I recently came across a great post that showcases 35 online retailers who have done an outstanding job of keeping the user experience simple and fresh. In the past, I have seen a lot of retailers focusing on adding more and more content to the pages so that they can make use of the very last pixel of white space on their page. Looking at these designs, perhaps the focus should be quite opposite – how to remove all the unnecessary content out of a page and increase the amount of that white space so that the users are presented with crisp and quality content that truly matters.

Here’s the list for your design inspiration: http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/galleries/ecommerce-ui/

Google analytics recently rolled out a new “Intelligence” feature which is a great attempt to solve this very problem. Google analytics now keeps track of “expected” data patterns on your site and can notify you via email or online reporting if there are any significant changes on your site activity. For example, intelligence feature could alert you if there was a 200% surge in visits from Twitter referrals during last 24 hours or let you know that bounce rates of visitors from India jumped by 40% last week. Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through all the data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your online business.

Take a look at the video below to learn more about this awesome new feature:

Excited? Well, there is more. Now you can also setup custom alerts to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. You can set triggers on pretty much any dimension & metric such as conversion or orders, and be notified by email  when the changes actually occur. If you don’t have these features in your account yet, you should see them in next few weeks. I think this is a great addition and will really help you operate your online store with lot more intelligence and insights that would otherwise have taken significant amount of time to analyze.

Here are some specific examples of how online retailers can use these intelligence features effectively:

1. Understanding seasonality of the products – Setup alerts for changes in conversion rates for specific products or categories over a time dimension so that you can be notified when it is time to review your product assortment from seasonality and relevance perspective.
2. Understanding changes in zero search results – You can setup alerts that would inform you if the % of zero search results spikes above normal. This is usually an indicator that more customers are not able to find the products they are looking for. You can then evaluate the top searched keywords to find assortment gaps.
3. Understanding the effectiveness of PPC campaigns – Lets say you setup a PPC campaign that results in a drop in the conversion rate. This is typically an indicator that the PPC campaign is not driving productive traffic to your website. Setting up an alert in these cases would allow you to aggressively manage your Adwords and other marketing campaigns so that you can avoid throwing money on campaigns that are not very effective.
4. Impact of social media – You posted a new story on Digg which went hot last night. It would be nice to get an alert if the traffic pattern on your site changes due to your social marketing efforts.
5. Drop in conversion rate – Lets say your server receives a huge surge of traffic and the users are not able to complete checkout due to performance problems. Wouldn’t you want to be notified immediately so that you can take corrective action? You can setup an alert that notifies you whenever the conversion rate or the order volume on the site deviates from the expected range.

I think this is a great feature to provide you access to more real time, actionable insights that will not only help you make more informed decisions but would also point out operational problems on your website on a more realtime basis. And best of all, it is free!!

You can make a safe assumption that the reason I am visiting your online store is because I have an intention to buy something from you. All I need from you is to help me find what I am looking for and then take me from point A (Product Page) to point B (checkout). I am ready to fork over my money if you show me a clear path! So it is up to you to decide how easy or difficult you want my journey to be. Need a few tips? Here are few ideas to consider:

1. Do not force me to register during the checkout process. If I click on checkout, that is usually a safe assumption that I have made a decision to purchase. Please get out of my way so you can take my money as quickly as possible before I change my mind. Don’t present me with unnecessary registration steps or other information that would slow me down. If you want to give me an option to register after the checkout is complete, sure I will consider it.
   
2. Remember that Google is not your target customer – I am. Don’t write your product descriptions or other content containing tons of SEO keywords with a sole purpose to please Google. Sure you need to focus on SEO but the product description has to make sense to customers first. At the end of the day, you might get a good ranking on Google but if consumers don’t understand the content on your site, you will not win.
   
3. Don’t let me add something to the cart if later you will tell me that it is out of stock. If you already know that something is out of stock, can you please show that upfront on the product page so we don’t waste each other’s time?
   
4. Do you have categories which do not have any products online? Can you please disable those categories so that I don’t have to click those categories, just to find a “No Products Found” message?
   
5. Just because you have a lot of promotions and products on your site, you don’t have to show all of them on your homepage!! Please keep the homepage clean and focus only on few key promotional or merchandise messages that truly tell a compelling story. If you have more than 100 links on your homepage, you are trying too hard!
   
