E-Commerce Lessons Learned

[mandy]

ECT: Is it possible to sell well to both of these groups, or must serious e-retailers focus on either consumers who need a lot of information and time before making a purchase, or those who are ready to buy in a click or two?

Wehmann: A well-organized, highly optimized site certainly can serve both [contemplative and decisive shoppers]. One way to do both is to use customer self-selection technology. In the software industry, a free trial is a pretty popular tactic. Once someone raises their hand and clicks on a free-trial link, navigation unfolds to give them more information and [registration for] a free download.

What they see depends on what link they click on. For decided buyers, a site may have an express checkout box to click. Eighty percent of people buy one thing, so it's really easy to express-buy. But those who want to learn more about the product can click on other links.

Many marketers think of their store homepages and site landing pages, but don't think as much about the buying process itself. One of the things we see is limiting shoppers' navigation as they go through the buying process. Marketers will show customers all of their great offers, and all the other things they may buy start to drop to help consumers stay on the right path and complete the transactions they've started.

It used to be standard for the checkout process to show the shopper a buy confirmation page and an order summary page. Now we eliminate one step. It's unnecessary to have both...

full article: http://ecommercetimes.com/story/BF9bIt2v...rned.xhtml