[thelist] how design affects ecommerce

Jared M. Spool jspool at uie.com
Fri Jan 11 08:33:51 CST 2002


On the subject of when to display shipping, our research clearly 
shows that the *sooner* you tell the customer the *total* cost of the 
purchase, the more likely they are to purchase. The correlations are 
very positive.

In a recent study we've done of observing more than 170 shopping for 
apparrel and home goods, we the only reason people didn't complete 
the purchase while they were in the checkout stage was because of 
shipping.

One site we studied will get a 25% increase in revenues by just 
changing the design of how they present shipping costs.

(BTW, *half* of the sites we tested didn't lose *any* customers in 
checkout.)

On the subject of how design affects e-commerce, in our work, we've 
found that less than 14% of the problems are checkout related. Most 
of the money being left on the table happens when people try to find 
the product or determine if it is what they wish to purchase.

If you focus only on checkout, chances are you'll only get modest 
gains and will still be leaving the big dollars on the table. 
(However, there are some *low hanging fruit* in some checkout 
processes and those are worth fixing quickly.)

    [Again, if you're really serious about designing e-commerce
    sites, you really should consider our upcoming course in San
    Francisco, February 11-12.
    (http://world.std.com/~uieweb/pubecomm.htm)] 

Jared

- o - o - o -
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
242 Neck Road
Bradford, MA 01835 USA
(978) 374-8300  fax: (978) 374-9175
jspool at uie.com   http://www.uie.com




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