6. It would be nice to know when I will receive an item – not just when you plan to ship it. You know my zip code – you know the delivery times with UPS and FedEx, you know your processing time – so can you please show me a date when I should expect to see the item at my door instead of having me do all guesswork in my head?
   
7. If I add something to the shopping cart, please show me the cart before showing any other recommendations or offers that I might be interested in. Don’t slow me down by showing 10 recommendations before I get to my cart page. I have a short attention span and if I get overwhelmed with too much unnecessary information, I might just leave.
   
8. If you take my email address during checkout, please make good use of it! For example, if would be nice of you to follow up few days later to check if the item arrived properly, and if I would be interested in writing a review for the item. I don’t mind writing an honest review – you just have to ask and remind me! Which is a good segue to the next point.
   
9. If I write a negative review about a product, please don’t go out of way to “moderate” the review to put a positive spin to my content. Please remember that customer reviews are supposed to be “unbiased” and any attempt from your side to hide or suppress the negative reviews is a sure way to lose trust with your loyal customers.
   
10. Don’t wait until the final step in the checkout to show me the final price including the coupon discounts, taxes and shipping costs. I would like to know that information at the shopping cart page so there are no surprises during the final step. If you need my zip code in the shopping cart page to calculate these costs, just ask me and I will be happy to provide that information to you. Which leads me to the next point –
    
11. If I have told you anything about myself such as my zip code, please try to remember it. Don’t make me re-enter that information at the time of checkout. There is a good probability that I will not change that information, but just give me an option to change it later if I need to.
    
12. Please don’t try to hide your contact information just because you want to minimize the number of customer service calls. If you have an 800 number hidden somewhere on the site, please display it prominently. Customers need to know upfront that there is an easy way to contact you if something goes wrong with their order.
    
13. When I am providing my credit card information, you really don’t have to ask me what type of credit card it is because you can figure it out from my credit card number. Just show me the credit card type for confirmation and I will let you know if there is a problem.
    
14. While you are thinking about that checkout experience, can you also do something about that Captcha! It is nice to know that you are concerned about our security and want to make sure that I am a human. But for the sake of humanity, please don’t make me decipher that 10 characters Captcha image. Just try to keep it simple, if possible.
    
15. If you display any AdSense ads on your retail store, can you please turn those off? That sends a mixed message to me as a customer. If you are truly an online retailer, your focus should be on selling products, not making a few bucks from customers who accidentally click on those ads and end up somewhere else.
    

Some of the above points may seem very obvious but it is amazing to see even large online retailers who end up building complex checkout processes, overlooking some of these points just because they have a “complex” business. If you think from customer’s perspective, they really don’t care about complexities in business – they are looking for a simple and intuitive shopping experience.

In the offline world, imagine walking into a store and you see clutter everywhere – the only thing that is clearly visible is an exit sign. However good the pricing is, if the store is not organized in a presentable manner, you are likely to walk straight through that exit door. Similarly in the online world, a lot of online retailers do not focus on getting objective feedback from external users on site usability. This is true especially for the small and medium size retailers who feel that things like usability testing are for the big guys who have a lot of money at their disposal. Not any more – there are several cost effective tools available now that would allow you to test and improve the usability of your site in an objective way, without causing a dent in your wallet. Here are 10 low cost ways to understand and improve the usability of your site:

#10 Five Second Test

Five second test helps you easily identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces. People use five second test to locate calls to action, optimize landing pages, and run A/B tests. Basically, you can upload images that will be reviewed by random Internet users. Users view the image for just five seconds then click on the screen to indicate areas of the images that caught their attention. Using text fields provided on the screen, they describe what they saw on the places they clicked. This works from the basic principle that visitors have a very short attention span and they typically don’t spend more than 5 seconds before moving on to other parts of the page. Therefore, you need to get their attention to the most prominent aspect of the offer in those 5 seconds. This is a free service and can help you identify opportunities with your ad or other image units.

