The art and science of e-commerce converge at Internet Retailer’s first-ever design conference
By Don Davis
The Artful Home is all about selling original artwork and crafts. But it took a scientific look at how customers were searching its web site to figure out why so many were having trouble finding the items they wanted.
By poring over search logs, Dawn Wayt found as many as 30% of customer searches yielded no results, in part because the site presented no alternatives when customers misspelled an artist’s name or a word like “jewelry.” By enhancing the search feature so that it returned results for the most likely correct spellings, the site reduced null results to 8%.
The lesson: “Focus on your customers. Know why they come to your site, what they’re looking for and help them find it,” Wayt, vice president of online marketing at The Guild Inc., parent company of The Artful Home, told attendees in January at the Internet Retailer Web Design ’08 Conference in Miami.
It was a theme repeated by other online retailers who spoke at the conference. Like Wayt, many have learned to use customer data to fine-tune their designs in ways that turn browsers into buyers. That includes learning when to use—and when to avoid—such newer technologies as Flash graphics and video.
The conference, the first Internet Retailer event to focus on web design and navigation, attracted 850 attendees and featured 22 exhibiting companies. In addition to the conference session, attendees engaged in more than 500 30-minute one-on-one consulting sessions with 18 technology vendors and advisory firms.
In the sessions, online retailers described how they refined their sites, tested the changes and further tweaked them. A prime example came from online jewelry retailer Ice.com, which created promotional videos on 200 of its best-selling items last year. The e-retailer took the plunge after a $1,200 investment in a video posted on YouTube turned into $400,000 in sales, according to founder and president Mayer Gniwisch.
Once the 200 videos were created, the company tested two versions of the site with video, one in which the video played automatically and the other in which the visitor had to hit the play button, against a site with no video. The automatic-play version won, and was implemented in December. One unexpected result: returns for some products dropped 20% or more, which Gniwisch attributed to customers having a better idea of what they were buying.
Another example came from bookseller Borders, whose soon-to-be-relaunched site features a Magic Shelf displaying books facing out as they might be seen in a bookstore, and allowing the visitor to click through a book’s contents and view the back cover.
Borders turned to a social networking forum that matched its customer demographics, Gather.com, and invited forum participants to comment on the beta site, Kevin Ertell, vice president of e-business at Borders Group Inc., told the conference. Most of the feedback was about Magic Shelf: forum members mostly liked it, but some complained that it was slow to load and difficult to navigate.
Borders engaged site development firm Allurent Inc. to improve the user experience, with the result that Magic Shelf now loads more quickly and offers new features. For instance, mousing over a book cover produces a “quick look” box that provides a summary of the book, shows its price and allows the customer to directly add it to a shopping cart. The user also can now drag the entire shelf from one side to another to see more titles.
“The difference in response has been tremendous,” Ertell said.
The Wal-Mart way
Wal-Mart Stores also tested alternatives last year as it added a feature to Walmart.com that lets visitors check the availability of an item in a nearby Wal-Mart store. Customers told the retailer they wanted to see the address of their favorite Wal-Mart, which Walmart.com added as a mouseover feature to save space on the page, said Debbie Kristofferson, vice president of creative and user experience at Walmart.com and the conference’s keynote speaker.
In addition, customers wanted to see addresses of other nearby Wal-Marts. Kristofferson said the retailer had to carefully consider every word to keep the most important information visible on the page without scrolling.
Besides surveys and focus groups, there are other ways web retailers can get feedback from site visitors, including by watching what they search for. In his presentation to the conference, Glenn Edelman, senior director of online marketing and merchandising at Wine Enthusiast, reported a spike in searches for a particular wine glass one Saturday morning, a day after a column in the Wall Street Journal had praised the glass. “In 24 hours, we had an e-mail going out saying, ‘We have this glass,’” Edelman said.
The retailer, which sells everything to do with wine except the wine itself, didn’t sell coasters. But after seeing lots of customers get “no results” when typing in that term, the retailer added coasters to its product mix, Edelman said. Many customers were entering “decanter” into the search box, apparently unaware that the item was included in glassware; now there’s a Decanting tab on the top navigation bar.
Eyes have it
An even more sophisticated way of learning how customers navigate a site is eye-tracking, which shows how a shopper looks at a web page by capturing the reflection of the individual’s cornea and retina from light emitted by a specially designed monitor.
