Lancome-USA.com sees the beauty of site design
Two months after L’Oréal USA Inc. launched a major makeover of Lancome-USA.com the redesign is beginning to deliver some significant dividends.
The redesign, which features a new architecture and tools that virtually eliminate the need for shoppers and visitors to use the back button to locate earlier product pages, has reduced shopping cart abandonment from 50% to about 40%, says L’Oréal USA vice president of e-commerce and customer relationship Sarah Williams.
The conversion rate on internal product pages is also improving and the average order has risen by 10%. Prior to the redesign, Lancome-USA.com was subject to frequent downtime, which caused delays in processing orders. “If the site went down we had to manually complete the transaction by finishing up the order and then sending the customer a final confirmation,” Williams says. “This has not been a problem since the redesign.”
The new design enables visitors to build a personalized skin care and makeup profile based on each user’s skin tone or type and their hair and eye color. A new feature on Lancome-USA.com, No. 328 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, also enables customers to type in the name of a discontinued cosmetic or fragrance, select the proper shade or scent and view new products that are similar. “Our number one complaint to our call center reps came from shoppers who couldn’t find a discontinued item,” Williams says. “The redesign has helped us cut down on the number of complaints by 50%.”
L’Oréal USA, which expects Lancome-USA.com to generate about 15% higher web sales in 2007, also has reduced the number of steps to finding and purchasing an item. “We worked hard to produce superior navigation,” she says.
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