E Commerce

Make More Money: Best Practices for Ads in Search Results: Part 2

In this installment of Search Matters, we’ll continue our discussion of ads in search results. Understand what makes a good ad. Limit cannibalization. Provide ads for internal merchandise instead of third-party advertising. Pay special attention to ads on pages that appear if there are no search results.

Make More Money: Best Practices for Ads in Search Results: Part 1

Conflicting demands make many UX professionals think of ads as a necessary evil. Customers frequently go out of their way to say they hate ads, while marketers always seem to try their hardest to stuff as many of them as they can on each search results page on your site. This leaves many UX design professionals caught in the middle, trying to balance the ad equation—and frequently failing to fully satisfy either customers or marketers. For this 2-part column, I’ve teamed up with advertisement and eyetracking research guru Frank Guo to present real-world strategies for successfully integrating ads into your search results. The goal is making money without unduly turning off your customers.

How To Bid Profitably On Nonconverting Keywords

Google has a bidding methodology called Budget Optimizer that attempts to maximize the traffic you receive for the keywords in a campaign. This is useful for early buying cycle keywords. However, every keyword should be reaching some goal regardless of where it falls into the buying cycle. It was difficult to track the effectiveness of these campaigns until recently when Google made some changes to Google Analytics. Now you can more effectively bid on early buying cycle keywords, or keywords that you want exposure for, but do not have direct returns by combining the new Google Analytics goals with a budget optimizer campaign.

Increasing Online Sales: Simple Usability Problems To Avoid

When designing an online store, you have to consider many different types of customers: repeat customers, first-timers, people in a rush, etc. One thing that would help all of them is optimum usability. You can achieve this in a variety of ways, starting with eliminating the most common usability problems from your website. Fixing any one of the following eight common usability problems will get you started on the path to usability and user-experience heaven and, ultimately, more sales.

Manufacturer Sites that Sell

The job of a retail site is to attract the consumer, sell the product, and deliver it. In the case of a manufacturer site, the only difference when encountering a retail customer is that, instead of delivering the product, the site may deliver the customer—to an authorized retailer.

Selling Advertising

Considering selling advertisements on your web-site? Here are some things you should think about.

Practical eCommerce

Practical eCommerce was launched in July 2005 by Kerry and Joy Murdock in Grand Junction, Colorado, USA. Its mission from the start has been to provide down-to-earth articles and advice to help smaller businesses succeed online.

Building Mashups with JSONP, jQuery, and Yahoo! Query Language

In the previous article of this series, we introduced JSONP (JSON with Padding) as a way to overcome browser same-origin policy limitations while combining and presenting data from third-party sources. This article continues this process and shows you how to use Yahoo! Query Language (YQL), a JSONP service from Yahoo!, to build a mashup Web page using jQuery.

Economic Downturn Puts Website Usability into Focus

The economic pinch is encouraging more people to shop online, making website usability more important than ever. Those ecommerce sites that follow good usability practices will inevitably have a competitive advantage. What are the key things companies can do to make their site user friendly?

SubHub Articles

All content that can be digitised – books, newspapers, magazines, newsletters, journals, research, music and film - is being digitised and distributed via the Internet. SubHub’s vision is to provide a solution for getting all this content online.

After Launching 300 Content Websites, These Are My Observations

To help those people who are considering going online and to offer some thoughts to those who already have a website here are 10 observations I’ve made over the last few months.

Designing Personalized User Experiences for eCommerce: An Information Architecture Perspective

You can think of the information architecture as the “glue” that holds a web site together - the part that hooks the content up with the user interface. It provides the large buckets to place products into and that users can browse by. It specifies the meta-information that ties pieces of content together and enables things like cross-selling.

Close the Sale With Persuasive Design

Persuasive design techniques focus on "getting the lead" or "closing the sale". Here are some techniques to help you do just that.

Turning on the Lights in Your Online Business

Ecommerce websites are typically set up as if they were just glorified catalogs: a list of products, some pictures, brief descriptions, and an order form. No human interaction at all.

