Optimized E-commerce by Kiwicorp Zealand

Optimized E-Commerce Six Strategies for Winning the E-Commerce War

White Paper June 2011

White Paper: Optimized E-Commerce

White Paper

Optimized E-Commerce Six Strategies for Winning the E-Commerce War Table of Contents • Introduction………………………………………….. - Challenges of Today's E-Tailers…………………. - The Ghosts of E-Tail Past………………………… - State of the Industry………………………………..

3 3 4 4

• Six Strategies For Optimizing E-Tail……………. 1. Core Features Come First………………….. 2. Know Your Random Users…………………. 3. Prepare For The Worst……………………… 4. Make It Mobile……………………………….. 5. Protect the Purchaser……………………….. 6. When to Ditch Your Data……………………

5 5 5 6 7 8 9

• About uTest………………………………………….. 11

“This may seem simple, but you need to give customers what they want, not what you think they want. And, if you do this, people will keep coming back.” -

John Illhan, Entrepreneur

White Paper: Optimized E-Commerce

Introduction The Challenges of Today’s E-Tailers In 1985, sales gurus Albrecht and Zembre wrote that, “Bad news travels fast. A dissatisfied shopper tells around 10 other people about their bad experience.” Today, with the advent of social media, you’d be lucky to have that same angry shopper “only” tell a thousand people about a poor shopping experience. It’s safe to say that Albrecht and Zembre hadn’t planned on Tweets like this:  I have been shopping online for HOURS now and have bought nothing. THIS

SUCKS”  “As unbelievable as it may sound, I hate online shopping. Seriously.”  “I thought I hated shopping in stores, online shopping sucks!!”  “I used to like shopping...but that was when I could actually find things to buy. Now I

hate it. Online too.” But disgruntled Tweets are far from the only concern of today’s online retailers. Do these problems sound familiar?  Constantly changing design and usability standards  Mountains of useless data  User security and fraud protection  Rolling out new features & functionality  Website performance (handling the peak periods)  Developing a mobile presence

Challenging as they may be, it is important to remember that these problems are within your control! There’s little you can do about the hundreds of new competitors that seem to be “If the user can’t use sprouting up everywhere you look, or the increasingly it, it doesn’t work.” sluggish consumer economy. Why then do so many etailers lose sleep over these issues? Better to focus on what you and your team have the power to change.

Susan Dray, Usability Consultant

And that is the subject of this short whitepaper. In the pages that follow, we’ll show how today’s e-tailers can do themselves a huge favor by revisiting the fundamentals of what makes for a quality software application – and unlocking the secrets of what keeps users coming back. To do so, we’ll lay out six essential strategies for optimizing your e-tail application – covering everything from user loyalty to user fraud, mobile apps to metrics, data to downtime and other important topics. Before proceeding, let’s take a quick look back at the evolution of online retail….

White Paper: Optimized E-Commerce

The Ghosts of E-Tail Past The year was 1995. A promising young startup named Amazon had just been launched, eBay was known as AuctionWeb, Michael Jordan was playing minor league baseball and there were virtually NO standards when it came to online commerce. In fact, a “good” user experience was predicated on the page loading within five minutes. Yep, those were the days. “To open a shop is Within five years, protocols like DSL and HTTP had been implemented to ensure a speedier and more secure online shopping experience. E-checkouts, shopping carts and search features were also coming into their own. Old people were even beginning to buy stuff online. Things were looking up!

easy, to keep it open is an art.” -

Chinese Proverb

And you knew it couldn’t last for long. When the bubble burst in 2000, it brought down many players in the space (although Pets.com became the poster boy) but fortunately not all was lost. The major players that had survived quietly continued to improve the online shopping experience, and before you knew it, the industry was once again back on top.

State of the Industry Look around you. Is it fair to say that just about everyone you see has purchased something online in past year? If you’re at work, they might even be doing it right now. More than likely, the answer to that question is a resounding yes – and there’s a ton of data to back it up. Exhibit A:

As great as these numbers may seem, it’s no guarantee of future success. As noted earlier, today’s E-Tailers must fight for every inch when it comes revenue, marketshare and media attention. So let’s now take a look at how to gain the upper hand.

