The Holistic Web

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.

Pretty much anyone in the ecommerce world has heard about the amazing work Zappos are doing, particularly in innovation around customer service and staff management.

It turns out innovation can be a good thing! I just saw these sales figures on the Zappo’s “About Us” page:

1999: Almost nothing
2000: $ 1.6 mm
2001: $ 8.6 mm
2002: $ 32 mm
2003: $ 70 mm
2004: $184 mm
2005: $370 mm
2006: $597 mm
2007: $840 mm
2008: Over $1 billion (goal)

Wow! is all I can say to numbers like that. Don’t we all dream of that…

I spend a lot of time looking at successful ecommerce sites, studying what they’ve done and how they have achieved their success. I have endless documents full of notes, folders full of screenshots, spreadsheets full of comparisons, etc. One site that has stood out as being extremely innovative is Endless. They sell shoes and handbags, and are owned by Amazon - I guess it’s Amazon trying to focus on a niche.

I did a screencast highlighting some of their innovative features which I’m sure must be increasing conversions (I haven’t actually seen any data, but I’d be pretty darn sure they are getting well above 5%).

Watch the screencast (6 minutes).