E-Commerce on the Go: Selling Through the Mobile

A series of best practice guidelines for removing potential barriers between your customers and your mobile e-commerce site.

Global Navigation

97% of sites included global links to the site's top-level categories. While global links to top-level categories help reinforce the breadth of a site's offering, they also consume significant screen real estate for links that arguably are not as relevant to users as page-specific content. This is particularly true at the lower levels of the hierarchy, where there is a larger amount of semantic distance between the global links and the page content.

Retail Ecologies, E-Commerce, and Information Architecture

This white paper discusses information architecture in terms of retail ecology theory and how it translates to e-commerce. It begins by defining what a retail ecology is, and then discusses how the information architecture of e-commerce sites can change for four different types of retail ecologies.

Your Website is for Your Most Important Customers

Well-managed websites tend to be those that are narrow in their focus. They do a few things really well rather than attempt to do lots and lots of things.

Learn From Your Customers for Usable Web Applications

Usability consultant Paul Englefield takes you on a journey to demonstrate that listening to your customers is the only way to provide the ultimate usability when designing an e-commerce site or Web-based applications. Through examples, the article weaves user-centered design techniques into the steps of designing an effective business site, focusing on gathering data about your customers' (and their customers') usage behaviors, offers two design models, and demonstrates how to integrate customers' input into the testing and evaluation process.

Revisiting Toys’R’Us

How could an $11,000,000,000 company fail so miserably in its e-commerce efforts that it had to turn its storefront over to a relative newcomer? And what is the Big Lesson we can learn from Toys'R'Us' difficulties?

Screen-Reader Usability at a Standards-Compliant E-Commerce Site

An E-commerce site was redesigned with Web standards in mind. The revised site used semantic HTML markup that usually passes validation tests and also incorporated many common accessibility features. A study was carried out with screen-reader users to determine how well compliance with Web standards and accessibility guidelines translated into actual usability and accessibility.

Online Travel Booking: What Influences Consumers?

An overview of what influences consumers when booking a holiday and what travel companies can do to offer the best user experience.

Guide to Buying Traffic

While many niches depend on PPC search traffic, there’s a wide group of sites that benifit from bought traffic from individual sites. Often times you can get very high quality traffic that converts very well from niches that tend to deal in a more direct site to site type traffic deal, rather than 3rd party ad networks. This guide is mostly to be used when buying traffic from forums, from individual websites, and from “plug” type packages, yet there are many things that transfer over to more traditional PPC outlets.

Hats Off to Your Own Web Business

Sahil Parikh built and runs his web app DeskAway a world away in Mumbai, India. In this article he shares some of the things he’s learned and hats he’s worn while creating his successful and profitable web app business.

Online Persuasion: Seven Ways to Persuade People to Buy

Persuading people to do what you want them to do on your website isn't as hard as you think. Read through these top tips and so your online conversion rates can soar!

Top Ten Mistakes of Shopping Cart Design Revisited: A Survey of 500 Top E-Commerce Websites

A list of common mistakes with e-commerce shopping cart design were identified in a previous issue of Usability News. This article revisits that list and reviews how 500 of the top Internet retail sites of today implemented their shopping cart design.

Is There a Way Out Beyond Google to Bring in Revenues?

No webmaster worth his salt can rule out the indispensability of Google for enhancing the prospects of one's business potential the online way. The ways and means to augment your business statistics are fine as long as they are paving the way in your business interest. The fact is that end results are always important and determine the continuation of a set of strategies or tactics in the future. Notwithstanding the enormous benefits accruing from top positions in Google's rankings, you will end up to lose sight of the long term survival if you drive your business on a Google-only focus.

E-Shop Accessibility: From Theory to Reality

This article will explain how it is possible to apply WCAG 1.0 (and also how to comply with the future WCAG 2.0 and ISO 9241-151) to create an accessible e-shop shopping-cart and backend management system, analyzing the problems and the proposed solutions.