#9 Feedback Army

Start a usability test for your website in 2 minutes. Receive 10 responses from an army of reviewers for $10. This is as cheap as it can get! If quantity is your thing then you can’t go wrong with this site. However, you may have to throw away few responses because at $1 per response, you have to question the quality of some of the responses. However, if some is better than none, you can’t go wrong with them. I dug a little deeper into their offering and it seems the feedback comes from workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Started by Amazon, Mechanical Turk is the crudest form of crowdsourcing, where you will find workers willing to do small virtual tasks for less than $1. So is it a virtual sweatshop taking advantage of poor people from third world country? According to this study, the answer is no. An interesting observation from this study is that more than 75% of workers are from United States and at least 50% have a college degree.

#8 Loop11

Loop¹¹ is a web-based user-experience tool, allowing companies to conduct remote, unmoderated usability testing on any kind of digital interface. It is a good complement to lab-based user testing enabling you to quantify usability metrics with 100s of participants. Costs $350 to run a user testing project with upto 1000 participants.

#7 Chalkmark

Want to test the design or UI prototypes with real people? You can use Chalkmark to get powerful insights from real people to tweak navigation and layout. As the results roll in, heat maps for each task are dynamically generated. Clusters of clicks are combined to give percentage read outs.Quickly run a test on your UI prototypes to answer any nagging questions about usability. You can get a 30 day plan for $109 and create unlimited tests and surveys.

#6 Concept Feedback

Getting ready to launch a brand new concept? Would you like to know what other professionals think before you release it to the world? Receive quick, actionable feedback from a professional community by uploading a concept (a website, logo, advertisement or other). Each reviewer has a reputation score so you can pick the best feedback.

#5 Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg lets you create tests to figure out what people are doing on your website. Enter the URL of the page you want to track, enter how long the test will run and CrazyEgg provides one line of javascript that can be applied on your site. The results – you can see all sorts of heapmaps and overlays to figure out what people are clicking on and more importantly, not clicking on your website. For $19 a month, you can track up to 25,000 visits per month. Or for $99 a month, you can track up to 250,000 visits per month.

#4 Ethnio

For $400, you can recruit about 200 research participants from your website and perform a moderated focus group session with real visitors from your site. It works using basic JavaScript and DHTML so integration is fairly quick and easy on your website. When a user chooses to participate, a notification is sent to the person who will moderate the session. The moderator can then telephone the participant and then conduct a moderated session or a focus group session.

#3 Google Website Optimizer

Don’t worry about making it perfect. Brainstorm a few site variations and try them out on real visitors. Meet Google Website Optimizer. If you don’t have this tool setup, get it now. This is one tool that lets you test and learn different variations of banner ads, promotions, design and immediately understand which version is driving the best results. On top of that, this is fully integrated with Google Analytics and it is completely free! Need I say more?

#2 UserTesting.com


UserTesting.com uses the Web 2.0 crowdsourcing model to dramatically drop the price of usability testing. It lets website owners easily get pre-screened users to rapidly do usability testing of their websites. It only costs $29 and the results are typically ready in an hour. You get a Flash video of a user speaking their thoughts as they browse your website and a written summary where that same user tells you what they liked, disliked, and what would have caused them to leave your .

And the Winner Is……..

#1. 4Q From iPerceptions

Want to get quick, actionable insights from your visitors? Meet 4Q by iPerception. It is a free online survey solution that allows you to find out why visitors are at your website, and whether or not they are completing their tasks (and if they aren’t, what’s getting in the way?). It easily integrates with any website, requires only a few lines of code and best of all – it is Free!! The reason I like this the most is because it allows you to create conversations with your users using a simple and direct methodology and it can provide key insights in improving the overall offering or the usability of the site.

What really impressed me was the fact that she remembered Toys’R’Us.com and could associate it with someone who could help in meeting her birthday wish. This got me thinking about how online retailers in US have been able to create a unique enough differentiation for themselves where customers know exactly what these retailers stand for. There are some retailers in US that are still struggling with this, but at a broad level, most of the retailers (online as well as traditional) have found a unique proposition for the customers. Whether it is the largest assortment (Amazon.com) or value for money (overstock.com) or discount electronics (Newegg.com) or Jewelry & Gifts (Bluenile.com) or upscale household category (William-Sonoma) or a great service experience (Zappos.com), there is a lot of differentiation. If a 5 year old can recall Toys’R’Us when they are thinking of toys, imagine how easy would it be for a grown up to do the same across various categories. Then I thought about the Indian context and I tried really hard to think about all the unique things that the online retailers in India stand for. I thought about product assortment, pricing, categories, service and after trying really hard, I wasn’t able to come up with any meaningful differentiation that really sets one retailer apart from other. True, there are some retailers that offer a bigger assortment than others – but more or less all other dimensions are similar across most of the online retailers.

