E-commerce and Usability

Here we'll look at making your e-commerce site easy for customers to use, including presentation of goods, visitor registration, shopping carts, shopping software, the "tunnel" of checkout, and the need for the customer to feel in control of the transaction. Many of the aspects of usability previously covered in Usability - The Basics and Usability and Navigation apply to e-commerce too, but it also has its own special requirements.

Your Customers are Control Freaks

We'll start with the issue of keeping your customers in control of the transaction, because it's crucial to the success of any e- commerce site. This may not appear to be a usability issue under a strict and narrow definition of the term. But broaden the definition a little to: "making your site easy to use — in the way your customers would like to use it," and the issue of control begins to fit.

The reason it's so important is that customers will abandon an e- commerce transaction if they feel they're losing control. It's that old human defence mechanism — when things get scary and confusing, run away. And run away they do. The figures on abandonment can be hard to interpret, see The Truth Behind Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates, but are generally reported at around 30%.

You don't see 30% of customers in a real supermarket abandoning their carts, so why is the figure so high on the Internet? There are many factors including security, reliability, and high shipping charges (a major influence) but another big factor is the intimidating nature of the Web. It's technical and lacks human contact. For most people that makes it a scary place. And if people start a transaction already feeling intimidated, you don't have to do much to push them over the edge and lose them. All you have to do is reduce their control over the transaction, or even appear to reduce it, or just fail to make it clear that they're in total control.

Examples? Asking for credit card details too early, failing to inform the customer at what stage the transaction will become final — before it happens, and adding personal profile questions to forms that gather essential information needed for purchase. None of these things are acceptable to customers in the real world, and they all contribute to that high figure of abandoned transactions.

So, what do you need to do to keep the customer in control?

• Provide a shopping cart with the same freedom of action as a real one.
• Get the elements of the purchase transaction in the right order — with credit card details collected close to the end.
• Say when the transaction will become final — possibly say it twice, right at the beginning of the checkout process and just before the point of no return.
• Don't demand non-essential details until the transaction has been completed.
• Offer customers a choice where privacy is involved — for example whether their e-mail address is added to your mailing database.
• Be careful when offering complementary goods, such as camera cases to go with a camera.
• Add online help windows where necessary.
  
• Don't ignore your customer after the transaction has been finalized. Good fulfillment and delivery tracking are usability issues too.

Get all these items right and you've won half the battles of e- commerce usability.

Let's look at some of the details.

Early Registration

You may have visited an e-commerce site that forces you to register before you can view the goods. And did you? Most people don't. They go somewhere else where they're free to window-shop without harassment. If a high street shop tried asking for customers' names before they let them in the door, they'd soon be out of business.

Or at least you'd think so. But there's an exception here that must be mentioned. A UK supermarket — Tesco — forces you to register before you can shop online for groceries, yet it's one of the most successful online supermarkets in the world, possibly the most successful.

The moral is that an intimidating front door policy won't kill your site if you have a good name and get everything else right. Tesco has done well because it has a near-perfect distribution system, which brought many word-of-mouth recommendations, enough to get over the registration hurdle.

Registration at a later stage, for example just before payment, is a more complex issue. There are security reasons for getting visitors to register before they buy — it can help trace illegal transactions. This reason alone probably overrides the usability penalty.

Client-side Shopping Software - Page 2