We are now in an instant society. We want information right away, and the quicker we can dig up the happier we are. We’ve got Google now, and the answers are literally the click of a mouse away from our eyes. As possible all things are done automatically without any hassle or spending too much time. Customers are alive and well in this environment and really have no patience for a website that wastes their time or is too busy trying to look amazing. They want info, and they want it instantly.

A lot of research has shown that the leading factor in attracting shoppers to buy from an e-commerce Web site is an ease of navigation — findings that were supported in a recent survey by Jupiter Research In other words, customers are saying “make your site easy-to-use, and you’ll earn our sale.” If usability is the key to a better bottom line, then what specifically will improve your site’s ease of use?

For that, we turn to the most excellent figure in the field of user-friendly online design — Dr. Jakob Nielsen, whom The New York Times called “the guru of Web page usability.” He holds 73 U.S. patents, most for making the Net easier to use. Nielsen speaks in serious professorial tones, but his advice is more than academic: Companies pay him bundles of cash to teach them how to improve their site’s sales.

Before changing anything, it is recommended that e-tailers should take an easy step to look at their site’s current level of usability: Run a user test. Find one willing test shopper — not an employee — and plop them down in front of your site to get direct, real-person criticism. It’s still interesting how many e-commerce sites have never done this — just sat down with users one at a time and watched them shop on their site. The best way to do this is to grab as many guinea pigs as possible and record trends as they develop.

You should pay attention for feasible problems in several key areas. E-commerce sites lose sales for three major reasons; which calls “the laws of want to-be e-commerce.” Namely, that’s poor merchandizing, providing information incompetently, and not appearing credible to shoppers.

If they can’t stumble on it, they can’t buy it everything should be simple to find — yet lots of sites still fail to follow this simple rule. The problem is frequently a case of poor product categorization. Things need to be where people expect to look for them often, businesses use very odd categories that make no sense to the typical consumer.

A new way to stave off user confusion is by allowing product winnowing. A site must allow customers to quickly narrow down its list of product to the desired item. A site with a rambling product catalog can satisfy a broad range of customers, it can also be confusing if that list can’t be easily narrowed by searching shoppers.

Don’t offer people lot choices or you’re just going to confound them and they’ll go away without buying. Instead, if a customer can easily find those size-ten shoes in summer styles, your sales will improve.

Two classic mistakes in product descriptions are created by: the overly eager marketing person or the overly geeky tech person.

The tech person will write 100 basic facts down, but not in a way that the consumer who’s not highly educated can understand them. And the marketing person will write in fancy language about how wonderful it is, without ever getting to the specifics.

Rather, descriptions must be written in the middle ground between these two. First, describe the product in comprehensible specifics. Then, offer the ability to delve into more specific product details for those who want it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.