Retail, in the eyes of the everyday customer

Taken from airsoftmegastore.com–

By displaying competitor information airsoftmegastore.com aims to eliminate the need for their visitors to visit competitor websites.

Once a serious shopper is ready, their attention shifts to ADD TO CART area.  Novica has a 5 course meal laid out for them (numbered in screenshot below)-

Course 1: Today’s Price- 99.9% of shoppers pay attention to the product price, which means they notice this hyperlink.  Novica.com uses that click to tell their story.

Suddenly the price becomes a little less important and the human behind the rug comes into focus.

Course 2 and 3: How can a shopper know if $162.99 is a good price? The site does mention ‘real value’ for the item is $305.95, but as a shopper I know this is marketing talk.  I know retailers mark up prices and then give discounts.

What I am familiar with are shipping costs.  Look at what happens when I click “calculate shipping”-

I believe the shipping price of $2.99 is much more effective than making shipping free.  Here’s why: when a retailer makes shipping free my skeptical mind immediately throws this argument, “Why is this guy absorbing all shipping costs? Something doesn’t add up.”  Giving a $2.96 discount is different; in this case my mind imagines, “If the retailer was being sneaky he would have taken the whole shipping price off.  The fact he only took off $2.96 must mean this is the best they can do.”  Note: this is how my mind is interpreting this information.  You should run a test between ‘free shipping’ and ‘discounted shipping’.

Course 4: Only 1 left at this time- This line introduces a sense of scarcity and as we’ve seen in other posts (here and here) scarcity lubricates conversions.

Course 5: “Why are quantities limited?”-

In course 4 novica.com made a claim.  Now they’re explaining it.  I can’t tell you why this works so well on shoppers but it really does.  I did a test where we added a “price explanation” link next to product price.  On click a pop-up described our manufacturing facility and quality ingredients.  We didn’t change the price in any way.  Yet, page conversions shot up 41%.  General conversion rule: the more shoppers are informed, the more they feel they are driving the shopping experience and the better they convert.

At this point the shopper is ready to ADD TO CART.

Oxyfresh.com has a scrolling list of their new customers.  Nice idea.  Click image below to see live list-

Taking the idea one step further an etailer could use geolocation to identify visitor location and display new customers from that state.

This strategy works especially well for higher ticket, longer consideration items.  For example, if I was considering LASIK surgery and visited lasikplus.com seeing a real-time list of people (non PII data) getting surgery right now could be the push I need to pick the phone.

Another place where this could work well is bluenile.com where they could show a scrolling list of customers buying engagement rings.

Of all customer segments first-time visitors are most important.  Why? Because these customers have an unfilled need which they’re trying to fill on your site.  It’s fair to assume first-time visitors know very little about you.  One of the first and most important steps in the conversion process is building confidence in a new visitor.  One can do this many ways-

a) Offer a $ discount
b) Invite them to read your About Us page
c) Show them your points of assurances (BBB, Hacker Safe, BizRate etc)

In this post I’d like to discuss what designerplumbing.com does.  Instead of clamoring for attention the moment you reach their homepage they wait for visitors to get to a category page (clear sign of intent).  Once you get to category page they display a well written, concise and relevant welcome message-

Here is the clever part- instead of shoving the intro to every category page and making it look fake the company uses cookies.  Intro message only appears for the first category visited by a first-time visitor.  Once I clicked out of Kitchen Sinks and visited other categories I didn’t see the message.  When I returned to Kitchen Sinks the welcome message wasn’t there either.

While registering a LLC on LegalZoom.com I was given customer testimonial encouragement every step of the way (observe red boxes):

Shoppers like to know other shoppers have purchased from an e-tailer before.  This is why customer reviews are so effective.  But, as Jared Spool eloquently demonstrated in his Revealing Design Treasures presentation roughly 1,300 purchases generate 1 review, so for many smaller e-tailers product reviews are often empty.  But that does not mean we can’t build trust in a visitor.  Lewisbamboo.com does something quite impressive.  First, if you scroll down on their orders page you’ll find this wonderful snippet:

And then, clicking the 722 cities link takes you to this page:

This is just a snippet, you can see the whole list here.

Do I have proof this strategy improves conversions? No.  Is it reassuring to someone about to pull the credit card trigger?  I’m pretty sure it is.

PS: I hope they update the date from 2006.