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I’m reading E-Commerce User Experience by Jakob Nielsen et al, which is a very thick and informative book. Even if the findings and guidelines in it are not necessarily surprises, they are still valuable. Here’s what I’ve learned or reconfirmed so far:

The first law of e-commerce states: “if the customer cannot find the product, the customer cannot buy the product.”… Low usability equals lost sales. It’s as simple as that.

Toys-r-us sends my mother, who has opted to receive it, a coupon each day for an item or two. The coupon is only good in the store and only good for that day. Brilliant marketing tactic. But it backfired, and here’s why.

Her coupon was for a certain toy. She printed it out, handed it to me and asked me if she should buy it for her cousin. I looked at it, and from the coupon I couldn’t determine what the toy was, exactly. So I went to toys-r-us dot com and typed the name in the search box. No results. Typed in pieces of the name, no results. Typed in the SKU and found a product that sounded similar to the toy but was named differently. Did I have the right toy? I couldn’t tell from the picture. Was there a description of the toy on the product page? No. So I went back in her history to find the coupon and see if I could get information that way. The coupon came from a 3rd party, and for whatever reason, I couldn’t even get to the right coupon, just another one that came that same day. No dice.

After 14 clicks on toys-r-us, I finally found the product description, buried in a text link on the product page, off to the side, where I never would have found it if I weren’t determined.
Toys-r-us not only lost the sale, but they lost me as a customer - what the book calls a “sales catastrophe.”

Is your site causing sales catastrophes?

The book says that about a quarter of them are caused by the inability to find the item. In the physical store, I can walk up to a sales associate and ask, “do you carry it” and “where is it”? Online, my only options are the navigation, the search bar and the help page - and more often than not, all those options fail me. Take a hard look at your site and see if your customers are finding what they need - even better, put a cheap surveymonkey.com survey on your site and ASK them. And be prepared to have your feelings hurt, because you are going to find that 25%, or probably more like 50% are not finding what they need and are simply going elsewhere.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 5th, 2005 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Usability, Marketing, Rants & Raves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.