Recommended research
Product Pages: A Best Practice Guide
Econsultancy's Product Pages Best Practice Guide examines the features online retailers should be using on their website pages to effectively showcase their services and products. The report contains valuable considerations that beginners and experts alike should be making and covers basic principles, such as copywriting, calls to action and image display. It also explores more complex components, such as user generated content and video.
How We Shop in 2010: Habits and Motivations of Consumers
How We Shop in 2010: Habits and Motivations of Consumers is split into two separate documents for the US and UK, examining e-commerce consumer behavior in both countries. Both reports focus on how consumers interact with e-commerce brands, conduct product research and the different factors in the buying decision-making process.
Partner at Capulet Communications
16 June 2007 20:25pm
Hi all,
With Dave's permission, I wanted to post a quick, message about a project I've been working on with Elastic Path. They're a series of short, silly videos called "The Crazy, Messed Up World of eCommerce":
www.getelastic.com/crazy-ecommerce
We've done our best to make ecommerce funny (a tall order, I think), poking fun at common frustrations like cross-selling, lousy search engines and other customer frustrations. Don't take my word for it--Bryan Eisenberg called them 'laugh-out-loud' funny (http://tinyurl.com/2fu9j7).
**The Cruelty of Online Shopping**
In a nutshell, the videos ask "what if real-world shopping was as cruel and difficult as buying online?"
We're releasing one video a week until we run out (we're thinking there are about six or eight decent ones). As you'll see if you visit the site, they're posted to YouTube.
**And Of Course, There's a Contest**
We’ve got a bunch of these videos, and we want people to watch them all. So, we’re running the inevitable contest. We’re giving away two US $100 Amazon gift certificates. There are two ways to enter to win the draw:
1) Subscribe to the RSS feed for Elastic Path’s blog:
http://www.getelastic.com/feed/atom/
Then leave a comment and tell us that you’re subscribed.
2) If you have a blog, link to http://www.getelastic.com/crazy-ecommerce and, if you like, embed one of the videos.
There’s one gift certificate for each option. We’ll announce and contact the winners when we post our final video. Cheers. DB.
Head of Usability & Conversion at PRWD
17 June 2007 11:22am
An excellent take on customer frustrations as they are negotiating their way through e-commerce sites! On looking at the 3 current videos I would think there is potential ammunition for a good number of these types of videos, perhaps more than 6-8 as you are predicting, but either way this project should provide a richer and more viral way of highlighting common frustrations.
One initial recommendation, particularly as the videos are closely related to grocery shopping, could go by the title of 'I know you sell what I'm looking for so where is it' which would relate to poor on-site search functionalities on major online grocery stores, which fails to locate a product or products which you know exist in the store - when you navigate the categories (aisles) to find the product it appears as you would expect.
Great project and very interesting blog, I'm now a subscriber!