An E-Commerce Christmas Carol: Lessons of Christmas Past

October is typically among the most stressful in retail.  If you're in e-commerce, you're worried about whether your site is ready for the  coming (you hope) onslaught of customers.  You're in the last minute "lock down" of any new site features that you want to deploy, and once that's done, you probably won't touch the site, other than for routine maintenance and promotional updates, until after the deadline for Christmas delivery has passed.

I was sifting through some old reading material yesterday, and I came across a very good WSJ article (Big Box Stores Aim to Speed Up Shopping) that I had saved about big box brick and mortar retailers like WalMart, Costco, Target, etc. and the work they are doing to streamline the navigation and checkout process in their stores.  It's well worth the read, whether you spend your time selling in stores or online.  By watching their customers and timing their activities in the store, then tweaking staffing, signage, systems and processes to reduce the amount of time customers had to spend shopping and checking out, these retailers were able to increase sales volume and average order size. For those of us that are fans of site usability testing, this is like using the brick and mortar store as one big lab.  It reminded me of a story from my e-commerce Christmas past that I talk about every year at this time.   

It was late Fall on the early side of the dot-com bust.  The crunch was on to get all of the last bells and whistles deployed on the site in time for the holidays.  And then the hammer hit: business for the company had been tough, and marketing budgets were cut.  We panicked. How would we make our sales numbers without the ability to drive traffic to to the site? 

An astute member of the team pointed out that we had more than enough traffic coming to our site to make our numbers without the marketing spend.  We just needed to be sure that more of those people actually bought something.  In other words, focus more on the bottom of the purchase funnel, less on the top.

This was a resourceful team. Within a week, we borrowed a video camera, hooked it up to my brought-from-home TV set in another office, and voila!  A crude, but functional usability lab was born (probably one of the first of its kind for e-commerce).  We focused our first study on one area: the checkout path.  Not only did we watch customers struggle with the basics of getting through the task, we timed them, and quickly learned that it took a lot longer to buy that shirt than it should.

Quickly, the design team got to work. There were a handful of simple changes and even language changes that could be done immediately, and some more involved changes that we wouldn't be able to catch in time for the holidays.  Even without the major changes, the team was able to significantly reduce the "task time" and improve the ease of checkout.  The result?  Higher conversion, and we beat our holiday numbers, even without the marketing spend and a few of the bells and whistles we had sacrificed in order to get the checkout work done.

Now,  to most of you that have been in e-commerce for a while, you've grown used to sophisticated usability labs, analytics tools and site optimization practices, so this story probably sounds a bit "101". But I make a point of telling it every year about this time, as I think it is an appropriate reminder that bells and whistles, exciting as they may be, are no substitute for some of the important, and yes, basic things that customers really want for Christmas - like an easy and error free shopping experience.  That's a gift that will give back to you, may dollars over. Even the brick and mortar guys are starting to figure that out.

Comments

[Bridgette Boudreau]

Would've been nice to have that spend though... ;-)

[Brian]

Thanks for the reminder to keep it simple. Nothing replaces watching real users try to use a site or software. Great post.