White Paper: Optimized E-Commerce

Six Strategies for Optimizing E-Tail 1. Core Features Come First Few sites are revamped, redesigned and reworked more frequently than that of e-tail – and there’s nothing inherently wrong about this process. As companies begin to better understand the space (and their customers) such changes are inevitable. The danger lies in over-prioritizing new features while neglecting the core ones. It’s therefore extremely important to determine how each new feature will affect your core product before any plans are put into motion. These core features primarily include:     

The online shopping cart The checkout process Registration Search Login

“Imagine if your cell phone changed the location of its keys every six months.” -

Joshua Garity, Brand Strategist

The best place to maintain this line of thought is within the testing phase. Not only is this true when introducing new features, but it also applies to changes outside your arena - namely, with new operating systems and browsers. In other words, do your core features hold up under the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer? What about Windows 7, Linux or Mac OS X Leopard? Even if you suspect that everything is up to par, you would be well-served to spend at least week performing some type of regression test on the core features of your site. It also wouldn’t hurt to add firewalls, anti-virus and anti-malware programs to that list, as these can cause major problems in online transactions if left untreated. In doing this, you’ll be surprised at the number of broken links, mis-matched search results, missing images and a host of other overlooked problems that cost e-tail sites a small fortune in revenue. 2. Know Your Random Users Analyzing user data is one of the e-tailers’ favorite pastimes. In an attempt to learn everything about their current and prospective users, they spend endless amounts of time and money breaking down their demographics by age group, gender, location, language, income bracket and a host of other criteria. They watch live usability surveys and pour over customer feedback to determine where users fall off, how they react to certain calls-to-action and other types of user behavior.

White Paper: Optimized E-Commerce

For obvious reasons, this type of data mining is extremely important to determine the who, what, where, why and how of user disengagement: “When this happens, online businesses not just lose this sale, but also potential repeated sales. To add salt to the wound, an average online shopper spent an average of $1,200 annually and any shopper lost is equivalent a direct revenue drop in your annual report. At a macro level, it costs businesses more than $44 billion in total.” – Willis Wee, www.penn-olsen.com Despite their exhaustive efforts to study this behavior, much of their user base remains a mystery – but this should be embraced! Often times the best form of feedback comes not from your customers or prospects, but rather from objective users with NO previous connection to your site. Because of this, it is suggested that e-tailers run a series of usability tests with a focus group that is less precise in terms of demographics, but still meets certain conditions. To start, assemble a group of no more than a dozen participants and create a series of user tasks for them to complete. A timeframe of 1-2 hours is reasonable. This could include actions pertaining to the core features listed earlier, such as registration, login and search, but should also include things like:    

Price and product comparison User reviews and ratings Live chat and customer support Promo codes and purchases

“Consumers are statistics. Customers are people.” -

Stanley Marcus

At the end of this session, have them complete a short survey that asks them to identify your site’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s best in this instance to leave room for suggestions they might have for improvements to the site. You’ll be surprised of the knowledge of the random web user. The bottom line: Your users are changing every day, so don’t limit your usability studies to a static focus group. Mix it up a little.

3. Prepare For the Worst Downtime – aka the 404 error page of death – is every e-tailer’s worst nightmare. It’s therefore no surprise that the industry directs so much of its attention to handling peak user periods (for most, this refers to the holiday season). If you’re like 90% of companies in this space, you begin to take the necessary precautions roughly six months in advance. Yet despite this attention to detail, there are likely several aspects of this process that can be greatly improved.

White Paper: Optimized E-Commerce

For instance, most e-tailers run some type of performance testing prior to peak season. These “load testing” procedures require complex software programs to determine how much stress your site can handle before its performance begins to degrade. This helps them identify how many users it can support; the bottlenecks in “The great strength of computers is that your servers and databases; your they can reliably manipulate vast average time per transaction, amounts of data very quickly. Their great bounce rates, page load speed and other important information. It’s a weakness is that they don’t have a clue as to what any of that data actually gold mine for data geeks.

means.”

But here’s the problem: This - Stephen Cass, 2004 activity relies 100% on automated software – there is virtually no human component. This is leaves a lot of room for error. For obvious reasons, you should never trust software to verify your site’s performance. After all, software doesn’t want to buy your products – people do! It is then highly advisable that you have real users examining your site while these performance tests are taking place. In other words, while the software automatically tests the backend of your site, someone should be examining things like page load speeds, graphics and the functionality of your core features. 4. Make it Mobile There’s no getting around the fact that more and more users are making purchases on their tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices. Unless you’re in the camp that mobile is a passing fad (unlikely) you’ve likely build a native application or mobile website to complement your online presence. The problem with this mindset is that it leads some to see mobile as a second cousin to the web – a monumental mistake! Writes Helen Leggatt of BizReport.com: “Mobile users expect their mobile Internet experience to be every bit as fast and easy to use as on their PC. In fact, 17% of mobile users will wait no longer than 5 seconds before giving up and 37% said they would be unlikely to return to a mobile site if frustrated by slow loading.” This is especially true of e-tail sites. So why do so many mobile sites seem lacking in functionality, design and performance? Simple: Because ensuring a quality mobile site is at least 2X times more complicated than the web. With your website, for instance, you’re basically dealing with browsers and operating systems as variables. With mobile, however, you’re up against that in addition to hundreds of carriers and devices. It’s definitely a much faster game, and as a result, quality suffers.

