Understanding Habits of Consumers on Retail Sites

October 12, 2008

When it comes to selling something to a willing customer, shop owners will be sure to make everything go right. Each step of the purchase should run smoothly in order for the transaction to take place without any hitches. In fact, there are post-purchase services and support given to customers. The bottom line is that, for any business, customer satisfaction is the most important thing.

These aspects also need to be carried over when the transaction is being done on the Internet. There are still a number of shoppers who are skeptical about buying online. Despite that fact, e-commerce is a booming phenomenon and growing in popularity.

Convenience is a key reason for shoppers opting to buy things online instead of actually going to the stores. Keeping this in mind, it would only make sense that site owners strive to make these retail sites as convenient and user friendly as possible. A shopper arriving on a retail site doesn’t necessarily have to be net-savvy or familiar with the way online shopping works. Site owners need to be aware of this fact when putting a site up. Content, display, functionality, user-friendliness are all aspects that effect the way in which consumers shop online. Research shows that there are certain patterns in which many consumers react to retail sites. There are features that they look for and preferences they have. Keeping in mind these factors and incorporating it into your retail site should definitely boost the way consumers react to your site.

As is also true about the Internet in general, the search feature on a website is very important. An internal search allows visitors to sift though the site and locate what they are looking for. It has been seen that the first thing that people do when they arrive on a site is to type in what they are looking for into the search bar. Manually typing the product name into the search bar is preferred over clicking the link that leads them to the product category page. Because of this common nature in visitors it is vital that your retail site has an excellent internal search function. Imagine how much business a site can lose if it is not equipped with a good internal search function! Products that are actually available on that site might be overlooked merely because the search function was not able to locate it.

Even the number of answers that are displayed on the results page will have an impact on how the shopper deals with your site. Relevancy of search results is key as is the way in which is results are displayed (horizontal or vertical display), the size of the images that are part of the search results and the copy that accompanies the search results.

So, yes, the marketing efforts that go into your homepage are important but this does not mean that you can afford to not pay attention to the functionalities on the website. The website, after all, is a technological entity.

Another factor that consumers find increasingly beneficial on retail sites are peer reviews. Most online shoppers strongly prefer sites that include peer reviews. Contrary to popular belief, though, not many shoppers are skeptical about the credibility of these reviews. In fact most shoppers feel that peer reviews only help them during their product research and purchase stages.

In addition to looking at factors that pull online shoppers towards your retail site, you must be extremely wary of the things that they dislike about online shopping. Perhaps the aspect that online shoppers find the most unpleasant is when a site asks for too much information. It is incredibly difficult to gauge at what level a shopper might feel that he or she is being asked for too much information. Be sure to ask only for information that is necessary and allow consumers the choice to skip filling out information if it is not necessary. The flow of design of the site plays a big role in how easy or difficult it might be fill out information.

Site failures are another reason shoppers say that they change their mind about completing the transaction on that site. This is a technical problem that needs to be looked into extensively. Policy is also a reason that makes shoppers uncomfortable on a retail site. This problem can be tackled by having clear policy statements that are easy to understand by all types of customers.

The main thing that site owners need to keep in mind is that shoppers are on their site to spend their hard-earned money on a product or service that they are interested in. Competition is thus that if it is not available from your site then another site will be more than happy to provide them with it. The worse thing that can happen is for a site to lose a customer due to problems related to design, content or technology.

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