Then I thought, what is it that Indian customers think about before shopping at one retailer vs. other. I also asked this question to a lot of individuals who I know have been online shoppers for quite some time. The results of this “unscientific” study were very disturbing – other than familiarity with the brand, the one key aspect that most of these individuals looked at was price of the product they were looking for. I asked them what about service, and the quality of execution – the answer was even more disturbing. “What service?” Almost all of them said that they’ve faced service related issues with most of the online retailers so they really don’t differentiate any one retailer vs. other on the basis of service.

All this long winded background really leads me to one simple conclusion – there really isn’t any strong differentiation that online retailers in India are able to stand for. This may sound very obvious and you are probably thinking – Duh Mr Blogger!! Thanks for enlightening us with something we already knew!! Point taken – however, my question is that isn’t a brand more than just a name and a symbol? Isn’t it about delivering a promise – a promise for something. Whether it is better execution, great experience, lowest prices – a brand must stand for something that customers can relate to. So what promise do the online retailers in India stand for? I continued my exploration and thought about all the different dimensions that the online retailers could look at in order to differentiate themselves.

The first one that comes to mind is focus on specific categories. Why isn’t there any online retailer that is focused on just one category? Why don’t we have any online retailer in India who can claim to be the largest books store or the largest jewelry store? One obvious answer could be that the overall eCommerce pie is too small and by focusing on just one category, the retailer may not be able to make decent revenue. Fair argument – however this is where the true visionaries are required. Its true that online shopping is not a large category today (roughly about Rs. 400 Cr to 700 Cr, depending upon who you ask). However, one must have a conviction and a vision around where eCommerce is headed. Once eCommerce hits the tipping point, the retailers who are focused on specific categories stand to gain the most by capturing the largest market share for that specific category. “But I want to build the next Amazon!!”, you say. “I want to build a mega store that can capture market share across all these categories – why should I focus on only one category?” Nothing wrong with that thought – however then you must think of a different dimension that really sets you apart from other online retailers. This is a good segue to my next point.

The second and my most favorite point is about service. I have heard a lot of people say that although it is good to strive for excellence in service, this dimension alone can’t differentiate one online retailer from another – not especially in India. I respectfully disagree. It is true that in the Indian context today, most online shoppers are shopping on the basis of price. However, perhaps this is because they haven’t yet experienced an online retailer that is truly focused on consumer delight. There is a difference between striving to be great in execution vs. building the organization from the ground up that is focused on customer service and delight. Case in point – Amazon and Zappos. Amazon does a fantastic job in execution and offers a very decent customer service, but I would argue that the focus at Amazon is on operational excellence rather than customer delight. Zappos on the other hand, goes out of the way to make sure that every single customer is delighted even at the expense of higher operational costs. It is a subtle difference but this subtle difference helped Zappos in grabbing the largest market share within shoes category leaving behind the likes of Amazon and Walmart.com.

Another dimension that is most commonly looked at is that of price. My personal perspective is that differentiating purely on the basis of price is a dangerous game to play. A game that will eventually be lost. This is especially relevant in the Indian context where the product sourcing doesn’t offer a lot of differentiation. There are a limited set of vendors in the marketplace who are supplying to majority of the online retailers. Therefore, it is hard to build a sourcing relationship with a specific vendor that can offer a sustainable price advantage. This is only possible if the online retailer is focused on private label merchandise – however, selling private label within India via an online channel will be extremely difficult.

So what does this all mean? Is there no room for broad based online retailers? I think there is enough room for every one – however, today the options are fairly limited from a customer point of view. Therefore, even though there is not much differentiation among online retailers, customers are still shopping online – albeit primarily on the basis of price & reputation. As more online retailers enter the space and as the eCommerce awareness increases, customers will start looking more and more for that brand promise. They will start looking for that one thing in the online retailer that is unique enough for them to switch from a browser to a buyer. That would be the time when the online retailers who haven’t yet thought about a unique brand promise will struggle. But will it be too late by that time? Time will tell – but in the meantime, I am off to Toys’R’us.com to shop for that Dora doll for my daughter.