Les Jones

E-commerce > Tuesday E-commerce Report #13

Last week I mentioned Tog's complaints about e-commerce. A number of recent surveys have found cases (such as buying movie tickets) in which online ordering was slower than telephone ordering and even standing in line to buy tickets. This week we'll look at possible reasons for e-commerce being slower than traditional commerce.

Hiding the Banana

When you walk up to the movie theater box office, all of the movies are shown with their starting times. Compare that to trying to find a ticket at one of the dozens or hundreds of theaters in your area, for any upcoming day of the week. E-commerce Times recently tested the major online movie ticket outfits. Their review found that searching, navigating, and sorting results were all major obstacles to buying tickets online.

Data Entry and Identity Management

It's easy to see how a conventional movie box office could be faster than online ticket purchasing. You give the clerk your money, he gives you the ticket. No need to type in your name, address, phone number, email address, and credit card number.

Amazon's one-click system solves this problem by using cookies to keep track of your user identity. When you click checkout Amazon gets your user identity from a cookie stored in your browser, then looks up your stored shipping address and credit card information from their databases. Amazon has a patent on the one-click checkout system, and licenses it to other online merchants, including Apple Computer (but note that licensees do not share login information with Amazon).

There are ways to improve the e-commerce experience. I recently made a purchase from a site that uses the PayPal shopping cart. I had a PayPal account that I used for eBay, and PayPal knew my identity from a cookie. Based on my user identity, PayPal already knew my shipping and billing address, phone number, email address, and credit card information. Checkout was almost instantaneous.

Most sites allow customers to create usernames and passwords so they can log in to the site and re-use their information. Customers are likely to forget their login information, so you'll need an option to send their username and password to their email address.

Re-using a customer's credit card information is another matter. The risks of storing and re-using credit card information are considerable, and most small sites would be better off throwing away credit card information and having the customer re-enter their card number and expiration date. That small inconvenience is a fair trade-off to prevent identity theft. If you're going to let the customer re-use credit card data, you have to make sure you have very good security that goes beyond a firewall. You'll also need outside security auditors to test it. Frankly, most small sites can't afford that level of security.

Speaking of risk, Microsoft's Passport is one initiative to have a unified login across Web sites. You create a Passport account, then use your Passport account to log in at sites across the Web. The risk it two-fold: one, trusting all of your sign-ons to one company. Two, having that company be Microsoft, with all of its history of security problems. It's a moot point now, because Passport ran into some legal problems and some business problems (they were charging Web sites too much for the service, so they got almost no partners) and is waiting a resuscitation.

Usernames and identity management are one way to go, but for some sites the opposite approach might work best. If you expect very few repeat customers, or very infrequent ordering, you might skip the process of asking your customer for a username and password. That saves time, and it also saves some mental anguish for the customer, since they won't have to pick a username (that hopefully isn't already in use on that site) or a password (that's secure, yet easy to remember, yet complies with the site's restriction on length and allowed characters). I'll do some user testing to see how much difference this makes.

General Interface Issues

Any new e-commerce site requires the customer to learn a slightly new interface, and slightly new shopping and checkout patterns. It helps to design your site to work pretty much like everyone else's. This is encapsulated in Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience from 2000:

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

This Law is not even a future trend since it has been ruling the Web for several years. It has long been true that websites do more business the more standardized their design is. Think Yahoo and Amazon. Think "shopping cart" and the silly little icon. Think blue text links.

Below are some common e-commerce practices. They aren't written in stone, but I wouldn't ignore them casually.

• 60% of sites have a "Home" link on each page, and link their logo to the home page.
• 50% of sites use blue as the link color.
• The Shopping Cart link was typically in the upper right corner of the page.
• 72% of sites used Cart or a variation (Shopping Cart) as the label for the link to the list of products the customer is ordering.
• 76% of sites that used a graphic to represent the shopping cart used a wheeled shopping cart.
• 32% of sites included a summary of the contents of the cart. Of those that did, 71% showed the number of items in the cart.

Les Jones is an e-commerce manager living in Knoxville, Tennessee. He offers consulting in Web design and site promotion, and programming in JavaScript, Web+ Markup Language, and the Web+Shop shopping cart system.