Forget about the flash intro page. Think twice before adding a chat room to your
online baby clothes store. Skip the rainbow colored background that clashes with
the font colors. The quintessential rule of e-business is: the simpler, the
better.
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Trying to cram a store's worth of material onto a few virtual pages is hard
enough, with some established e-stores offering as much as 500 or more products.
If you add a cornucopia of unimportant information that you think is cool, think
how many precious minutes your customers will waste digging around your pages
for stuff that are really important. That's bad business.
In fact, customers are beginning to complain that sites are much too
complicated. This is the result of a study done by the Chicago-based Information
Resources, Inc. in its survey of 7,900 shoppers. They found that most packaged
goods manufacturers are providing features that visitors don't want. In
attempting to do too much and be everything to the customer, the marketing and
sales objectives fail.
The study also showed that top brand marketers in beauty care, food and
household supplies are wasting money on such features as games and chat. Of the
sites included in the sample, 38% featured games, yet just 12% of shoppers say
they want them. In a reverse situation, 74% of the shoppers say that they are
willing to provide feedback online, but only 38% of sites ask for it.
Many site owners and webmasters forget the main reason why people are drawn
online to shop - and that is convenience. So if your store is inconvenient and
doesn't provide them with what they need, rest assured that they will be out of
your site faster than you can say "Hello."
So how do you incorporate efficiency and simplicity in your site? Danielle
Zilliox, in her book "The Get Started Guide to E-commerce" offers a
number of tips in
 creating sites that don't waste a customer's precious time:
1. When in doubt, leave it out!
Simplicity and clarity helps visitors find
things with a minimum of fuss; they also help emphasize the information that you
do provide. Be minimalist. Unless there is "present and clear
necessity" for one element, don't include it in your page. If you can't
explain to yourself why that graphic is important, then probably it's not. Chuck
it.
2. Use the three-click rule
as the guiding formula of your web site's overall
structure. If you can't decide whether the site is self-explanatory enough, use
the "three click rule." All customers should be able to find the data
they need within three clicks of having entered the site. Customers should be
able to dash in, grab what they need, and dash away again without becoming
hopelessly lost. Although four necessary clicks for some links would hardly be a
disaster, you still want to be as close to the ideal as possible.
3. Have a clear structure.
Unless you provide some kind of organization to
your site users, they can become lost in a tangle of disconnected screens. Chaos
is certainly not the path to success! Everything should be arranged in an
orderly manner, and it should always provide enough information to answer these
three questions: What type of site is this? What kinds of information can I find
here? How do I contact this company?
4. Build an interactive store.
Don't treat your web site as a standard
catalog or brochure that wastes your singular opportunity to build an
interactive store. Without exception, the best web sites are those that allow a
certain degree of interaction between the merchant and the customer. Even if the
complexity of mass customization is currently beyond your capacity, be sure to
include at least some opportunity for customer involvement - even if it's only
an email address for feedback.
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