The pulse of Alexander Interactive

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the following Thursday are just days away… Holidays are right around the corner. We’re not looking to change the world here at Ai, but we do want to play our part in making this upcoming year a safe, secure and profitable one. That being said, have a look at an article I recently wrote which was published in the B2C Marketing Insider.

12 Tips on Creating a Safe Online Customer Shopping Experience

“84% of polled Internet shoppers don’t think that online retailers are putting enough effort into protecting customers” (Forrester Research, Inc)

The E-commerce holiday shopping season is upon us and online retailers are busy implementing new shopping features, social campaigns, analyzing their test results, and redesigning their funnels from browsing to checkout.

The experts are out in force: Focus on usability! Optimize your product page! Come up with brilliant holiday promotions! Study the shopping trends! Yeah! Yeah?

No. Don’t waste your precious and ever-dwindling time focusing solely on usability and Ui improvements. Bottom line: If you don’t have your customers‘ trust and confidence, you won’t convert–regardless of all the improvements that your testing results indicated you should make.

This holiday season, make it a priority to ensure that your site is providing your customers with the sense of safety and security they are longing for in their shopping experience. Use our tips below to ensure your customers spend their precious time deciding which product to buy from your site, rather than then if they should even buy from you at all.

Prominent Contact Information

Contact information should be prominent and in a consistent place within your header and footer so that your customer knows where to go when they have questions or encounter issues. Display both phone number and email address so that your customers can contact you in the manner of their choosing.

Privacy Policy

Include links to your privacy policy on all transactional pages. The ubiquitous footer link is a good place to start, but too often overlooked. On transactional pages, make sure you have it prominently called out in the body of the page, above the fold. Spell out pieces of your policy as needed. For example, when asking for an email address, state your email usage policy right next to the field. Best Buy says this perfectly “Best Buy does not sell, rent, or trade your personal information to third parties”. Clear, blunt and to the point. As it should be.

Don’t Hide Costs

Transparency in shipping costs and delivery times is key – especially come holiday season. Be sure to provide all of the actual costs up front, including shipping, handling, and sales tax. These can have an enormous impact on the final price. According to OneUpWeb, 95% of customers want to know the exact cost of the order before proceeding into checkout. There is no better way to put the kibosh on a potential sale than to withhold additional costs until later in funnel.

When the user can expect to receive their package is enormously important as well, especially to shoppers cutting it tight during the holiday season. Show this information as early as possible as well. This is actually a deciding factor when it comes down to those final few days. Shoppers are willing to pay a premium as long as you can provide them with the security that it will arrive on time, as promised.

Return Policy and Shopping Guarantee

Shoppers want to know what their recourse is if their item arrives and is damaged, the wrong item, or just simply not what they wanted. Be sure to clearly spell out your return policy so there won’t be any surprises later. Do you have a shopper satisfaction guarantee? Nice! Again, place this prominently above the fold, and inspire your shoppers with confidence that they can’t make a wrong or irreversible decision.

Anticipate Their Concerns

Be mindful of the various sensitive touch points throughout the purchasing process.  Address concerns before they even arise. If you expect your customers to share private and personal information with you, you need to address the reasons why you need the information at the appropriate times.

• A “We 100% guarantee your safety” link right next to the checkout button, and in checkout header that leads to a DHTML popup with your 100% satisfaction guarantee inspires confidence and keeps the user in the funnel.
• “We will not share your email with anyone.” next to email field lets user know you aren’t going to sell their email address.
• “Shipping details” tied with product, in cart and checkout, makes user aware of costs and availability early and often.
• “You can always change your order later” when tied to a call-to-action removes some of the hesitation associated with doubts on whether to commit at that exact moment.
• Don’t be afraid to invite phone calls. A sale is a sale. Including “Prefer to checkout over the phone? No Problem. Call us at…” at the top of your checkout give shoppers a sense of security even if they don’t plan on calling you.

Apply the Human Touch

Ten other sites may sell the same product, at the same discounted price, and have the same safety features in place. Differentiate yourself by emphasizing a personal touch and telling your shoppers that you completely understand their concerns. Give them that warm and fuzzy feeling that they are in good hands by hitting the emotional aspects of shopping.

Using the right tone and personality makes a difference. It is comforting for a customer to see “Please don’t hesitate to call us with any concerns or questions. Your security is our sole priority.” compared to a simple link to the Help Section. Instill confidence in your customers by speaking to them like human beings, rather than unique visitors, throughout the shopping process.

Your “About Page” and Value Proposition

Part of converting the customer is making them feel confident that they are in good hands. The ‘about page” is an often overlooked part of creating a secure shopping experience.

Are you family owned? Are you quirky? Are you a huge company that started off with two people in a garage? Do you donate a certain portion of profits to charity? Don’t let “About Us” be one paragraph of fluff about commitment to selling great products. Shoppers will see right through this. Be yourself. Shoppers have a greater sense of confidence knowing that they are at a real store run by real people.