Better Web Forms: Redesigning eBay's Registration

Even the smallest adjustments to a page's design, layout, and content can make a major improvement in the overall quality of the page. Taking a fresh look at sections of a site that have been ignored for a while can give you an entirely new perspective. By making small incremental changes and testing them against real world scenarios, we can more easily focus on continuous improvement without going back to square one every time.

Converting Visitors to Buyers

Converting visitors to buyers can be easily achieved by following some basic rules of conversion.

E-Commerce Imagery: Persuading with Pictures

The use of effective images to sell online is crucial. Read through these essential guidelines and find out how to use images to increase conversion rates.

Do Too Many Graphics Reduce Sales Page Conversion Rates?

Optimizing an offer page to maximize the number of people who make a purchase or pay for a subscription is a delicate process. You need to get the balance just right.

Build a Shopping Cart Application Using XForms

This tutorial focuses on key aspects of the W3C XForms 1.0 standard to produce a fully functional Web-based shopping cart. With this approach, the reader will get a good start at creating real-world applications with XForms, without having to learn the entire XForms specification.

Filter and Sort: Improving Ecommerce Product Findability

Filtering and sorting are essential for helping users find the products they're looking for. Find out how to make best use of this essential functionality.

Usability Testing of Travel Websites

A usability study was conducted to identify usability problems as well as recommendations for improvement for three travel sales websites. The study performed testing on twenty participants, between the ages of 19 and 65, recruited from the university campus consisting of students, faculty, and staff. The three websites tested were Expedia.com, Orbitz.com, and Travelocity.com. Each participant was given general instructions and a pre-survey to determine their demographics and level of Internet experience. The usability study tested participants on the task of finding the same itinerary on each travel website. The participant during testing was under observation of the experimenter that maintained an observation log. A post-survey along with a debriefing session was conducted to gather additional feedback. The average testing time for participants was 30 minutes. The results of this study are presented as well as a future research discussion consisting of the development of usability guidelines for designers of travel websites.

Chinese Banks Homepage Usability Research Report

The homepages of three leading Chinese retail banks are assessed for their usability.

B2B Usability

User testing shows that business-to-business websites have substantially lower usability than mainstream consumer sites. If they want to convert more prospects into leads, B2B sites should follow more guidelines and make it easier for prospects to research their offerings.

Does the Intrusiveness of an Online Advertisement Influence User Recall and Recognition?

This study investigated the effect of the type (banner ad, pop-up ad and floating ad) and state (animated and non-animated) of online advertisements on recall and recognition of the advertisements. It was hypothesized that floating ads, pop-up ads, and animated ads would be easier to recall due to their intrusive nature. Results showed that participants in the pop-up ad and floating ad condition had better recall of the presence of the ad as well as better recognition. Animation did not significantly influence any of these measures.

Ad Conversion Rate Influenced by Time (Not Click Rate)

Time is an important design variable to understand. Your user experience is effected by it no matter what user experience you are serving up and the rules are different for every context. For example, the "three click rule" (users must get to their destination within three clicks) applies to e-commerce primarily but not to mortgage education, financial services usability or reading the New York Times online.

RBC Royal Bank’s Online Banking Initiatives: Usable Design Now and in the Future

Discuss their initiative to make user-centered design a central part of RBC Royal Bank's Online Banking.

And Then There Were Adwords... An Introduction

If you have been looking into Internet marketing, you have probably seen Adwords mentioned now and again. Why don’t we cover the basics of the program. Adwords is the name of the pay-per-click system offered by Google on its search engine.

Issues You Will Confront When Using Third Parties To Build Out Sites

Nearly every ecommerce site revolves around a database to support inventory, listings and transactions. Building out the database can be a challenge. Here is what to expect.

Keyword Perspective: Avoid This Mistake At All Cost

In this article, we are going to discuss a major problems involving keyword selection for existing businesses. It is a simple mistake, but one most people do not think about. The two prime Internet marketing platforms are pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. The issue we are going to discuss today applies equally to either of these platforms as well as any other internet advertising you undertake.

Keyword Research and Product Lines

As you have probably heard over and over, keyword research is a pivotal step for success. Taken a step further, it can develop your product lines for you.

