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Relate your interface to your product
Amazon.com might be a mega-seller, but it's interface doesn't work perfectly for every product it promotes. The lesson here is to gear your site and design for the products in which you specialize, and don't bother trying to emulate the e-commerce leaders.
For example, sales of classical music CDs don't add much to Amazon's bottom line, so the e-tailing powerhouse's site isn't optimized for selling Mozart concertos.
But, "if you had a classical music site, you could have an interface that is significantly different from Amazon's, and among classical music lovers, you'd have a considerably higher sales rate," Nielsen says.
"There are all sorts of [sales strategies] that are really specific to the product you're selling or the types of customers you're addressing," he adds.
Moral of the story: Your site's interface has to he specifically focused on your goods.
Internal ads, with care
It takes some bucks to set up, but serving ads along with the results of your internal search engine is highly effective. It works like this: "People ask for something and you feed them eight ads for what they're searching for," Nielsen says. "People are very likely to click on those ads, and they're very likely to buy what they click on."
On the other hand, if you run a promotion on your site for one of your products, don't make it look like an advertisement.
"Users are getting so used to not looking at banners on the Web," Nielsen notes. Many companies make the mistake of bombarding their shoppers with supposedly eye-catching ads. "They make a big animated, spinning, look-at-me kind of thing -- exactly what makes people not look."
Such promotions are best presented in a simple manner, mainly with text, perhaps with a straightforward photo if needed. "Make it look like content -- not like an advertisement."
And don't use pop-ups. "It's like placing a luxury department store in the red-light district," Nielsen says. Pop-ups "give you a dirty feeling."
Looking ahead
Before e-commerce can truly become mainstream, merchants have some basic work to finish, in Nielsen's view. As he defines them, the basics of effective e-commerce are a clearly designed site with no obvious flaws; logical navigation; a fast checkout process; and concise, persuasive product descriptions -- all areas where merchants are coming up short.
"We're losing so much business because of these basic factors," he says.
When that's completed, the next step -- the real future challenge -- will be helping people find things they don't know they want, he says.
The e-commerce segment most affected by this is gift-giving. The problem is that little has been developed -- in terms of software or site tools -- that answers the questions people often have when they shop for others in real life, he says. The task is best handled by toy sites, Nielsen says -- some of which allow you to narrow down by age group and gender.
Improving search engines will help, but shoppers still don't know what keywords to enter to find a gift for a certain relative.
Nielsen suggests that solving this issue will require in-home studies of consumer behavior to go deeper into shopper psyche than has ever been ventured before -- then incorporating this research into online stores.
In the meantime, online sellers might take a clue from toy sites, Nielsen said. While their approach isn't perfect, some toy sites are able to help shoppers find gifts for others by enabling them to narrow down products by age group and gender.
Since most sites have their biggest sales in the holidays, "the sites that can crack that particular nut will multiply their holiday sales dramatically," Nielsen says.
James Maguire is a contributor to eCommerce-Guide.com.
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