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on the horizon for e-commerce
E-commerce is still going through rapid and quite fundamental changes, which
makes the work of e-commerce managers an interesting challenge! How do you make
sure you've spotted all the emerging technologies, the novel design features
and the innovative mechandising ideas? How do you filter all these new ideas
and decide which ones to investigate further for possible incorporation into
your own site? In this article, I want to draw attention to 3 issues that I
think e-commerce managers need to consider over the forthcoming year (AJAX,
Faceted navigation and Split-testing).
Why, in particular, do these merit consideration?
-
each one has the potential to deliver substantial competitive advantage,
-
they are all strategic investments - none can be deployed as a tactical bolt-on
at a moment's notice
-
(unusually for innovations in e-commerce) they are all based on
well-established principles and tried-and-tested technologies.
1. AJAX
What is it? AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML
(see definition and
discussion of AJAX in Wikipedia). It is a set of technologies that can
provide richer and more responsive interaction between your site and your
customers, using standard browser technology.
How does it work? Today's e-commerce sites interact with
customers page by page, with the associated delays involved in sending a page
request, getting the page compiled by the server and then transmitting it back
to the customer's browser. With AJAX, e-commerce pages can respond dynamically
to customer actions by getting small chunks of new information from the
server (using the XMLHttp function), behind the scenes without the
customer noticing a thing! This new information can then be incorporated into
the page using client-side scripting (Javascript). AJAX is, therefore, a
combination of several well-established technologies and can operate across all
browser platforms.
What can you do with it? Have a look at
Google Suggest - you start typing in your search keywords and almost
instantly you get suggestions for what you might be looking for. Now imagine a
similar feature in your e-commerce site search box, except much more focused,
suggesting only product categories, product and brands to match the letter(s)
typed. Or you might want a single-page checkout that validates or pre-fills
certain fields as the customer completes the form. Or perhaps you want to make
multiple hi-res images of a product available without increasing the size of
the of the page download - simply load the page with a few small images; by the
time the customer has looked at the page and decided what they are interested
in, AJAX will have loaded the other images.
Benefits for your customers? AJAX potentially takes us a
significant step forward towards giving the customer the information they want
more quickly, efficiently and seamlessly than we can today. And
this all makes for a more persuasive shopping experience.
Update: 22nd June 2005 - see the redemption of
search, featuring a demonstration of AJAX-powered prompted search
for an e-commerce site.
2 Faceted navigation / search
What is it? It is a way for customers to find products matching
their needs by selecting the features of interest to them. Faceted navigation
classifies the range of features available within a given product category and
progressively narrows the range of products shown, as the customer clicks on
features they are interested in. Faceted search does exactly the same but it
begins the whole process with a keyword search. See an example of faceted
navigation at
www.epicurious.com and faceted search at
www.shopping.com.
How does it work? Faceted navigation critically depends upon
rich and systematic metadata on the entire range of products - before you
can enable customers to select products on the basis of their features you need
comprehensive data on what those features are! This is why the implementation
of faceted navigation needs to be a strategic initiative for most e-commerce
sites. Given this metadata, however, faceted navigation classifies products on
the basis of meaningful clusters or ranges of features and exposes this
classification to the customer as hyperlinks.