Show Prices for Common Scenarios

B2B sites often have overly complex pricing structures or can't show prices at all. To help prospects with early research, list representative cases and their prices.

西方可用性指南在中国电子商务站点设计过程中的应用和文化差异考虑

摘要电子商务成功的关键是理解什么是使人们在网上购买东西的诱因，并且为他们提供方法进行购物交易。电子商务网页设计者必须充分理解目标市场的消费者行为。对于在线顾客的心理和期待的研究不仅能够帮助消费者和电子商务，而且可以帮助支持提供这些商务设备和电信基础设施的制造者。这篇文章将讨论我们在我们研究中遇到的一些事项：1）理解是什么促使中国消费者在线消费。2）西方网络可用性指南是否适合于中国的消费者

Amazon: No Longer the Role Model for E-Commerce Design

Many design elements work for Amazon.com mainly because of its status as the world's largest and most established e-commerce site. Normal sites should not copy Amazon's design.

The Slow Tail: Time Lag Between Visiting and Buying

Users often convert to buyers long after their initial visit to a website. A full 5% of orders occur more than four weeks after users click on search engine ads.

How FreshDirect Delivered e-Commerce Success

The lessons for FreshDirect's usability success can be applied to many e-commerce businesses.

Silent Partners: Selecting The Best Web Host

Web hosting companies are the ‘silent partner’ of every online business. A good partner makes going online a natural extension of your business. A bad one costs you time, money, and customers.

The Best and The Rest: Rating Web Developers

When you've got the budget to implement a web project, there is no shortage of vendors who want to be your friend. But how do you determine the best choice?

Beyond Functionality

Some organisations still take a function-centric approach to their online transactions with customers. Functionality is king, and interactions with the customer are seen as secondary.

UK E-Commerce Losing Half Its Local Business

UK e-commerce businesses could be losing as much as half their local business, if they opt for a 'dot com' web address.

Ads Are Here To Stay: Planning For Ad Placement

Site advertisements can interfere with content and disrupt layout. Yet they are most often part of website requirements, forcing IAs to come up with strategies for incorportating them. Is there a graceful way to handle ads online?

What I Learned From Television

Despite the increasing number of website ads, consumers aren’t necessarily getting their feathers ruffled more, they’re getting smarter.

The Money Page

Low tech, high yield: A funny thing happened on the way to the shopping cart. One Web designer found a simpler way to make e-commerce pay. Alan Herrell shows you The Money Page.

Understanding the IBM Basic B2B Profile

The IBM Basic Business-to-Business (B2B) Profile 1.0 is a profile that, in the fashion of the WS-I profiles, enables basic B2B integration scenarios using Web services technologies. In this paper, author Chris Ferris explain the profile's purpose and technical content.

Live or Die on the First Screen

Pick up a Sears catalog and you can flick through the pages and get pretty close to the exact product you want in less than 5 seconds. Now visit an unfamiliar e-commerce site and you'd better put aside a few minutes to figure out where to find what you want, if it's there at all.

Using the Internet for Public Relations

With the advent of the Internet and World Wide Web as an evergrowing and interactive media, Public Relations has a wondrous new tool in its arsenal for managing perception and attitude. Here we discover the leading edge of thought, opinion, and activity in using this new tool to accomplish Public Relations goals.

Cultural Considerations and Applicability of Western Usability Guidelines in the Design of Chinese E-commerce Websites

The key to the success of e-businesses is to understand what entices people to buy things online and to provide them with the means to carry out these shopping transactions. E-business Web page designers must also have a sound understanding of the consumer behaviors in the targeted markets. Research to understand the psychology and expectations of online shoppers will not only help consumers and e-businesses but also the makers of the equipment and telecommunication infrastructure which supports these businesses. This paper discusses some of the issues in our research to i) understand what motivates Chinese consumers to buy online and ii) whether the Web usability guidelines derived in the West are appropriate for Chinese consumers.

