USER EXPERIENCE: TIME TO LOOK AT THE BIG BOYS

12th September 2009

Some of you reading this may have seen, read or heard my rants about the lack of synergy between the online and offline customer experience that is prevalent in many multi channel retailers (In the UK).

You may also have heard me say (On a number of occasions) that very few retail sites are ‘fit for purpose’. Of course much depends upon your definition of ‘fit for purpose.’ From my perspective it’s about delivering an optimized customer experience, one that meets the needs of all key customer or user groups first time, and that subsequently maximizes the commercial opportunity for the business.

The focus of some of my diatribe has been on small to medium sized businesses (SMEs). So I thought it would be interesting to review the sites of some of the larger retailers and online businesses to see what challenges they have because irrespective of their size, my feeling is that they could still improve the customer experience and therefore improve their commercial performance (Oh, and before I go any further, and risk offending every other retailer out there, the criteria I used to determine the ‘top online sites’ is the IMRG/Hitwise hot shops list, which ranks sites by the traffic they receive).

To caveat the content in this email, I make my living as a consultant and so clearly I’m not going to give all of the answers free of charge to these monolithic businesses that obviously have the budget to pay for my extremely cost-effective services! Therefore for the purposes of this piece I’m going to focus on some aspects of both the ‘checkout process’ and on ‘findability’ i.e. the ease of finding and buying products on 5 of the top 10 online sites (2 in this email, 3 in the next one), as these are after all key drivers for both site abandonment and sales conversion.

I do a lot of work with retailers on optimizing their sites and have often said in the past that I could even improve the performance of the grand daddy of online retailing, Amazon. A somewhat over-confident assertion I can hear you say.

So, that’s a good place to start.

I do really like the way search guides you when you start typing in a term, this is very intuitive and a quick way to find what you’re looking for.

From a findability perspective, my search for ‘footwear men’ under ‘all departments’ did bring back a decent selection of shoes. However there were no faceted search options at this stage (The ability to narrow down your options by gender, size, price, style etc). Yet they do have this when you select shoes and accessories as the department. I’d be really surprised if this doesn’t lead to a reasonable drop off rate at this particular page.

I also have to say that I don’t particularly like the product display at this juncture, as it’s a long list of products to scroll down initially with no-way to narrow down your search. I don’t know if they’ve ever tried a different approach of say a 2 x 2 or 3 x 2 grid but it would make for an interesting multi variate test to see what the results of that were.

I tried another search this time, I selected the ‘clothing’ department (An easy mistake, some customers might assume they can buy footwear from within a clothing category) and it brought back some footwear but also an indigo blue shirt from Tommy Bahama a Nike ‘Footwear’ hook t-shirt and a Paul Frank Monroe lingerie set.

On a plus point, Amazon does return good information on customer service related searches.

However, I don’t find the faceted search (Filtering and sorting products by different criteria such as price, gender, colour, style, brand etc) is as intuitive as it might be. The best aspect is being able to search by user reviews, but it would be even more helpful if you were able to search by ‘style,’ i.e. Work shoes, casual shoes, sports shoes etc.

Having selected footwear, within the clothing department, I thought I’d drill down further and selected the price point of £50-£100. I then clicked on ‘men’ to find I was offered 8 pairs of men’s Calvin Klein boxer shorts. Now thankfully I can still fit into these, however, I was after footwear not underwear (See screenshot below). And yes, mine were the extra large.

Whilst the Amazon search enables you to search by department, which is good, once you’ve drilled down to a category such as footwear, the department options are limited to that search and you can’t select another department.

Now you could argue that I’m nit picking here, and don’t get me wrong, Amazon does a heck of lot of things well and better than most.

For example; I like how you can view your browsing history as well as the products you’ve viewed recently.

And I really like the ‘add to wedding list’ button (See below), which is a nice touch, however, I’m not sure what the average bride might think about receiving 8 pairs of Calvin Klein boxer shorts as a wedding gift. I guess it depends upon who sent them!

None-the-less, I assure you that whilst the challenges Amazon needs to address are small and few in comparison to most retailers, they all add up. These issues will lead to site abandonment and lost sales, and irrespective of how many, it needs to be addressed.

As an aside, I believe that the overall design of the site is becoming an issue. What was a clean, simple purchase path has become a little disjointed as they extend the brand and the range architecture into new product categories. The site feels cluttered. And selling apparel and footwear demands a different customer experience than selling books. And whilst the addition of a wider range of products will enable Amazon to increase its average transaction values (ATVs), and sell more units per transaction (UPTs) to existing customers, it will have a hard time acquiring new customers to these new categories of products until they can deliver an appropriate customer experience. One akin to that which users would experience on the other apparel sites they visit.

