Compelling Your Most Difficult Online
Customers To Buy Something…
By Brad Beiermann
T h g i R Now!
G
et ready. The following statement might rub you the wrong way. Here it comes…Today, there is very little happening to compel customers to buy a product on a major corporate ecommerce site. One more time… Today, there is very little happening to compel customers to buy a product on a major corporate ecommerce site. Some of you are probably already thinking, “Get real. The major corporate ecommerce sites are making millions. What are you smoking? I’m not reading any further.” Well stick around, because there is something going to be revealed in the paragraphs to come that will have some shock value and a solution. Let’s now get to the point.
www.visibilitymagazine.com
Some large ecommerce sites like Staples, Lowes, CDW, and Kohl’s have embraced lean UI front ends so much that the product page now only gives product name, SKU number, product image, and a price. This has been occurring for quite a while. Question: What is compelling the customer to buy with such a stripped down product preview on our ecommerce store front? Is a product image and price enough? If you are selling a commodity like coffee, paper, and tin foil, or items you can find easily somewhere else, then price will surely be a focus. Why spend valuable time providing extra info about the product? This brings us to the point that is being made here. Copyright is often tossed out when you have a product nobody needs an introduction to. Remember the long time marketing saying: Facts only tell, but stories sell. In our quest to perfect the user experience, have we focused too much on making shopping easy? If a customer does not want the product, will it matter how easy our site is to do a
transaction? For the customer to buy, they first must want the product. Yet, many large online commerce sites have taken out the story from the product page or preview. If we were shopping for green tea on a major ecommerce site, we could expect to see a product preview in the search results to show four things: 1. Product Name 2. Item Number 3. Product Picture 4. Price These are facts about the product. These are usually the only things making the cut because real-estate on the screen comes at a premium. This is especially true in the world of mobile ecommerce where the practice of lean UI design has been the rule of thumb when putting together the mobile store. If we were to click or tap on the green tea product, it would take us to the SKU page. This page would have the same four points of info as mentioned above.
Winter 2013
|
Visibility
|
55