What can you do with it? You can create a noticeably different
shopping experience for your customers! A traditional e-commerce navigation
menu force-fits every product into a single slot within a rigid heirarchical
product catalogue. To find them the customer's mental representation of the
product needs to match the structure of the catalogue. To pick a classic
example, the catalogue may categorise a baby car-seat as a travel product so if
the customer looks under safety products they will be disappointed! As I
illustrated in my recent article on
confusion zones in the navigation of online retail sites , sources of
such disappointment are abundant in top retail sites. Faceted
navigation, by contrast, slices-and-dices the available products according to
their features. These features are presented to the customer, usually as a list
of hyperlinks, and on clicking a link, products with that selected feature are
shown. The customer then has the opportunity to refine their choice with
further feature selections. At any point, the customer may revise or delete any
of their selected features until the products displayed meet their needs. Here
is an illustration of how faceted navigation would look for washing
machines:
Benefits to your customers? By presenting customers with a
range of features to choose from, navigation paths are chosen by the
customer, and not determined by a heirarchical product
catalogue. By exposing the features on offer within a product
category, customers are immediately made aware of the possibilities open to
them and the decisions they may need to make. This is particularly useful
for less-informed customers who may arrive at a site with few criteria upon
which to base their purchasing decision. Transparency also ensures that
customers do not overlook areas that might otherwise have been invisible… if
only I’d known it was available in red ... and should prevent
customers from reaching ‘dead ends’ by asking for implausible combinations
of features. Enabling customers to change their decision criteria as they
shop is also consistent with key research findings on constructed
preferences, as we highlighted in our Online Retail User Experience Benchmarks 2004 report.
3. Split-testing
What is it? Split-testing is a procedure for presenting
different content to different customers within your e-commerce site to find
out which works best (usually what maximises sales-conversion).
How does it work? Although qualitative research can provide
many pointers for improving e-commerce, there are some issues that need the
precision and differentiation that can only come from quantitative research.
Interviews with a group of customers can, for example, reveal whether they
think your site offers good value for money relative to competitor sites.
Obtaining key information to inform a pricing strategy, such as whether to
introduce product bundles at discount prices , will, however, require
quantitative analysis of many transactions. Split-testing enables you to do
such quantitative experiments online and get full statistical analyses of the
results. So, for example, alternate customers get either the offer of the
discounted product bundle or the individual products on their own. By the end
of the experiment, you have all the answers you need to evaluate (and quantify)
the benefits of product bundling. A great deal of the value of split-testing
comes from being able to tease apart multiple factors that may interact to
produce the desired effect. So, for example, product bundling may work
well for some types of products but not others, it may work within certain
price bands but not others, it may work with certain types of
customers but not others. Multi-variate split-testing can tackle problems
like this within a single experiment, with greater explanatory and statistical power than simple two-way testing can
achieve.
What can you do with it? There clearly remains a strong if it
ain't broke, don't fix it mentality in the management of e-commerce
sites. According to the recent survey of e-commerce managers from www.e-tailing.com
only 30% of sites make major site enhancements more than once per year. A
strategic committment to split-testing would move e-commerce management from a
process of periodic revolution to one of progressive evolution. You see a
potential opportunity for competitive advantage, you test it and if it proves
itself worthwhile, you implement it. This, of course, is not intended
to underestimate the infrastructural changes required
within many e-commerce enterprises in order to make this happen. But,
then just how much is business agility worth in the online retail
marketplace?
Benefits to your customers? The easier it is for customers to
achieve their goals, the happier they will tend to be. Having new site features
well-proven before their implementation would eliminate much of the
frustration of online shopping. And how many more customers are going to be
retained if progressive evolutionary change takes the place of the occasional
radical site make-over?
Comment
From Carlos Baez, Deputy Head of Development Operations, teletextholidays.co.uk
at 12.03pm 6th JUNE 2005
"Interesting article. We do have something which is a bit of a mix on our
www.teletextholidays.co.uk under the 'Holidays' section. Given the
amount of package offers featured (not far from a million), we make users do an
initial search, which will generally return a lot of results before allowing
the filtering. Once a search is performed the users can then progressively
filter by any of the fields in the results screen (destination, airport, board
basis, etc) until they narrow the choice to a limited manageable set. The
filtering is however done not using the more usual list of
"features/characteristics" in faceted navigation but clicking on the actual
text in the results table.
Interestingly enough, we are also looking at using AJAX on our flights and
accommodation searches to replace the polling pages we currently have. We use
the polling pages because searches can take up to 50 seconds while we contact
all our partners and get the results merged. With AJAX we will be looking at
presenting the results as they come on the results page without reloading the
whole page.
I also wanted to say I found the contents of your blog very interesting and
insightful, I have always thought that most sites are feature driven rather
than trying to understand how customers think and how to adapt websites to
their thought process."