What's in Store Online

PERSONALIZATION
Sell Dirt To A Farmer
Most online stores greet you with personalized sales pitches. How does a site decide what you see? Two ways. Rules-based marketing says, "If a customer puts a razor in his shopping cart, show him an ad for razor blades." Collaborative filtering, on the other hand, says, "Statistically, customers who buy razors and cat food are also likely to buy ice cream, so show him an ad for H&#228agen Dazs."

But neither approach is perfect. Says Steve Van Tassel, senior VP of products at NetPerceptions, "Rules are a great way to express the merchant's agenda, collaborative filtering the consumer's." Lately, Internet marketers have started combining the two, using filtering to identify groups of buyers, then using rules to push the products they want pushed.

But all that fancy technology is wasted on many shoppers. A recent study published in the Harvard Business Review found that 42 percent of online shoppers saw no benefit to personalization. The alternative: Let customers do the customizing. One buyer at an online boutique might opt to view shoes by color; another buyer might browse by style; another by season.

SHOPPING
Getting To Checkout
E-commerce site design has one goal: getting shoppers to the checkout stand with lots of goodies in their shopping carts. But there are obstacles. Bad design chases away more e-shoppers than any other flaw, says Andy Cargile, director of customer experience architectures at e-commerce consultant Vividence. The worst part is that these design goofs are well-known and easily fixed.

The biggest mistake, according to Cargile: inscrutable search engine results. Roughly half of online shoppers are "search dominant," meaning they go to the search engine first to find what they want. But Cargile says search results pages on two-thirds of the shopping sites he surveyed are unsortable, unfilterable or simply unreadable.

The second big mistake: All too often shoppers can't find out shipping costs until they reach the checkout window. Buyers want to know up front how much an item really costs, including shipping. Smart sites offer links to shipping rates or show shipping costs as soon as an item hits the cart.

Finally, changing quantities can be unnecessarily tricky. If a shopper realizes she doesn't really need two red cashmere sweaters, she can't just change the "2" to a "1"; most sites require that she click an Update Quantities button, too. It might seem like a little thing, but customers who receive the wrong quantity are among the top sources of customer service calls and returns.