How people shop online
I was just reading through the transcript of a “just published” Marketing Sherpa Ecommerce study which I contributed to and thought that one paragraph was very interesting and bore repeating:
Anne: I think this really shows you another thing as well and that is, that consumers are treating Ecommerce sites, and you see on the next slides as well, consumers are treating Ecommerce sites in a very different way than they treat print catalogs and in a very different way than they treat brick and mortar retail stores. What you’re seeing is very little browsing activity. I mean, I know when I sit down with a catalog and in fact there are eye-tracking studies in the catalog industry, that if you are sending a catalog, in particular to your house list. They’re really looking at the images. They’re really examining it. They’re saying, “Hmmm, should I buy this…†They’re really enjoying that browsing, shopping activity. The same thing happens with a lot of shoppers in brick and mortar, depending on the type of store you have. But they’re coming in and enjoying the environment. They may be examining a lot of different things. You know, you’re in the mall, it’s Saturday afternoon. You’re enjoying yourself. This is almost an entertainment activity. It doesn’t seem to be the case with online Ecommerce according to the eye-tracking studies. Now we studied eight different Ecommerce stores including Amazon, eBay, a whole bunch of them. Most of them you didn’t see that kind of entertainment activity and what I think is interesting is that a lot of/some Ecommerce marketers are making the assumption that the entertainment mindset is there. Certainly Bombay with that big gorgeous picture is sort of thinking, “Well, we know our Bombay shopper. They love to look at these big beautiful pictures.†But indeed, people barely glanced at it. What are people doing instead? They’re looking at the navigation. And we see consistently, people going zooming right to the navigation. Pretty much ignoring anything else. So they’re treating the Ecommerce site as a search engine, as a search tool. You are not a store; you are a search tool to get to where people want to go.
So, you can forget the bells and whistles when it comes to designing the core of your ecommerce site. As the latest Marketing Sherpa study shows, unless you can get your visitors from where they enter your site to what they’re looking for quickly, you’ll be passed over for other sites who do. Ecommerce is not about browsing, it’s about finding – and fast.
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