Eye-tracking showed test subjects viewing the site of apparel retailer Charlotte Russe were spending a lot of time looking at lifestyle images on a particular page, but could not click on the image to buy the products portrayed, said Johanna Murphy, senior director of user experience and design at GSI Interactive, a unit of GSI Commerce Inc., which operates the e-commerce site for Charlotte Russe. GSI and the retailer are now working on a new rollover feature that will allow visitors to buy outfits displayed in such images.
More technology is not always the answer to a web site’s problems, as Dan Miller, vice president of product management at American Greetings Interactive, explained. After the greeting cards retailer added lots of Flash-based animation to its site customers complained that the pages were loading too slowly and the abandonment rate went up by five times or more on certain pages, Miller said. The retailer reverted to older graphics technology to speed up performance.
“Lighter is righter,” said David Flinn, director of professional services at Gomez Inc., which tracks site performance. “If you’re losing customers it could be bad navigation, but it could also be it’s just too slow.” He suggested reserving bandwidth-clogging rich media for the pages that really engage customers, such as product pages.
Online retailers also should be sure that they use rich media in a way that meets customers’ expectations, advised Shari Thurow, founder and search engine optimization director of Omni Marketing Interactive. For instance, if clicking on a product image brings up product detail for one product, it should do the same for others.
She also warned that extensive use of technologies like video and Ajax can hurt a site’s search engine rankings, as the engines do not index those elements the way they do web pages. “The more rich media you put on a site, the less likely it is to appear at the top of search results,” she said. Thurow advised attendees to consult with an expert in search engine optimization before adding rich media to a site.
Keep it simple
While there were several presentations about advanced technology, there were also speakers extolling the virtues of simplicity and consistency.
Among them was Jamie Dihiansan, senior art director at multi-channel retailer Crate and Barrel, who emphasized letting the product be the star of the web page. Crate and Barrel’s product pages feature a central image box, which rotates rich photographs of one product at a time. Templates can easily be changed to incorporate new content, enabling a digital graphics team of only six to keep up with a web site where up to half the products change each season.
Some web sites make the mistake of trying putting too much on a home page, said Jennifer Bailey, usability services manager at web performance-measurement company ForeSee Results Inc. “Emphasize everything and you emphasize nothing,” she said. “Customers don’t know where to focus.”
She also advised putting key elements, such as search boxes and navigation features, in the usual places on the page. “Be innovative in other ways,” Bailey said. “When it comes to the core e-commerce functionalities follow the conventional path, because that’s what customers expect.”
SonyStyle.com has been redesigned three times in seven years, and the current version features consistent placement of key information across categories, said Darrell Porcher, Sony’s director of web development. It’s also designed to enable all kinds of consumers to research and buy products. “We learned that you can’t be so segmented that you wind up isolating the customer,” Porcher said.
Often isolated from e-commerce are consumers with disabilities, and Lynne Brown explained that group includes 21% of the working-age population of the U.S. Redesigning its web site to make it accessible to the disabled helped Japan’s Mitsukoshi department store chain increase online sales by 45%, said Brown, business development specialist at the IBM Human Ability & Accessibility Center.
A personal account of how hard it is for the blind to shop online was presented by Pina D’Intino, senior manager of service management reporting and accessibility at Scotiabank, one of Canada’s largest banks. While her computer is equipped to speak the text in tags attached to graphical elements on a web page, D’Intino, who lost her sight nine years ago, said fields often are not properly tagged. Her bank is working with other financial institutions in Canada to come up with standards for making web sites easier for the disabled to use.
Moving to mobile
Looking ahead, mobile commerce eventually will emerge as a fourth major retailing channel along with stores, the web and catalogs, David Sikora, CEO of mobile shopping mall Digby, told the conference.
Today, selling to consumers through their mobile phones is limited by the phones’ small screens and the unpredictable connectivity of wireless networks, he said. Data entry is also problematic. “You can’t build the same type of customer experience with mobile commerce just yet as you can with a personal computer linked to the Internet,” he said.
That will change, Sikora said, comparing mobile commerce today to the state of online retailing 15 years ago. “We are in a similar era with mobile commerce,” he said. “The merchants that figure out how to use this channel will have a huge competitive edge.”
And those retailers will face an entirely new set of design challenges.
don@verticalwebmedia.com
