EFrenzy was in a bit of one. The site, founded in 1999, is an e-tail marketplace designed to connect its yuppie clientele with house cleaners, dry cleaners, dog walkers and pretty much any other service professional a household could require. Their motto - which explains the odd name - is "we'll take the frenzy out of your life." But there was a problem: 91 percent of visitors to its homepage were leaving, and of those few who decided to stay, many were bailing out without finishing a transaction.
EFrenzy's quandary is hardly unique. E-tailers are obsessed with the deserted shopping cart - and with good reason. Of the millions of people surfing through the more than 10,000 e-tailing sites (of which 1,000 have annual sales of $500,000 or more), 97 percent leave before buying. And of those who start to fill up a cart, 65 percent abandon it before going through the checkout process, according to a Shop.org study by Boston Consulting Group (dossier). That means millions of dollars unspent. E-shoppers flee for various reasons, but the main consumer complaint is that shopping on the Web is supposed to be easier than schlepping to the mall, yet many e-tailers make it a pain in the tuchas.
Like most e-tailers, eFrenzy is in a constant struggle to understand and connect with its customers. Adding to its stress, the 1-year-old company faces intense competition from rival site Imandi.com and, with 150 employees, is experiencing growing pains. They're under pressure both from demanding venture capitalists and from a recent deal with America Online (dossier), which will increase its traffic hundredfold. For all these reasons, eFrenzy turned to Vividence, a startup in the budding site-testing market. Vividence, which already counts among its 130 clients such heavy hitters as Nordstrom.com (JWN), Drugstore.com and Excite@Home (ATHM), uses homegrown software and an army of testers to conduct what it calls "Web experience evaluations" of clients' Web sites.
What Vividence does, in a nutshell, is figure out why visitors are bailing. Their testing software identifies problem spots where users get stuck or derailed, which can then be fixed to provide a better user experience. Excite@Home, for example, came to Vividence because people weren't using the member-services portion of its site. After discovering that the problem stemmed from the inability of users to recover lost passwords, Vividence recommended that Excite@Home move the Password button to a different location. Password recovery went from 50 percent to 90 percent.
The problem with CarsDirect.com (dossier), an online auto retailer that also markets loans, leases and extended warranties, was more basic. Visitors came, looked - and left. Vividence evaluated the site to determine why potential customers wouldn't pull the buy trigger and discovered that the problem wasn't with the site's functionality (78 percent of testers said it was fine) but with its product: People were reluctant to purchase a big-ticket item like a car online. Vividence determined that providing more support, such as access to industry research and news articles, would help.
The top concern among e-tailers who come to Vividence: how to keep shoppers moving smoothly through the site until they've made a purchase. Are items easy to find? Do users like the product selection? Is the checkout process clear? They're also worried about site organization and navigation, and about streamlining the registration process. Can shoppers find everything they want? Are too many personal questions required to register? Are the benefits of registering clear? Finally, they want to find out if shoppers are getting the customer service they need and if it's valuable enough. "Vividence takes mountains of raw data and gives us actionable items to improve our shopping process," says Christopher Cunningham, CIO of gift site RedEnvelope.com.
Vividence was born at the height of the search-engine wars of 1996, when Steve Kirsch, the chairman of Infoseek, told Artie Wu, then a Stanford grad student, that he couldn't figure out why people were favoring Yahoo (YHOO) over the other search engines. "He wanted to ask a grandmother in Nebraska why she preferred Yahoo," Wu recalls. "The Internet is the most trackable medium on earth, but finding out hard data about customers is difficult." Wu got to thinking about the problem and set out to develop a solution. What he wanted was a test so specific, it could tell him in a matter of hours why, for example, parents have stopped using a particular toy Web site and started driving to the local Wal-Mart instead.
Wu, 29, says finding e-tailers who need Vividence's service hasn't been too difficult. Before he had even launched his company, he had four customers. With his former roommate from Harvard, Steve Ketchpel, who was then completing his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford, Wu spent two years developing testing software. Having received $18 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (dossier) and Sequoia Capital (dossier) in two rounds of venture financing, he hired more than 150 employees and recruited 120,000 testers of varying demographics. Vividence formally launched at Demo 2000 last February.
Helping e-tailers solve their customer problems has become a hot niche industry, says Randy Souza, an associate analyst at Forrester Research (FORR), which forecasts the online testing industry to be a $3.5 billion market by 2003. It used to be that, when it came to knowing what customers wanted, a company would start by holding focus groups. Now there are firms like Greenfield Online and W3 Resources, which conduct focus groups online, and cPulse and NetRaker, which repair flaws by surveying users about client sites then giving that information to the clients so that they can fix the glitches. Still others, like Keynote Systems (KEYN), streamline navigation and goose site speed.
Finally, there are the so-called testing panels - the firms that, like Vividence, specialize in putting a site through its paces, following real users through the site to see where they go and what goes wrong. Among the leaders are usability labs like Human Factors International, which lets clients watch users peruse a Web site and listen to them explain why they're taking certain paths, and WebCriteria, which uses a software agent named Max to test users' preferences. Vividence, for its part, uses human testers to tease out a site's flaws. The company maintains that this technique produces more honest results, because testers supposedly don't pull any punches when making their comments.