Earthlink Scores Big: TV, Web, Core Values

A recent Earthlink TV commercial demonstrates how a company can use humor, sci fi, innovation, and benefit oriented brand marketing to please and inform customers. Plus, a great web site and high quality ethical core beliefs and values. Very user-centered.

Deceivingly Strong Information Scent Costs Sales

Users will often overlook the actual location of information or products if another website area seems like the perfect place to look. Cross-references and clear labels alleviate this problem.

Preparing for the Holiday Shopping Season

Reduce the bounce rate for organic landing pages, collect data to manage PPC for maximum ROI, and take five other steps to maximize your site's holiday sales potential before it's too late.

Cybermarketing in English and German: Observations on the Multilingual Web Site of a Finnish Company

Cybermarketing is a recent aspect of marketing strategy, which involves establishing company presence in cyberspace, in other words on the World Wide Web, or on the Internet. The instrument used in cybermarketing is the company web site - or the company home page as it was first called. The company web site is, likewise, a new concept; the first, most innovative business enterprises only established their web site presence in the second half of the 1990s. Indeed, business professionals have been slower than academics in adopting the communication potentials incorporated in electronic media on the whole, including the World Wide Web and the Internet.

Beating the Checkout Blues

Depending on which research report you read, roughly 25% to 75% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts before consummating the deal. Despite the disparity in numbers, all the research firms agree on one thing: that's way too many.

What Causes Customers to Buy on Impulse?

This paper studies the design elements within e-commerce sites that motivate impulse purchases online.

Beyond the Buy Button in E-Commerce

The best way for e-commerce sites to increase subsequent orders is to treat customers well after they place their initial order.

Putting a Face on B2B Websites

How do you lead your business-to-business clients down the right path without sacrificing every design, usability, and information design principle you’ve ever learned? And how do you make these websites engaging for users? Nancy Carl offers advice for creating successful B2B websites.

What's the Skinny on Weight Loss Websites?

This study reports on the usability test of three weight loss websites. In addition, eye tracking patterns were observed for initial exposure to each site home page. Results indicate that participants were able to search the Atkins diet site more efficiently than the Jenny Craig website or Weight Watchers website and preferred this site overall. Analysis of eye-tracking data suggests users first fixate on graphics and large text even when looking for specific information. Interface issues contributing to overall satisfaction and preference are discussed.

Supporting Customers' Decision-Making Process

When people buy things, they engage in a decision-making process. Research shows that one of the major problems with commerce sites is that they fail in supporting the customers in this process. By understanding their needs and concerns as they progress through the decision-making cycle, we can build better and more successful commerce sites.

Utilizing a User's Context to Improve Search Results

This paper describes some design practices for providing a scoped search interface for an e-commerce site.

Information Architecture of the Shopping Cart

This white paper explores the principles of design for process-oriented information architectures by illustrating the best practices in the design of e-commerce ordering systems commonly referred to as 'shopping carts.'

From E-Sex to E-Commerce: Web Search Strategies

The authors examine the idea that human information needs and searching behaviors are evolving along with Web content.

Good Information Architecture Increases Online Sales

This article explains how information architecture can impact the sales process, and how and effective information architecture can help a site flourish.

Are the Product Lists on Your Site Reducing Sales?

You can increase sales on your site as much as 225% by offering sufficient product information to your customers at the time they need it. One way to do this is to develop product lists that don't require shoppers to bounce back-and-forth between the list and individual product pages.

Checking Out or Getting Out? Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment

People used to abandon online shopping carts because they didn't understand how online shopping works. Now, it's because they do.

Lessons in Internationalization

By examining some of the mistakes his company made while implementing an e-commerce Web site, Larson demonstrates the complexity of internationalization.

E-Business Resources

A collection of dozens of links to online e-business resources.

