So, you decided to give coupons to your customers, send out a newsletter, give them their coupon code, put an empty coupon box on your cart page and wait for them to come back and shop like crazy.

Perhaps.

But, what about those that didn’t get the coupon? We did some A/B testing with an empty coupon box and it shows that it actually increases the abandonment of the cart page. What might be (probably) happening is that people leave the website to go coupon hunting. This means that a majority of them doesn’t come back.

How do I prevent people from abandoning the cart?

One way of solving the problem is showing the coupon entry box only to users that came through a newsletter. However you have to be careful about this since you might loose some customers that copy paste, didn’t come through link directly etc.

So the best way (in our opinion) is to make the coupon code a bit less obvious. Make it just a small link and explain to users where to enter it. That way it won’t bother the rest (that much).

We’ll just update you with a few events we went to last year worth noting.

Internet World, London

Hm… I already had a blog post about this event and I think I said everything there. It might pay out to visit, but in general, if you went to an ecommerce event – they are all alike. It was nice to see some new ideas and concepts, but all in all there was a lot of refurbished old ideas and a LOT of sales people.

YAPC::Europe in Riga, Latvia

YAPC is the biggest Perl event around. To an average non programmer this means nothing, but in practice it means that head developers from Booking.com, New York Times, Geziahls.de, net-a-porter.co.uk and similar small and big companies get together to discuss the technical news but also talk about the good and bad practices. This is one of the events that’s usually well worth visiting. As far as our team goes, Stefan Hornburg held a talk on new templating engine he’s been working on, and I spoke about usability. It was a very interesting event filled with smart and knowledgeable people. Next year the event is taking place in Frankfurt, Germany, so feel free to come around.

Pittsburgh Perl Workshop at CMU

PPW was very interesting this year, with many Perl related talks, but not so many eCommerce ones. Apart from the ones we held.

Stefan Hornburg was talking about Nitesi project (a modern Perl approach to ecommerce. Get it on GitHub)

And I was talking about improving usability in eCommerce. All in all the talks went well, and we managed to meet few interesting people there. It seems to me that “geek” events bring much more value than stock eCommerce events which seem to be flooded with sales people without any real knowledge of the matter.

World Usability Day in Istanbul

In November we went to Istanbul, where we were invited to by TurkCell. It was very interesting to see how TurkCell is actually investing a lot into usability. Their usability lab is superior to most setup’s I’ve seen. Luka Klemenc and myself held TED style talks about usability. The topic of Luka’s talk was “Making things simple” and mine was “Usability in foreign language ecommerce”. If you missed it (and you probably did unless you were in Istanbul at the time) I am sure you will have the opportunity at another event. Or Istanbul next year. We liked the city so much, we’ll definitely be going back.

Informa Studio in 2011

At the end of 2011 Informa has took some bold moves and opened up it’s doors to US and German customers. We will soon be presenting our entire international team on the website.

World Usability Day is a day of celebration for usability professionals and promotes the valuable discipline of Making thnigs Easier to Use. But it has another more important role. It is a day to reflect where Usability stands in science and society, how it has evolved and most importantly – Do we still need it?

The answer is simple: More than ever!

Top 3 Reasons why we need Usability in E-commerce in 2012

E-commerce is evolving faster than ever. Not only new services and products on the supply side but also numerous new devices that consumers use.

1. Mobile

It is no coincidence that the event in Turkey was hosted by Turkcell – Turkeys biggest mobile operator with nearly 40 milion subscribers. We’re all using our smartphones for browsing the internet, reading our feeds, posting on social networking sites. Mobile commerce is on the rise. Half of the UK population owns a smartphone as of October 2011. They are the highest-selling consumer electronic device category in US. Usability-wise mobile applications and websites still have a long way to go. Turkcell’s state-of-the-art usability lab is the step in the right direction.

2. Languages and Localization

E-commerce is really going global in the last couple of years. Multilingual sites know the importance of localization and usability issues connected with it. Jure presented a study we conducted in our lab on how people use foreign language websites. Results are pretty straightforward. Selling on-line to different countries in different languages is tricky. There are no cheat-sheets for it. Usability testing is crucial.

3. New Products and Services

Not only have the devices that people use changed. The products have also changed. E-commerce is not a huge Buy Now button anymore. We are buying complex services and products online. Just imagine e-travel. In my talk I was trying to explain How to deal with the increased complexity of services on-line. But let’s leave that for another blog.

What others were saying

It was very good to see that the speakers and visitors came from both academic and business background. Professors from 4 different universities explained how they incorporate usability and user centered design in their lectures. Hopefully that will bring many skilled practitioners to the field in the future.

Turkcell and our host Alper – thanks for having us.

1. Use clear form with caution

Although we would advise against using “Clear Form” button, if you see it serves a good purpose, it might make sense. If you do use it, make sure it’s not close to “Next page” or “Submit” button as it easily frustrates a user who has clicked the wrong button.

2. Use inline error messages

Don’t just write error messages on top of your form. Be sure to place them next to the form field where the error occured. This will ease the work for your users.

3. Ask the least knowledgeable person you know to test it

Check your form with at least one person that is not acquainted with your form and jargon.

4. Timeout is evil

Some forms take time to fill out. Some people type slowly. Last thing they want to see when they press that “Submit button” is Timeout.

5. Use common names for fields

Your fields should have names like name, email, country,… This will allow users to use their browsers auto complete features and enable them to fill out forms faster.

6. Suggest to them

If your user’s IP address puts him in “Austria”, then that should be the country you suggest to him when he is filling out the form (unless you know better). This can actually be applied to more fields than one would think.

