I got an email from a client today, I’d been discussing how to improve the sales on her e-commerce site. This line jumped out at me:

I feel the site is already extremely easy to use and navigate

And it is. It’s a perfectly nice site, there’s no major usability problems with it. Perfect? No, but no huge problems. I’m sure a usability study done on her site would show up a few problems and areas for improvement, but wouldn’t be damning.

But is usability all it’s cracked up to be? There’s many different types of usability studies, but the most common is to get users to complete a series of tasks (such as buying an item) and see how  far they get, what roadblocks and problems they encounter, and so on. And that’s great stuff. It’s important to get them able to do the task.

However, a good e-commerce site is more than just about being able to do something. It’s about your customers wanting to do it. It’s about motivation. For example, a blue “Add to my shopping cart” button and a red one are just as usable as each other. In fact, you might even argue that the red one is more usable as it stands out more. However, in just about every test done, people are more likely to click on a blue button than a red one. This sort of thing doesn’t show up in a usability study. The site is equally usable whether red or blue, but it’s not equally desirable or convincing.

So, usability helps get rid of the barriers, but that’s only half the story. If you want help with either half of the story, but mostly the second half, perhaps I can help.

Categories: Conversion | Date: Aug 24th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments

“UK ecommerce breaks £4bn a month”

“July saw a massive jump in online retail, with sales rising 80 per cent on last year to a new all-time high, according to e-tail industry body IMRG.”

Categories: General | Date: Aug 22nd, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments

I got a tip off from Jose (no link) about a new product, Ubercart. It’s a free shopping cart built on the Drupal framework, a popular free CMS/portal management package.

Also I’m still keeping an eye on Magneto, another interesting upcoming package.

In my opinion, there’s a distinct lack of innovation in the shopping cart market, everyone is pretty much doing me-too products. Sure, some are better than others, but they are just trying to do the same basic features better than each other, but missing whole categories of features. But that’s a post for another time (and something that I am personally working to address – also a post for another time).

Categories: Shopping Carts | Date: Aug 13th, 2007 | Author: Mark | 1 Comment

Bounce rate is a deceivingly powerful metric in your analytics report. MarketingProfs recently published a very thorough but easy to read article on bounce rates. Highly recommended.

Categories: Tracking | Date: Aug 8th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments

No matter how careful you are, your site will always get some traffic to broken links. A simple solution: do something creative with your 404 page to convert those people into customers. Here’s an example of one site that’s done it well: http://www.healthdirectusa.com/oops.html

Categories: General | Date: Aug 6th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments