Are etailers being upfront about credit accounts?
A number of online (mainly catalogue) retailers offer buy now, pay later credit accounts for shoppers, but these can come with some relatively steep interest charges.
For example, Very.co.uk can charge customers as much as 39.7% interest, making it much more expensive than the average credit card (normally around 17%).
Not that there's anything wrong with offering these accounts, but are customers being made aware of the terms and the potential interest charges when they make their first purchase?
Next: iPad app review
Not many UK retailers have released apps for the iPad so far, but Next has recently released a shopping app.
The best retail apps that have been released so far have some something new for the iPad, the Yoox.com app for instance, or Net-a-Porter's interactive magazine format.
So how does the Next iPad app compare?
Next: iPhone app review
Next has just launched an iPhone app with a large range of stock to browse through, and full mobile commerce functionality.
I've been trying out the new Next app to see how user friendly it is...
Next website can't handle sales traffic
Next held a sale over the weekend, but it seems that its website wasn't properly prepared for the extra traffic, and many customers were asked to queue to enter the website.
I tried to access the Next sale a number of times on Saturday morning, and was asked to wait for up to six minutes on various occasions, while for others it was up to 20 minutes. Not good...
Pureplay and high street fashion retailers - who values usability more?
With the continued growth of online shopping, and with new pureplay
retailers entering the market looking for new opportunities, I would
expect that the biggest players would be leading the way in terms of
customer experience.
With the upcoming Online Fashion 100 event in London that I'll be attending, I have taken a look at some of the biggest players in the fashion industry, both pureplay retailers and high street retailers.
I was particularly interested to look at key areas of their online customer experience to find out:
1) how well some of these brands are are delivering intelligent and meaningful cross-sell and up-sells to drive higher average order values, and...
2) which retailers are potentially losing sales due to a lack of focus on the full customer experience, right through to the end of the checkout process.
Note to Next: don't make visitors listen to music
Chris Lake wrote about 50 ways to annoy web users on Monday, which included things like pop-up ads, slow loading pages, unreadable text, and other terrible crimes against usability.
One of the biggest offences for me is the automatic playing of audio when you arrive at a webpage, and I've found a pretty sorry example of this on the Next homepage today.
Online sales provide some cheer for UK retailers
Some of the UK's leading high street names have been revealing their retail figures for the Christmas period so far this week, and though high street sales have been affected by the credit crunch, e-commerce is still a growth area for these companies.
Today, Next and Debenhams both reported a drop in their like-for-like sales for the period up to and including Christmas, and both reported a rise in online revenues.