Twenty Tasks in E-Commerce

Suggested tasks for testing of ecommerce sites such as compare product features for products A and B.

ecommUSE user experience strategy

The first objective of this research was to build up substantive knowledge about which specific factors make customers trust e-commerce websites. The second objective was to build up and validate methodological knowledge in the form of tools that HCI practitioners can use to design and evaluate trust-shaping factors in e-commerce websites. On the basis of literature on trust and e-commerce surveys, a first model of trust in e-commerce (MoTEC) was developed. Through user tests, the initial model was refined to increase its descriptive power. The final MoTEC model contains four main dimensions, containing components and subcomponents.

Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping

'Experience design' doesn't just apply to online design. Paco Underhill's 'Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping' explores customer experience and consumer behavior as they affect retail and offline environments and in turn provides dozens of lessons for those in web development.

Eight Quick Tips for a More Usable E-Commerce Web Site

If you are a Web site developer and you want to create a safe, warm, and comfortable e-commerce environment for your users, then you will want to consider several issues. Start first by thinking about your own online shopping and purchasing concerns. What do you like? What don't you like? What do think are the indicators of online security and personal and financial privacy?

Amazon, You Just Lost $82.62

The purpose of this article is to openly display my disgust with Amazon and to discuss the implications. On Monday, 11-June-2000, I ordered a gift certificate from Amazon.com. I was going to use the certificate for Father's Day, however Amazon failed to send the certificate in time. So, I drove to Barnes and Noble, bought some books, and bought a gift certificate. Amazon just lost $82.62.

Correlating Web-User Data

The statistical term 'correlation' has found its way into popular business language. Often, though, no measurement of correlation has actually taken place. That's too bad. Because there's probably a correlation between measuring correlation and increasing revenue.

Customer Service In Good Form

Online product registration forms can make customer service easier for the manufacturer and more valuable to the customer.

Donation Gravity: An Analysis of Donations Made to the Red Cross through Amazon's Honor System

In light of recent terrorist attacks on the United States, Amazon.com set up a page to collect donations for the Red Cross. Over the course of about two and half days, I recorded the donation activity on that page. An analysis of the data revealed that the average amount of money donated by each person steadily increased (i.e., donation gravity). This manifestation of donation gravity is discussed, along with several usability ideas that can help you design a better online donation web page.

Nickeled-and-Dimed to Death

A few years ago, experts thought a new pricing model would sweep the Internet in which users would gladly pay a few cents a page for the content that they liked. It was a costly misjudgment.

The Usability of eBay's Checkout Feature

The article briefly highlights some frustrations sellers have with eBay's Checkout feature.

Did Poor Usability Kill E-Commerce?

User success rates on e-commerce sites are only 56%, and most sites comply with only a third of documented usability guidelines. Given this, improving a site's usability can substantially increase both sales and a site's odds of survival.

Examining the Role of De Facto Standards on the Web

Just what are the design practices on the web that have the highest frequency? And are there design practices that all (or nearly all) sites employ?

Big Boxes and Shoppertainment: More Lessons for Web Design from Mall and Retail Design

Explores some tactical issues in structuring and presenting content.

E-Commerce

In e-commerce sites the crucial design parameters are efficient navigation and search, along with speed to the final 'place order' button. During the 'dot-com' market bubble many new e-commerce sites spent fortunes of their investors' money on elaborate Macromedia Flash or digital video presentations and quickly failed — some went bankrupt before the site was launched. Meanwhile, the Web's most successful commerce sites kept things technically simple and basic. Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, and other successful Web commerce sites use remarkably spare page design schemes and simple text- or tab-based navigation systems. Another area where e-commerce sites often fail is in providing search engines that are smart enough to 'degrade gracefully' when there is no exact match to a request.

Designing to Sell Online: Persuasive Power in Action

Electronic commerce promises to radically transform business. To remain competitive, businesses must address many issues before success can be realized. Key to the success of ecommerce will be the effectiveness of the web design interface interacting with consumers. Our user-centered case study, which received an STC Research Grant last July, evaluates consumer attitudes to the on-line shopping experience by observing this interaction. We measure the rhetorical power of design elements on an e-commerce site by using classical rhetoric as the theoretical framework for analyzing our results. This paper reports the preliminary findings of this research.

