Designing Your E-Commerce Site for Service
September 15, 1999
Function
Persuasion can be achieved using combinations of:
Information, both neutral and non-neutral, which will
create the raw material for an informed decision.
Pressure to buy (e.g. within a limited offer period) provides
a stick, and
Enticements such as free trials, bundled products, and
holidays for the kids, can provide the carrot.
The ''information'' area of your site will provide the functionality for
persuasion. You''ll need to keep this area full of freshly created (or
freshly but cleverly rehashed) information on new offers, programs and
other news about you and your products.
Key functions here:
Updatable Information which you can inexpensively manage and change
to provide the ''freshly painted'' impression that someone is actually on
duty in your business..
Current Inventory will allow you to concentrate your customer''s attention
on what you''ve actually got to sell, and the terms and prices you intend
to apply to the product.
Endorsements, whether from your other customers or independent reviewers,
are always persuasive. Link to or quote them directly.
Facilitation of your visitors'' transactions is about building
a low-resistance circuit which will transfer money from them to you.
This will be achieved by connecting up heavy-duty cable (links and buttons)
from where your visitors are informing and entertaining themselves right to
where they buy your stuff. This should be fast, seamless, and as natural as
falling off a log.
As you guide them towards the transaction, your visitors need to be
increasingly sure that they wish to transact business. Help them by providing
''escape routes'' like forks in the road, but design them so that the visitor
will use them only to gather more product and will return to the same spot.
(A good example of this is in a bookstore site, where you get ''search again''
links along with ''order books'').
This may sound like beating the bushes to flush a tiger into a kill-zone,
but to some extent that''s what you''re doing. You could also say that you''re
helping your customer find what she''s looking for with the minimum of
time wasted.
Key functions here:
Live Links from information and news items to transaction components.
Link directly from the name of a product to the information/ordering page for that
product - don''t put ''order a MPG4F here'' link in apparently non-commercial text.
Backup Links on menus, footers and sidebars will allow visitors who
aren''t actually reading your content (a surprisingly high proportion ''skim'' it) to
find their way to the product pages.
Shopping Baskets and their variations can be critical in simplifying
and facilitating complex search/select/order cycles. While nowhere as effective as
they should be, they are indispensable in places where many products are on offer.
Search Tools allow accelerated location of products, services and
information about them. Searches should be simple, flexible, fast, and human-centric (not
requiring knowledge of advanced Perl regular expression syntax!). Results
must be presentable, readable, relevant and interactive (allowing further action
such as ordering or requesting a review).
Execution should, as its other meaning suggests, be sharp, flawless and painless.
This is the point at which your customer decides to pay for your kids'' schooling, so
give her all the assistance possible.
Allow the visitor to completely specify her purchase, including delivery, recipient
information, quantities, colours, accompanying information (''attention of'' names,
card text going with flowers, etc.), and anything else you think she needs to say.
If you''re ''remembering'' (nice word for tracking) customers, you
can shorten the form-filling and only include per-purchase information.
Provide security using a secure server for credit card transactions, or else consider
the up-and-coming payment systems available. Many people still use plain old e-mail
to send their card numbers, so don''t be too anxious about hi-tech security. Provide
as many methods as your customer needs to choose from, and no more.
Auto-sending an e-mail response is a courtesy which people appreciate, even
though they recognize the template-generated false humanity in your acknowledgement
for what it is. It allows them to check their purchase or request, and
to take immediate action if there is a problem. Your customer will also
treat the acknoledgement as a receipt (which it''s not, by the way) and use
it as a quoted reference in any subsequent, after-sales communication.
Key functions here:
Order Forms should be long enough to get all the information, but
as short as possible to avoid abandonment at the last moment. Phased (multipage)
forms can be useful here, and customer memory can eliminate duplicate form-filling.
Confirmation of the transaction, both on the returned page and in
an immediate acknowledgement e-mail, provides reinforcement of the illusion of
staff, as well as being a professional and minimal response to being handed
some money.
Tracking of orders, customers and deliveries are highly useful
back-end functions which have front-end applications. DHL
became famous for putting their parcel-tracking system online. Do this for your
own customers and they will love you.
Appearance and functionality are one thing. Anyone visiting your site needs
to be able to find their way to your products and services - to
navigate.
Add ecommerce-guide.com to your favorites Add ecommerce-guide.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.xReceive news via our XML/RSS feed
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
