In Search of E-Commerce, from Mark Hurst and goodexperience.com

Table of Contents | About the Second Edition | Executive Summary | Introduction | Apple | Dell | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | America Online | Microsoft Expedia | CDnow | Outtakes | Creating the Good | Authors


C H A P T E R    1

Introduction


If there's one person in the world who doesn't need to read this report, it's Walt Mossberg. Walt is the original ease-of-use advocate. Almost seven years ago, he launched the Personal Technology column in The Wall Street Journal with a simple, clear, and true statement: “Personal computers are too hard to use, and it isn't your fault.” We pay homage to Walt with an inaugural statement of our own:

E-commerce is too hard to use, and it's not the customer's fault.

Don't believe us? Go to practically any shopping website and see for yourself the state of electronic commerce today: Graphics that take forever to load. Incomprehensible error messages. Poorly designed buying pages. Slow, complex, and unfriendly websites that do anything but encourage customers to buy.

The goal of this report is to show you how to succeed in e-commerce. In case you're too busy to read the rest of the report, we'll give you the answer right now. Following this one rule will pay for this report hundreds of times over:

To succeed in e-commerce, make it easy for the customer to buy.

What keeps a customer from buying? Conventional wisdom says that security is the main obstacle - i.e., that most online shoppers are wary of giving out their credit card numbers over the Internet. While it may be true that security is the top concern now, this will change soon, as consumers inevitably become comfortable with the idea of online shopping.

As concern over security decreases, consumers are left with one more major obstacle: ease-of-use. The design of the e-commerce site itself increasingly determines its success or failure. Even in a fast-moving, chaotic industry, there's one indisputable rule that can accurately predict the outcome of many e-commerce sites:

If customers can't buy, they won't buy.

That rule may sound self-evident, but it needs to be stated. Every e-commerce site we've ever tried has had ways of making it difficult for the customer to buy.

How We Searched for E-Commerce

Where, we wondered, were the companies that conducted e-commerce sensibly, by making it easy for customers to buy? Surely, we thought, if there were any companies that would have the resources to properly design e-commerce sites, they would be the leaders. So we went shopping on the sites of seven e-commerce leaders:

Each of the seven sites, as we expected, had strengths in its design. But what surprised us was that each one had glaring weaknesses that undoubtedly cost the company a great deal of money and customers, every hour of every day. Despite the millions and millions of dollars spent in creating them, all of these e-commerce sites had major flaws. Each site placed obstacles directly in the customer's path, in some cases making it impossible for us to complete a sale without a Herculean effort on our part.

To identify the strengths and weaknesses of each site, we simply took the position of a customer. We went through the buying process on each site and asked the simple question: What on this site makes us want to do something other than buy?

Buy. It’s the single most important word in e-commerce. If the customer buys, you stay in business. But if you put up barriers in the buying process, the customer does not buy, and you fail in e-commerce.

It’s important to note a few things about the people who go to e-commerce sites. First and foremost, the customer already wants to buy. Users don’t surf to Expedia, or go to the AOL Shopping Channel, to play games or join a community. Users, smart people that they are, choose to visit these sites in full knowledge that products are being offered for sale.

Every visitor to an e-commerce site, then, is a potential customer. Every new arrival to an e-commerce home page is a potential sale - and, if the customer is served especially well, a repeat sale. E-commerce sites succeed as they convert more visitors to buying customers.

E-commerce sites lose sales as they present complex, slow, and confusing designs to the customer. Such designs are the barriers to e-commerce. We want to help you tear them down. Our hope is that, after reading this report, you’ll be able to look at any e-commerce site and say, “Aha! I see the barriers!”

The good news is that e-commerce is so new that almost everyone has erected these barriers. The bad news, if you run an e-commerce site, is that your competition may also be reading this report. If your competitors take down their barriers before you do, you’ll lose customers. Getting your customers back once that happens would be a lot more difficult than redesigning your site with ease-of-use in mind. Our advice is simple: Don’t wait. Start removing the barriers to e-commerce now.

About the Screenshots

Much of the discussion in this report is based on screenshots taken of the seven sites we evaluated. These screenshots were taken during the writing of the report in March 1998. Needless to say, most of the Web pages shown in the report have changed since then. In fact, many of the pages have changed to come in line with suggestions made in the report - see the “Eight Months Later” section at the end of several chapters.

Screenshots in the “Eight Months Later” section were taken in February 1999. Because the Web changes so quickly, even those pages may have changed by the time you read this report.

Why We Wrote This Report

The purpose of this report is to show you how to succeed in e-commerce. By pointing out the barriers that make it hard for customers to buy, we’ll show you how to create a successful e-commerce site that serves the customer in the most effective way possible.

In a word, we’re going to show you how to achieve simplicity in e-commerce. Even the solutions we propose are simple. They don’t require complicated software, or even expensive usability tests - just a willingness to serve the customer better. This report is meant to be as simple as the message it preaches.

We also want to establish our Good Reports brand as a source of useful, nonhyped information. We won’t bog you down with pages of raw statistics and charts and graphs. Such data are sometimes useful in trying to prove a point, and they’re fun to throw out in meetings and memos. But we want to help your bottom line, right now, as easily as possible. We’ve skipped the statistics to help you improve your return on investment today, tomorrow, and years into the future.

Finally, we hope you have some fun reading the report. Sometimes we get a little lighthearted in spirit. Our hope is that our tone will engage you and make this report not only useful, but something you’ll enjoy reading from cover to cover.

Robert Seidman
Mark Hurst

Next Section: Apple
Table of Contents | About the Second Edition | Executive Summary | Introduction | Apple | Dell | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | America Online | Microsoft Expedia | CDnow | Outtakes | Creating the Good | Authors