The Holistic Web

I’m lucky to live really close a stretch of shops with awesome food (Ramsay St for those who know Sydney). Every Saturday, there’s lines out the door and sometimes around the corner at two of the bakeries. Literally a few doors down is a fresh pasta place. They do absolutely awesome pasta, and it’s a strongly Italian area. However, it’s usually empty on a Saturday morning.

There’s a bunch of reasons why that might be, but I have one theory: urgency.

Fresh bread is great when you first buy it, good the end of the day and only ok the next day. Everyone knows that. Sure, you can freeze it, but it’s never quite the same.

The pasta shop also sells it frozen, and encourages freezing of it. No urgency, no compulsion to buy NOW. It’ll still be there tomorrow. It’s just a theory, but I’d love to see what would happen if they turned it on its head and, as much as possible, promoted it like bread - must be bought fresh, best for a day or two.
It’s been long established that urgency promotes sales. It’s a great idea to put in place a timeline, even if it’s artificial, to boost sales.

• Limited offer free shipping
• Free widget with orders this week
• 10% off today only

etc.

What gets your visitors motivated to take action? You need to think about providing them with relevant information.

If you were trying to motivate a dog, what would work better: the world’s tastiest, freshest, best carrot, or any old piece of meat?

Be careful you aren’t spending too much time making carrots…

(inspired by “The Principles of Effective Copywriting” DVD)

From the book “Nudge”:

You are more likely to agree to an operation if you’re told that 90 out of 100 people who had it are still alive five years later than if you’re told that 10 out of 100 people die from it.

Food for thought there.

Recently, I’ve been dealing with several established ecommerce sites and a few yet-to-be-launched sites at the same time. The difference between them is interesting.

The ones that haven’t started up yet are generally just talking about design. It’s all about the graphic design, the look and feel.

The established ones, design is just one part of the mix. The things they focus on are sales, features, conversions, marketing opportunities. And, yes, they think about design, but it’s rarely top of the list.

Sure, to some extent it’s comparing apples with oranges. The established sites already have designs. The point though is that most new sites spend too much time thinking about design. They agonise over small details, but are doing this in a void, with no customer feedback.

We’ve probably all heard about the phenomenal success of Zappos. Another site I like to point people to is Blair. Zappos is taking the world by storm with it’s phenomenal sales. Blair is consistently one of the top converting sites on the web. Both are, in my opinion, quite ugly sites (and Zappos redesigned recently!)

For those in startup, agonising over a few pixels, think: do I know more than Zappos or Blair? Not that the goal is to try and be ugly, a nice site is always better of course. The goal is to sell, and they do that well, so take a few hints from them.

I’ve been re-reading Malcolm Gladwell’s classic “Blink”. It’s a great book about how we react to things very quickly, before our brains are aware of it. This is applicable to ecommerce in many ways - what are the unconcious cues we give our visitors which persuade or dissuade them from buying?

Gladwell talks about tests done by John Bargh at New York University. The book gives a fair bit of detail so I’ll try and summarise.

His test participants thought they were doing some sort of cognition/English test. He would give them, for example, 5 words such as:

“from are Florida oranges temperature”

And they would need to construct a four word sentence from that. Pretty easy. However, that wasn’t the real test. The real test was called “priming”. Through these sentence groupings he would scatter words to influence the person, to see how it would affect their behaviour.

In one example, one group of students were given a bunch of words such as rude, bold, disturb, bother, intrude, etc. The other group were given respect, yield, polite, courteous, etc. The students on completing the “test” were told to go to a nearby office to get their next assignment. This is where the real test started. When they got to the office, the person they were to see was busy talking to someone else. The people were timed to see how long it would take them to interrupt.

The group who had the rude words averaged five minutes. The “polite” group, 82% of them hadn’t interrupted by 10 minutes (the limit for ethical reasons).

The book gives several other convincing examples about how the words used to prime people, or in some cases, words people were led to use themselves, influenced their later performance.

The question is, how can this be used to prime our site visitors? Surely there must be a way to increase conversions. It also opens up a bit of an ethics grab bag. Is this unethical, is it too manipulative? I would say not, but curious to hear other views on it.