The Riddle of the Abandoned Shopping Cart

Baldwin Louie — Fri, 10 Nov 2000 14:00:00 -0800

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.

What's unfortunate, say Souza and other experts, is that by evaluating a site's ease of use after it's designed, e-tailers often realize way too late that they've plunked down millions of dollars to build a site that leaves visitors muddled and annoyed - and certainly not in the mood to pull out their wallets. EFrenzy, of course, is guilty as charged. When the site launched in February 1999, admits Stephen Lake, eFrenzy's CEO, it was less-than-stellar. While Lake describes his company as "customer obsessed," he hired Vividence because he realized eFrenzy needed to better understand those customers.

It's a common enough problem for Web sellers, who start out focused on building infrastructure. Mired in operational challenges such as how to provide fulfillment, how to ship products and how to get attention in the marketplace, it can take a dot-com as long as three years (three years!) to get around to customer concerns, says Elaine Rubin, chairman of the trade association Shop.org. And once they do take a hard look at their Web site, e-tailers are slow to realize the problems. "E-tailers often design a Web site to show how smart they are, instead of using good methodology for selling products to customers," says Jakob Nielsen, principal at Nielsen Norman Group, which charges $30,000 for a Web usability consultation. Nielsen, the author of Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, has helped the BBC, Keen.com, the Motley Fool (dossier) and KBkids.com (dossier).

According to Nielsen, the problem of the abandoned shopping cart has long been misunderstood. Conventional wisdom has it that Web shoppers flee because of sticker shock - having arrived at checkout, they see their total order price and leave. That does happen, Nielsen says, but it's emblematic of a larger problem. Most users, he says, find it so difficult to get around e-tail sites that they park items in a shopping cart simply so that they'll be able to find them again to weed through later. Customers get cold fingers for other reasons, as well: Most e-tailers don't give shipping costs upfront or tell users if the product is in stock, so customers often arrive at the checkout step only to be surprised and irritated by expensive shipping charges or a lengthy shipment delay. Nielsen preaches honesty: Give customers all the information up front and they'll trust you more.

Often a visitor will abandon a shopping cart because the site itself is badly designed. Perhaps products are poorly described or photos are unflattering. Or, forgetting that most people are worried about security and privacy issues, an e-tailer will ask too many probing, personal questions, leaving the customer paranoid. "To buy something, a customer has to go through the Spanish Inquisition," says Nielsen. "You have to register with a unique username, answer too many questions, read statements about the site's 'community.'" He adds, "In a physical store, I like a sweater, I try it on, go to the cashier, buy it and leave. The goal is to separate the money from the customer quickly. In the e-commerce world, it's the opposite."

To see how Vividence goes about analyzing and addressing such missteps, I followed Karen Fullerton, Vividence's top sales rep, as she went on sales calls and nursed her clients through the testing process. On a warmish day, we met in Fullerton's favorite coffeehouse in the Potrero Hill area of San Francisco, then proceeded to her sales calls in her green 1994 Saab. Tagging along with her verified one truism: Web sites need to be more customer-driven. As Fullerton asked client after client about their customers, the inevitable response was a deer-in-the-headlights look. Basic questions - Who are your primary customers? What do they want? - were met with fear, fidgeting, fingernail chewing.

At least when Fullerton pitched eFrenzy, the company's employees weren't quite so naive. Sara Edelman, eFrenzy's director of research, had specific concerns about navigation and site design. Fullerton told Edelman and her team how the testing process works and talked about cost: $25,000 gets an e-tailer a test with 50 users; $35,000 gets the customer a more statistically accurate 200 users. (EFrenzy went the 50-tester route.) The price is all-inclusive; along with the test, the customer receives a presentation by an analyst who digs through the resulting data. "We answer the questions that keep them up at night," Fullerton says.

Persuaded, eFrenzy signed a contract with Vividence. The first task was to spell out the mission of the research: To understand the difficulties faced by eFrenzy customers as they navigated the site. The Vividence team drafted a series of questions and then searched their list of testers for 50 who fit eFrenzy's target demo. Then, finally, Vividence ran the test.

The testers were told to take a few minutes to explore the site and comment about their experience. Then they were asked to accomplish a specific task, in this case to find a carpet cleaner in a certain ZIP code for less than $150. The testers downloaded the special Vividence browser, which records where they go and allows them to comment on why they took certain paths. The whole eFrenzy test took about 45 minutes.

After the testers finished their work, Vicki Valandra, the Vividence "engagement manager" responsible for dissecting and presenting the data, cranked out 91 single-spaced pages of quantitative and qualitative data, ready for interpretation. "It involves a lot of hours," Valandra says dryly.

