Trendspotter

by Melina Hamilton

Underlying a decision to purchase is the shopping experience itself: from website design to product arrangement, the helpfulness of product information, the ambiance and the level of personal service that you provide. But, with all these factors to consider, where should you begin?

One of the major advantages of e-commerce is the ease with which you can measure the performance of your products. By comparing traffic volume to conversion rates, you can quickly identify your top selling products, products with opportunities for promotion, product pages that require optimisation and products to consider replacing. The next step is then to fine-tune the performance of your site to improve the shopper experience. Hence are a number of tried-and-tested techniques to consider:

1. Remove obstacles

Make it easier for your customers to buy by organising your information architecture to match your shoppers’ needs. Luxury fashion retailer Net-A-Porter (www.net-a-porter.com) does this well by providing no-nonsense navigation and visual browsing on product pages – one of the most powerful tools for fashion e-tailers. Multiple views, detail and full-size image zoom, colour swatches and images shown on models or forms, helps shoppers to make an informed purchase decision. The site also cross-sells its products cleverly, by recommending only relevant and coordinated products to complete stylish outfits.

2. Empower your shoppers

The ability to customise your shopping experience or personalise a product can turn an average purchase into a memorable one. IKEA UK (www.ikea.com/gb/en) goes beyond the realm of ‘online catalogue’ by using a combination of lifestyle scenery and flash technology to make products come to life. The website allows customers to interact with the furniture in almost the same way as they would in store – wandering from room to room, collecting ideas, getting a closer look and picking up essential product information on the spot. I was pleasantly surprised by the site’s audio/visual demonstrations (see TV and media solutions for example) – an entertaining way to picture how the product could fit in with my lifestyle. Taking this a step further, IKEA UK enables shoppers to virtually assemble a collection to suit their needs using a personal planning tool, and then conveniently save everything to a shopping list.

3. Consider other content formats

Anyone selling high involvement or high value products knows that it requires expert levels of service to address a shopper’s every concern. GuitarGuitar (www.guitarguitar.co.uk), the UK’s largest guitar store, has found a great way to translate the in-store experience of purchasing a guitar by dedicating a specialist level of service to online shoppers. Expert demonstrations in high definition video format allow online shoppers to spend as much time as they need to get to know an instrument before purchase.

If you would like more information on Sage Pay’s solution please contact: dropusaline@sagepay.com

Sage Pay

Sage Pay is a division of FTSE 100 business software company Sage. It is the UK’s fastest growing independent payment service provider (PSP) and is one of the most trusted e-commerce brands. Sage Pay processes millions of secure payments for its 32,000 customers each year and makes the process of accepting payments simpler, faster, safer and more profitable for businesses of all sizes.