ensure repeat sales: you must make sure that your shop is in good order!

Sites that work have good front displays that are clearly labeled to enable shoppers to easily move around the store picking out bargains. The check-out is easy to use and swift. This ideal shopper experience is achieved by developing a stimulating visual experience, underpinned with clear navigation and good interface design. The art of ’stickiness’ is then guiding the shopper easily through your site whilst presenting fresh content and lots of special offers. But remember the customer is ‘king’, so try not to make them do something that they don’t want to do when interacting with your site.

Just Browsing

Visitors to your site will not always navigate around the site in the same way. One user may browse your entire product catalogue, while another may just want to type a keyword into the website’s search engine. Remember not everyone will have the patience to ‘trawl’ your
entire product catalogue.

A lot of e-commerce websites are let down by poor product search facilities. Either the website does not have a search engine, or where there is one, it lacks precision and provides too many, or too few results. Not only should a search facility be accessible from any page, it should also be clearly visible.

Easy does it

Making the shopping experience as easy as possible, minimises customer effort and increases the chances of a sale. Once a visitor finds the product they are looking for, at a glance they should be able to see what it looks like and its price. They should also be able to read a brief product description. There also needs to be links to more detailed information, if required. The user can then add the product(s) to their shopping basket and proceed to checkout. Once they have an item in the basket you can take the opportunity to cross or up-sell.

Customer, Customers, Customers

To get retail and trade customers to use the website you need to give them a distinct advantage over using the phone. Trade customers in particular, want to speed up the order process. You need to give them the option of using previous orders as templates. Where they have product codes to hand they may also want to ‘key-in’ product lines instead of using a ‘point and click’ interface. It goes without saying that their price lists, matrices and any other unique discounting structures should be applied automatically.

When planning your site you should try to focus on how different customers want to use the site, and not how you think they should use it. In light of this, the order completion process, or ‘order tunnel’ should be broken into distinct stages, with guidance and advice provided in a clear and concise format.

That will do nicely

You should also consider how your customers will pay the products that they purchase. There a number of payment gateways who offer a variety of payment options. For instance, depending on your business you might want to enable customers to setup standing orders. Again as with all usability issues you must strive to provide a good user experience that will encourage users to visit the website and buy from it regularly.

The key to a user-friendly e-commerce website is to keep the design simple, provide quality products, and make your terms of business clear. A website with features that the customers will never use is worse than a site with few but relevant functions.

If your organisation is unsure about using e-commerce as a new sales channel, remember some key benefits: a website faces significantly lower set-up costs than one retail outlet. Yet one site can allow you to sell anywhere. With lower operational costs, your company then stands to gain increased margin on the products which are ordered online. Approach e-commerce half-heartedly and you will run the risk of losing to your competition.