I think that to some extent, part of the problem is that existing users have gotten used to what isn’t a great user experience, whereas new potential customers will have far higher expectations.

So I decided after all not to buy footwear and went for the Calvin Klein’s.

But what’s this? I’ve added them to my basket and then I’m not offered the option to checkout instead I see an unfamiliar ‘see all buying options button.’ Now that sounds a little complicated and possibly too time consuming for a man with little spare time on his hands…

So I opted for the ‘basket’ option above the top navigation and this is what I found…I was offered the opportunity to continue shopping or to sign in if I’m an existing customer. It doesn’t even give me the option to register at this point, not that this would be the right point to do so.

Aghhhh. I just want to check out. Where and how do I do that? Oh forget it, I’ve had enough. I’ll buy my Calvin Klein’s elsewhere. This really is a poor customer experience. It may well be a glitch and it doesn’t appear to happen if you search on a conventional path, none the less, if it happened to me, it’ll happen to other customers and therefore will lose them sales.

Just a word on the conventional purchase path, at 11 clicks or so for a new user, it’s definitely one of the longest.

So rather than experiencing what I had anticipated would be a gentle paddle down the lazy Amazon river turned out to be more of a helter skelter ride down the river rapids. In order to calm myself down I went off to the pioneers of click and collect, Argos where I assured myself that the customer experience would be as I expected from a market-leading multi channel retailer.

Argos has a pretty logical and simple business model, which lends itself well to creating a cross channel environment and is probably the closest to a true cross channel business in the UK.

First of all I searched for non-product terms such as customer service and delivery options. For the former they had all the links I’d need but for delivery options I got nothing but product links back.

Onto the product search. And Ok, I knew I wasn’t going to find Calvin Klein underwear or footwear for that matter on the site, so instead I did a search for Jewellery to buy a wee gift for ‘her indoors.’

Thankfully my search for Jewellery did return jewellery and watches although the landing page focused very much on watch images. I think having searched for Jewellery I’d have preferred to see Jewellery images and product options in the first instance, but I guess I’m being a bit pedantic.

There are lots of links to sub categories of jewellery products. There were also some strong calls to action around bestsellers and 180 price cuts within jewellery, unfortunately these were all way below the fold and as such, would have been missed by a lot of users. However, you do see these as soon as you click on one of the links to a sub category.

They have an interesting selection of sub categories. However, I think it would also be a good idea to let the user see all Jewellery or alternatively to search different sub categories but be able to see all products already viewed when they enter a different sub category. This would make comparing products an easier task. Whereas what you can do is compare-selected items specific to the sub category you’re currently in, in terms of their features.

And look, you can buy or reserve it! Now wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that at all of your favourite retailers? Actually, it would just be nice if you could buy a product online and return it to the retailer’s store!

This is definitely a key area where Argos performs well. Even if you’re a store customer and you would prefer to buy in store isn’t it a great experience to be able to reserve your product of choice through the site and know that your journey to the nearest Argos store isn’t going to be in vain because the product you wanted to buy was out of stock?

It should also be noted that hidden charges at the checkout is still the number one reason for abandonment at this stage, so when I’d decided to buy the nice little ragdoll pendant, Argos displayed all of the delivery options and prices even BEFORE I got to the checkout. So another big tick in the box there.

And at 9 clicks, the purchase path was a painless one.

So two big boys downs, three to go in my next email. So please look out for my contribution to e-commerce expo’s next mailshot, when I’ll give you my thoughts on Play.com, Tesco.com and Expedia (Amazon.com actually has the 4^th highest level of traffic, but felt it wise to review another site).

To summarize my experience so far with these two market leading brands, well to be honest I expected a slightly better experience from Amazon. They are after all the heavyweights of online and as a pureplay e-commerce business should be setting the benchmark for customer experience, whereas Argos certainly gets as close as I’ve seen from a findability and checkout perspective to achieving a best practice customer experience (At least the aspects I reviewed).

If you want to find out for yourself what the other key drivers are for on site conversion and sales, and believe me there are dozens of other key areas to focus on, then you can either contact me now to book my very reasonably priced site optimization service (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)), or you can come and meet me in person at the forthcoming shop.org e-commerce event in Las Vegas from the 21^st to 23^rd September, or the e-commerce expo event at Earl’s court on the 20^th and 21^st October when I’ll take a quick look at your site and give you some free tips (Yes I know I did say free, am I mad?…OK, don’t answer that) on how to optimise your site.  

Of course the alternative to this is to continue with the status quo in the belief that your online channel is doing really well. But is that due to organic growth and the lifecycle of the channel or are you really maximizing the opportunity online? And what are your benchmarks for measuring your performance?

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