White Paper: Optimized E-Commerce

While developing for mobile is a job for a small team, testing for mobile is not. Rather, it is a task best suited for crowdsourcing – defined by author Jeff Howe as “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to a large group of people in the form of an open call.” With a crowdsourced community, e-tailers can verify the functionality and usability of their application across virtually any type of criteria – language, location, browser, carrier, operating system and others. To learn more about crowdsourced testing, click here. 5. Protect the Purchaser The cost of protecting your users (and your business) has skyrocketed in recent years, and the trends for fraud show no signs of ceasing any time soon:

Writes The Federal Circle: “It's no wonder that retailers are prime targets of cyber crime. The high cost of complying with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards, which requires that all sensitive data be encrypted and secured, left many companies skimping on security. In 2007, the National Retail Federation cried foul, calling for an end to the requirement that shops and online stores archive credit card data themselves.” This is especially true for e-tailers that accept mobile payments, which today, is nearly all of them. Although Reuters reports that user fraud has a disproportionate impact on large merchants (i.e. those earning more than $50 million in revenue) this is a problem every e-tailer must deal with. No exceptions. While e-tailers go to great lengths to ensure a safe shopping experience, they frequently overlook the little things that can make a huge difference. To point you in the right

White Paper: Optimized E-Commerce

direction, here are a few questions to consider as you deal with the security of your application: 



Can a user easily get an app to cough up the private data of another user? For example, if they see “user_id=232” in the URL, what happens if they change it to “user_id=231”? Do they get to see someone else’s personal data? Are you sharing personally identifiable information about your users with third-parties like Salesforce.com or Google Analytics? What about the company that’s hosting your app? What happens if your website is cached when it shouldn’t be? Does it share the wrong data with people? What happens if you actually want caching? Is it sending out the right things to be cached? Are end users actually seeing a benefit? Is your site vulnerable to common security exploits like XSS, injection flaws, broken authentication, flawed session management, invalidated redirects and forwards? Is your web app behaving the way your privacy policy claims it does?

In light of the time constraints that plague many development teams, it can be helpful to outsource some of this activity to a reliable, third party vendor. In doing so, you’ll be surprised at what a fresh pair of eyes will pick up. 6. When to Ditch Your Data Sorting through mountains of data – in an attempt to extract something meaningful – can seem like a baffling ordeal, though this need not be the case. The real problem for today’s e-tailers is not the data necessarily, but the source of the data. Software guru and data expert Michael Bolton explains why common metrics can be misleading: “Businesses could learn a ton of useful information from their own customer service and technical support reps, and they could learn plenty about the project by listening to their programmers and their testers. Product and project knowledge gets mediated by middle managers and numbers; it turns from information into data. When your car is about to go off a cliff, it’s a weird time to be thinking about gas mileage and drag coefficients; better to take the right control action—look out the window and steer or use the brake until you’re back on course. Once you’re back to being productive, then you can start thinking about optimizing.” The point is that data can only help you make decisions – it can’t make them for you, as it requires both knowledge and intuition. This “human factor” tends to frighten the datadriven types, who see every problem as technical in nature. Unfortunately, e-tailers

White Paper: Optimized E-Commerce

operate in an uncertain, continuously changing world, where numbers only tell part of the story. They cannot provide complete answers to these questions:    

Are your customers satisfied? Is the site intuitive and user-friendly? Is the site providing a safe user experience? Is it consistent across both web and mobile platforms?

So when you feel swamped by piles of data in front of you, step back and ask yourself how closely the numbers pertain to the questions above.

White Paper: Optimized E-Commerce

About uTest uTest provides in-the-wild testing services that span the entire software development lifecycle – including functional, security, load, localization and usability testing. The company’s community of 60,000+ professional testers from 190 countries put web, mobile and desktop applications through their paces by testing on real devices under real-world conditions. Thousands of companies -- from startups to industry-leading brands – rely on uTest as a critical component of their testing processes for fast, reliable, and cost-effective testing results. More info is available at www.utest.com or blog.utest.com, or you can watch a brief online demo at www.utest.com/demo.

uTest, Inc. 153 Cordaville Road Southborough, MA 01772 p: 1.800.445.3914 e: info@utest.com w: www.utest.com

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