E-Commerce Usability

This website is for people who want to improve the usability of their e-commerce site.

Consumers on the Web: Identification of Usage Patterns

This article analyzes consumer behavior on the Web. The purpose is to research patterns that characterize consumer actions in this environment. The study employs Nielsen//NetRatings Internet panel data in Finland. The four-month data for 65 panelists suggest three interrelated Web usage patterns that are highlighted here. The text will outline how these conclusions were reached and present other observations.

The Case Against Micropayments

Micropayments are back, at least in theory, thanks to P2P. Micropayments are an idea with a long history and a disputed definition - as the W3C micropayment working group puts it, '... there is no clear definition of a 'Web micropayment' that encompasses all systems,' but in its broadest definition, the word micropayment refers to 'low-value electronic financial transactions.'

Trust and Online Purchasing

The success of web retailing depends to a large extent on gaining and maintaining the trust of users. 'User experience' certainly includes elements of usability, but it goes beyond this to encompass the entire customer interaction process. When focusing on the online experience, there are certain key recommendations for organisations seeking to improve user experience.

User Experience and E-Commerce

Slowly but surely the importance of 'user experience' to any e-commerce initiative is being understood. It is becoming apparent that simply ensuring that the goods are in the shop and the customers can find the door is not enough in the ultra-competitive online environment. 'User experience' is the difference between one-time visitors and satisfied repeat customers. It is also the area in which e-businesses can learn most from their offline equivalents. 'User experience' certainly includes elements of usability, but it goes beyond this to encompass the entire customer interaction process. But focusing on the online experience, there are certain key recommendations for organisations seeking to improve user experience.

The Conversion Rate

Why is usability such an important factor in the success of e-business developments? A key concept in understanding the value of usability is often called the 'conversion rate'. Simply put, it represents the percentage of unique visitors who go on to interact with the site in a pre-defined way. Usually this means make a purchase, but depending on the site in question it could mean registering for more information, placing a bet or opening an account. Conversion rates are usually low. That isn't particularly surprising - they are low in almost any industry, online or offline. What is particularly relevant in the context of usability is the huge benefits that a small change in the rate can offer.

Usability and Online Bookmaking

One industry that seems to be weathering the current online storm – and which has a reputation of being ‘recession proof’ in any case – is bookmaking. A combination of established offline players (William Hill, Ladbrokes and Paddy Power for example) and online-only companies (such as Blue Square) continue to provide plenty of choice to punters. This in itself is hardly surprising, as bookmaking is one industry tailor-made for the Internet environment.

Usability in Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

In CRM, user acceptance is a huge issue. End users, who are rarely the same people who choose applications in the first place, can be extraordinarily resourceful when it comes to undermining or working around new products or implementations introduced by manager. All this means that creating applications that are efficient and enjoyable to use is imperative for both ISVs and CRM implementers.

Components of E-Commerce

This article explains what you need to setup an ecommerce business starting with the basics of business and leading to the new technology of e-commerce. Even though there has been many e-businesses that have failed recently, e-commerce is growing at a record pace. Many businesses are trying to setup store fronts in cyberspace, and many more are creating businesses for the sole purpose of selling stuff on the web.

Security and Trust: Taking Care of the Human Factor

In the e-business chain, the last link that needs to be convinced of the security of an online transaction is the end-user. That is why this article puts forward a user-centred perspective of the problem of trust in online payments, derived from the discipline of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). We will first offer a general account of e-commerce system design, showing that there is more to trust than only security. The last part gives some recommendations on what can be done to increase consumers' trust.

What Makes People Trust Online Gambling Sites?

A validated model of trust was used as a framework for an empirical study to identify on- and offline factors that influence gamblers’ perception of an online casino’s trustworthiness. The results suggest that the quality with which casinos address gamblers’ trust concerns by providing appropriate content is the prime factor. However, designing for trust must be part of a consistent strategy that also involves customer service and usability.

E-Commerce Usability and Trust

Egger's research starts with a model of trust for e-commerce, then derives tools that designers can use to evaluate or design trustworthiness into e-commerce websites.

