If web stores were more like real-world stores, sales would surely go up

The tricks of successful off-line retailing are well-known: train sales personnel to help customers make purchases, display accessories near featured products and showcase new items upfront. So it is surprising that some of the oldest and best-branded retailers do not provide features to help shoppers find gifts and do not offer product accessories on their web sites. Failing to help the customer make the purchase turns away a huge percentage of sales.

Retailers can overcome this failure not with technology alone, but by going back to thinking about what makes good retailing: satisfying customers’ goals. At Quidnunc we start the requirements process by understanding customers’ goals, and we use this to guide the design. We call it Scenario Modeling and we use it to prioritize features against the business’s objectives, so we know which are most valuable to the success of the web site.

Business objectives for retail sites might be:

This scenario should be familiar to many of us: we know who we’re buying for, but sometimes have only a vague idea of what that person might like.

One major retailer’s web site has a gift search facility, but it doesn’t let our shopper choose the age; the options are just Child, Him, Her, Housewarming, etc. It also asks the shopper to choose an interest area: Technology, Sports/ Outdoors, Family Fun, etc. Choosing from this list means our shopper pretty much has to know what she’s looking for. The result is a lot of work for our shopper, who will have to search almost all interest areas and will have to look through hundreds of products for all kinds of age groups.

A much better gift finder would ask the shopper for the information she knows: the age and gender of the recipient. The site then would display suitable gifts, or at least prompt further exploration. Toysrus.com (hosted by Amazon.com) does well by asking for age range, and then shows possible matches from the list of top sellers, editor’s choices and customers’ recommendations. From here, there are links to browse by type of toy (action figures, dolls, games, etc.) or price range.

Once our shopper starts to look at a particular item, Amazon.com’s “customers who bought this item also bought...” feature really helps; a product that is in the right general direction will lead our shopper to other possibly suitable items.

This whole experience is rather like the helpful sales assistant who asks what you’re looking for and shows you suitable items. Then, based on your feedback the sales clerk shows you other items that might be right or that will prompt further feedback.

Tying this back to our business objectives, we can see that gift shoppers who come to the site and find it helpful are likely to make a purchase, and are also likely to come back. New shoppers who find the site unhelpful may never return again.

The next most important point in the common shopping experience is deciding if the current item is the right one. This time let’s switch our shopper to looking for clothes, which are notoriously hard to sell over the web: Shopper wants to buy a button-down shirt. He wants something in cotton, blue or light gray, with a funky pattern that is machine washable. He likes shirts that offer the option of using cufflinks as well as buttons, but hates very pointy collars.

Fussy isn’t he? The web site that helps this gentleman will have to offer a full description and a picture that allows him to check out details he cares about.

Seems obvious doesn’t it? Sadly not many major retail web sites seem to think so. The web site of one famous department store has a fabulous zoom function that lets our shopper examine the details he’s interested in, but the descriptions are very terse, and nowhere are there warnings about items that are dry clean only.

Another aspect to making the sale is customer service availability. This inspires the following scenarios:

There are so many possibilities, the list can go on and on, but these examples tell us something very useful: product pages and checkout processes are the most common places when shoppers’ inquiries go outside what the web site might normally provide.

Many web sites discourage customer calls, hiding the phone number below e-mail links or feedback forms in a “contact us” section, because they find most of the calls are related to browser or ISP problems and they don’t want to provide free technical support. However, if a phone call to customer service will close the deal then it’s worth the retailer’s time and effort. A prominently placed phone number on product or checkout screens can increase sales by a good few percentage points. Once again, we can easily see how this helps the business objective of increasing revenue.

Now that the dot-com hysteria has subsided, many retailers are stepping back and rethinking their online offerings. Toysrus.com, recognizing its mistakes from its first online foray, partnered with Amazon.com. ToysRUs felt this partnership would provide the customer experience it desired in a cost effective and timely manner.

Does everyone have to partner with Amazon to get by online? Certainly not, but Amazon is everyone’s favorite example of a successful online retailer. Why? Because it already gets the Internet experience, and can concentrate on delivering services that customers actually want. Amazon doesn’t add features in the hope that somebody will think they’re cute: it adds support for scenarios that will satisfy customers’ goals and make the sale.