Epilogue

Nobody likes filling out forms. If you make it easier for your users, you will notice an increase in speed and number of filled out forms. Take your time and analyze your form. If it’s simple to fill and doesn’t require too much thinking, people will be much more eager to fill it. Get rid of the fields you don’t really need.

• “Longer that people browse the site, the more they like it.” – Not true!

That is one of the common mistakes website owners make. They are reading to much into it. Of course you want to to know what people think about your site. But you need to apply the right methods to do that. This question is very difficult to answer just by looking at your click-stream data. You’re not just interested in the time, you want to know about user engagement.

What is user engagement?

User engagement implies emotional involvement. When something is engaging, it is usually attracting or delighting.

Time on site shows you the time each user spent on your site during a single session. Maybe they stay because they like the site. Maybe they stay because they can’t find anything. It shows us the degree of engagement with your site. It shows you how long they stick around. That’s it.

Time on Site ≠ User Amusement

User engagement consists of two parts:

• Degree of engagement: Time on site, number of visits, pages visited.
• Type of engagement: What they think of the site, are they amused, do they like it.

We usually want to know as much as possible about both of them. The first one is pretty easy. How about the quality of the engagement?

How to find out if users like my site?

• Testing your website on 5 users will tell you more than reading the Time on site average of 500.000 users.

Web analytics has its limits. We can measure many things but we can’t know how people feel just buy looking at a graph. One of the best way to get quality insight is to do usability testing.

• There is virtually no substitute for testing your site on real users.

Don’t hesitate to contact us, if you need help with usability testing.

If you are an EU resident, you probably know that online shop has to take items back and issue a refund even if the customer doesn’t tell the shop why they are returning. Some items (like holidays, tickets etc.) are exempt from this. But mostly, it’s a nice touch towards your customer to offer them an option to return items they have purchased without extra cost. And it brings additional sales too.

But what to do when the amount of returns becomes too high?

Tell them they can cancel

Before you send out the items, warn your customers that they can still cancel without any additional cost. This will not only make you look nice but will also decrease the amount of returns later on. Best time to do this is in the email stating that you have received their order. If you are among the rare shops (yes, there are still some) that don’t send this email, then start doing it!

Ask people why they are returning

In most shops, customers have to pay a fee for returning (return shipping). This is not fun for the customer, so most customers return items only if they are really not satisfied. By asking them why they are returning the items (let them do it voluntarily) will usually reveal an issue on your website worth investigating. Fixing these issues by providing customers with more detailed information will usually help decrease the return rate.

Returns are problematic for all business. More for some, less for others. But nobody likes them. By educating your customers properly, you can take out a portion of this and as an additional benefit, your customers will be happier.

Our coworker, Stefan Hornburg will be holding 2 talks this year, both somewhat related to the new Interchange 6 on which he has been spending most of his free time lately. One of the talks is devoted to Template::Flute, a Perl module which is serving as a default templating engine for new Interchange. It’s revolutionary approach is based on Template::Zoom by Matt Trout. Second talk will be about Modern Perl E-Commerce where he will introduce the new Interchange e-commerce framework to the Perl general public.

We are looking forward to seeing some of our blog readers there and meeting with you in person!

Benefits:

• Already established brand
• Option to upsell when customer arrives in the shop
• Customers get more acquainted with your shop’s offer online (even if some items are not currently in shop’s stock).

Drawbacks:

• You might still need delivery, which can complicate logistics
• Price difference between online and classic retail

It’s not an easy decision. Many have tried going online and got burned. But, done properly it can be a nice additional sales channel. Tesco obviously does it right.

Search advertising has it’s obvious benefits. You can target by keyword, Google offers nice bidding system, you can run your own campaigns,… But display advertising (banners and video) still has it’s customers.

When to use display advertising?

Main purpose of display advertising is branding. Yes, I know. It sounds vague. But it actually isn’t. Buying banners all over the place doesn’t pay out. But if you know who your customers are and target your banners where they hang out, you are likely to make them remember you. Which, in the end, increases your conversion rate.

Stupid people pay for banners, smart people use AdWords

We hear this a lot. But, it’s not true. Display advertising and search advertising are two completely different games and should be treated that way. They require completely different logic and usually rules that apply to search (keywords,sites,…) don’t necessarily work with banners.

Banner advertising is increasing?

Now that we know that search advertising is not the beginning and the end of universe, we’re turning back to good old banners. And if we’re to trust eMarketer, display advertising will soon top search advertising.

The steep growth in online video ad spending, combined with solid increases for banners, will help display ads eventually top search spending. – emarketer

How does this apply to me?

Almost anyone can benefit from display advertising, if you do it smart. The trick is to select the right websites to raise awareness of your brand.  It’s a fine art, but once mastered it can pay out nicely. Once user is ready to buy, and clicks that search result that takes him to your site, the fact that he has “heard” about you might very well prevail.

If you have any questions on how to use display advertising to promote your business, feel free to contact us. As you know, we give 1 hour of consulting for free.

Q1 2011 online sales in France are estimated to 8.8 billion euros by FEVAD, a French association of ecommerce (distant selling professionals, as they call it).

• Average ecommerce transaction in France is 92 EUR.
• The total number of ecommerce sites in France is 85000
• According to FEVAD, market will grow by 22% in 2011 (note that other sources claim lower numbers)

Even with these rising numbers, France is still a lower on the scale than Germany and UK, which are considered really mature ecommerce markets in EU.

However, France is a specific market, and not very easy to enter. Apart from the language barrier, there is also a specific ecommerce culture, which is in many ways different than the rest of Europe or the States.

With our expertise on French e-commerce market, we can help you get there. And survive.