The Latest Hot Trend Tests Usability of Web Sites

E-tailers grapple with everything from out-of-sight marketing costs to troubles with shipping. But another problem is close to home: Sites are hard to use, and that's turning off customers. Thirty leading e-commerce Web sites are riddled with flaws, concludes a soon-to-be-released site usability report. The study by Forrester Research and User Interface Engineering, a Bradford, Mass., usability testing company, is based on the experiences of 18 customers who were given $50 to buy things online. Amazon.com, L.L. Bean's site and REI.com were among the 30 sites surveyed. Forrester will issue the full report card later this month, but all sites had flaws. Shoppers in the test ran into dozens of problems that ranged from locating products to finding enough information to make a purchase decision to checking out.

Can Internet Shoppers Be Described by Personality Traits?

Personality traits are used to describe the strong consistencies that people demonstrate in their behavior across time and situations. People display behaviors that fall into a continuum of trait extremes. This behavior can be malleable to the situation such as the differences in behaviors across various shopping venues. For example, while consumers may not hesitate to give their credit card to a cashier or give personal or credit card information over the phone, research has shown that many consumers are concerned with online security. Therefore, this study explores Internet purchasing behaviors and the following personality traits: Vigilance and Openness to Change.

Critical Design Factors For Successful E-Commerce Systems

The primary goal of this paper is to identify critical design factors that have substantial effects on the performance of e-commerce systems. This paper presents a theoretical model that examines the relationships among detailed design factors, perceived quality level and ®nal performance of e-commerce systems. Two consecutive empirical studies were conducted to verify the theoretical model. Results from these studies reveal that the information phase among four transaction phases was the most in¯uential in the ®nal performance of e-commerce systems. Among the myriad design factors related to the information phase, product-related information, depth and variety of the system structure, variety of list view for products, consistency of product and background presentation, and variety of presentation for product information were all found to be closely related to the perceived quality level. This paper ends with the theoretical and practical implications of the study results.

Toward the Optimal Link Structure of the Cyber Shopping Mall

This study aims at identifying the optimal link structure, which is an essential requirement for convenient and pleasant cyber-shopping. To achieve the goal, this paper presents a research framework in which different types of links are hypothesized to cause different patterns of customer navigation, which in turn is expected to influence cognitive convenience and emotional pleasure of cyber shopping. Based on two dimensions of links, link direction and link target, various links are classified into five types; NBR(Neighborhood), PAR(Parent), TOP, NEP(Nephew), and IND (Index). Two consecutive experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the cognitive and emotional usability of various combinations of the five link types. Experimental results clearly indicated that different combinations of link types influenced customers’ navigation patterns, which in turn effected the convenience and pleasure of shopping. It was found that the combination of NBR, TOP and IND generated the optimal link structure, whereas PAR and NEP rather decreased the degree of shopping pleasure and convenience. This paper concludes with its limitations and implications on the construction of effective cyber shopping malls.

The Persuasive Power of Design Elements on an E-Commerce Web Site

There was $3 billion [USD] lost on the Web last year because of poor design—sites not realizing that if they just make it easier for the consumer to buy, they'll make more sales'. James Daly, editor-in-chief of Business 2.0, echoed a similar view: 'Design is the channel for bringing a new spirit into an online shop ... creative, customer-centric, humanizing design will ultimately distinguish the winners from the losers.' Because the computer interface is often the only contact the customer has with an online company, good Web design is undoubtedly key to a company's success.

An eCommerce Primer for Technical Communicators

The burgeoning eCommerce industry has redefined not only traditional business processes, but the technology required to impart them. Roles are being created or redefined, where programmers, systems analysts, and engineers now have to have almost as much knowledge of business process development as they do of their technical specialty. The same can be said for technical communicators. Technical communicators involved in eCommerce today need to have an understanding of the major issues involved in eCommerce. This paper addresses five of these major eCommerce areas: the statistics behind eCommerce issues, eCommerce infrastructure providers, managed electronic commerce, business object technology, and data mining.