VIEW POP UP CHART - SORRY THIS CHART IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE On August 10, Valandra made her V-Day presentation to 12 people crammed into an overheated conference room at eFrenzy's San Francisco headquarters. Valandra did not seem nervous, though Vividence prides itself on telling clients outright whether their site is good or not. On average she makes one presentation a week, and while customers sometimes aren't eager to hear the cold, hard truth, she sensed that, in eFrenzy's case, the crowd would not be too hostile.

"I'm not going to keep you in suspense," Valandra said, and announced that the testers liked eFrenzy better than its competitor, Imandi, by a margin of 56 to 32 percent. The room erupted. The eFrenzy people seemed emboldened: Their site didn't suck. Much of the anxiety in the conference room receded. Valandra reported that, in most categories, the testers liked eFrenzy about 10 percent more than Imandi. Valandra then surprised the eFrenzy employees by telling them that 20 percent of the testers had visited an online services marketplace. "Wow," someone shouted. "That many!"

But the news became less comforting as Valandra continued. Although 68 percent of the testers said they were impressed enough with eFrenzy that they'd use the service personally, not one tester had ever visited eFrenzy prior to the test - its marketing presence was practically nil. And the news went from mediocre to worse as the testers criticized eFrenzy's site, basically ripping apart its entire methodology.

EFrenzy calls its site "outsourcing your life" and markets itself as a place where you can type in your needs and get help. Say a customer wants a housekeeper. She goes to the site, posts a request, then waits to hear from different housekeepers. Many of the testers were unimpressed by this system. First, they worried about what would happen next: Would they be hounded by e-mail? Naturally, they also wanted to comparison shop and see a list of service providers in their area. To satisfy this need, eFrenzy has a user button labeled Search For Service Provider, which allows a customer to search by either city or ZIP code. But all that search produces is a list, with little or no evaluation of the service providers. For example, eFrenzy lists three tax preparers in my ZIP code. But it provides no information about any of them. Are they any good? Do any of them specialize in particular types of tax law? Vividence's testers found eFrenzy lacking in such helpful information - in tech industry lingo, there is no "value add." EFrenzy seems to claim it's the Yellow Pages on steroids, but in many cases the site offers less information than a phone-book box ad.

The eFrenzy employees in the room nodded in assent. Yes, this is a concern. (CEO Lake says the company knew about the problem and already had plans to fix it.) One frenzied eFrenzy employee kept saying, "We're fixing it, we're fixing it." More bad news: Valandra said Imandi scored much higher in its range of services, and the testers thought eFrenzy favored the seller over the buyer. "It's just the opposite," someone muttered, irritated and defensive. "They wanted better site speed, too," said Valandra, repeating a complaint of a large majority of testers. Lastly, Valandra said, there is confusion around the eFrenzy name. Suddenly, the conference room was filled with people taking frantic notes. After we adjourned, I talked with the eFrenzy employees, who despite their earlier panic seemed almost nonchalant about the findings. Perhaps Valandra should have been harsher; or perhaps they were acting calm for my benefit; or maybe, as they all told me, the problems had already been identified in previous usability tests and would be fixed.

In the days and weeks after the meeting, eFrenzy's staff made piecemeal changes to the site: They linked the eFrenzy logo in the headers back to the homepage, improved the interface that customers use to request particular services, and changed the homepage greeting to display a customer's first name instead of his or her username. This, they hoped, would endear the customer to the site.

Ask other Vividence clients and it's clear that user feedback can net outstanding results. Move.com, which describes itself as a one-stop solution for all relocation-related needs, has used Vividence for four tests. "We can debate for hours about what people do in certain situations on a Web site," says Michael Tchao, Move.com's VP of customer experience, "but Vividence lets us hear from a large group of geographically diverse people." As an example, Tchao says Vividence testers recommended moving a clickable map, which was hidden "underneath the fold" on the homepage. "It seems like a 'Duh, of course they wouldn't see the map,'" he says. "But we thought it was obvious. It wasn't." Vividence also recommended changing some of the site's search functions, says Tchao, and page views increased by 40 percent.

EFrenzy would certainly love to see gains like these, but it's too early to tell if Lake and his team will make the changes necessary to create a better shopping experience. Lake promises a better site driven by snappier marketing language (he just hired an editor in chief), and says he plans to add comprehensive ratings of the different services. Edelman says they'll run another Vividence test as soon as they prepare for a site revision in the late fall. That's probably a good thing. It may be true that what you don't know can't hurt you - but in the case of e-tailing, what you do know can certainly help.

Gary Andrew Poole is a freelance writer based in San Francisco.

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The Riddle of the Abandoned Shopping Cart