For the past year or so, ecommerce sites have all been focused on content: do they have a blog; do they have the right pictures; are they stocking the right products with the right descriptions? However, in 2011 this focus is going to shift much more towards creating online brand experiences.
The ForeSee E-Retail Satisfaction Index, which was published in the US at the end of 2010 backs this up. The survey reveals that “Apple defies conventional wisdom because it achieves the highest customer satisfaction despite scoring below its rivals on perceptions of prices.
However, Apple scores much higher than the others in website functionality, which is the most important driver of customer satisfaction for all three websites.” This clearly shows that it’s not good deals or cheap prices that affect people’s web experience but the quality of the ebranding. The reality is that now everyone has the right content and pictures, and as consumers are getting more used to shopping online, they are becoming more demanding of the websites they shop at.
Without any doubt the value of your ebrand is heavily influenced by online customer experience. As price leadership is difficult to achieve in a hugely competitive and transparent online market, focusing on usability and experience is crucial to gaining competitive advantage. So what do e-tailers need to do to ensure that their online experience matches their customers’ expectations?
The first thing that they need to realise is that it is not just about design; while a site may look great, if it lacks functionality and is hard to get around then this is going to reflect negatively on the brand’s online experience.
Ease of use and good navigation are a good place to start. When people come to your site, they need to be able to find what they want quickly and easily, alternatively if you are encouraging them to browse your site you need to ensure that your on-site navigation is intuitive, and offers people the ability to hone down what they are looking for. For example, few people are going to work their way through 20 pages of trousers, so faceted navigation is imperative, this allows the user to filter their search by different attributes, such as brand, colour, style, size or price range. Even if people don’t buy in the first place they will remember how good or bad the level of service was – exactly as they would in the real world.
Another way to ensure that visitors can find the right products is through the site’s search function – particularly if the retailer stocks a lot of different products. Another study, this time by Marketing Sherpa, has revealed that people who use search are three times more likely to go on to purchase than others, so evidently this is an important area to get right.
Does the on-site search understand customer needs like a salesperson? Error tolerance within the search function can be crucial if you want to serve the customer needs. For example, our research shows that there are around 80 common misspellings of the word Birkenstock so any search program needs to be able to handle these types of errors while still generating the correct results.
We have also done extensive research into how search results are presented. The two most popular are in a list view or in a grid view. The grid view works best with products that require big picture displays, such as fashion, jewellery or luxury items. List view on the other hand, is best used to focus more on technical products that need more data and specification detail such as consumer electronics.
Also, if a retailer is using grid view then they need to have an odd number of items, five for example, and the most popular, or most relevant, result should be placed in the middle as the eye will automatically be drawn here. This is a subtle but effective way of enhancing the experience a visitor has on a website, and retailers will already have all the relevant data to help them do this as they will be able to track which items sell more within certain categories and then weight them accordingly within their search function.
Similarly, with product recommendations, the retailers will already know, for example, when previous customers bought a specific pair of trousers and then went on to buy a particular belt, and this can then be presented as a recommendation to future customers buying the same trousers.
Essentially, the key to keeping browsers engaged and to converting them to shoppers is relevance – if people feel they are not getting what they want they will just go and shop elsewhere. And both search and navigation play a key role in delivering this relevance to the visitor. From this perspective they are a critical part of any retailer’s ebranding.
Albert Pusch
Head of Marketing, FACT-Finder