Make a Good First Impression

Visual design has a huge impact on new customers feeling safe. Shoppers will form an opinion of your company within five seconds of seeing your home page. Want them to feel safe, and not think you are a fly-by-night outfit? Invest in design. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be award-winning, gorgeous visual experience. The site’s design need to give an instant sense of credibility and trust to visitors. Even though customers may not be entirely conscious of it, good design inspires confidence.

Performance & Stability

A slowly loading page, a site that’s down, or obscure programming error messages can raise instant doubts in the shopper’s mind. It is likely they are in comparison shopping mode, so if they were to leave one site and arrive at a site that loads slowly, or not at all, then the experience comes to a quick end. If they see errors and messages they don’t recognize, they will doubt your professionalism and whether their information is safe on your site. A solid technical implementation is as important as a great design.

Badges, Tigers and Seals Oh My

Seals of approval from TRUSTe or Better Business Bureau Online are widely recognized, but remember that a seal is only a graphic; it can be counterfeited. To be sure, make sure you link to the certifying agency’s site that profiles the merchant information. Also, avoid the Times Square approach putting eight different seals on your site. It diminishes the effectiveness. If you really feel the need to bombard 8 seals on there, all I ask is that you use the animated graphics. At least your savvy visitors can get a laugh.

Sweat the Small Stuff

Be sure your site has been thoroughly reviewed and that there are no misspellings or grammatical mistakes. They may seem tiny, but they will immediately cast your professionalism in doubt.

Security Through Social Validation

Social validation is a proven factor in influencing how people purchase products, and it’s no different when it comes to influencing why they should shop at your site for these products. Customer dialogue, reviews and interactions (regardless of what is being discussed) brings instant credibility to your site. People want to know that other people shop at your store. They want to see activity and not just take your word for it.

Now more than ever, privacy is a huge customer concern. Between Facebook privacy issues, Google ego-searching, and countless ads aggressively targeting hackers and screaming identity theft shoppers are only getting increasingly more sensitive and aware of the how, why, and when their sensitive personal information is used.

As online retailers, it is our responsibility to provide a safe and comfortable shopping environment for the customer, both online or off. The most successful businesses are able to instill confidence in their customers, and adding a relatable human touch. They develop a trusting, ongoing relationship with their customers to ensure repeat purchases and loyalty.Look folks, lets not forget – it’s the holidays! Do your customer and your bottom line a favor by letting them focus on giving rather than worrying. So you better be good for goodness sake.

Ai folks have become quite fond of Bath & Body Works foaming hand soaps. Sadly, the arsenal of soaps we once had–seven different scents lined up at our kitchen sink–has been dwindling. Today a few of us went to the Bath & Body Works store, not even one block down from our office, to pick up some new foamy, sweet-smelling, anti-bacterial soaps. (I even got some for myself because I love it and I have no problem admitting this.)
I left the store with a bag of hand soap and what appeared to be some coupons. One of them was actually a letter, printed on Bath & Body Works corporate stationery. This turned out to be a letter to customers, informing them that the Fifth Avenue location would be closing later this month.
It is a great idea to inform customers of location changes, so they will not be completely shocked one day when they arrive at a locked door of a now-vacant storefront. It is an even better idea to give customers incentive to continue shopping at other locations by providing coupons. Sure enough, the letter in my bag was also a coupon, giving street addresses and phone numbers of other Bath & Body Works locations in the New York City area.
I love the concept behind this: “We have to close our store, and that sucks, but we have other stores and we value your business and would like you to find a new location to shop at. Here is a discount on your next purchase, should you choose to continue shopping with us.” There is even a phone number listed to their Customer Relations Department, should anyone wish to inquire about why the store is closing or any other questions regarding the company in general.
This format of open communication between retailer and customer inspires a sense of loyalty and value that goes both ways: a retailer staying loyal to the customers they value, and customers staying loyal to the retailer which values them.
I will absolutely use this coupon at a different location, not only because I like their hand soaps and can get a discount, but also because they have shown concern for customers like me.

I’ve spent much of the week battling a nasty cold. One of the last things I expected when sent to the pharmacy was to think about user experience. Doc said, “Get some Mucinex D,” so off I went.

But what is Mucinex D? I asked for it at my usual pharmacy but they only had plain Mucinex and Mucinex DM. This sent me to the nearby chain pharmacy, where my head began to spin.

Mucinex–a basic guaifenesin expectorant–comes in seven varieties. There’s plain; D, with a decongestant (requiring the pharmacist keep it behind the counter); DM, with cough suppressants; a dedicated cough version; a maximum strength version; a severe-cold formula; and a nasal spray. Each has its own color scheme.

This theme plays out similarly throughout the entire cough-and-cold aisle. Every product has multiple versions that exist in part to satisfy finicky customer demand but mostly to consume shelf space at competitors’ expense. Thus the pharmacy becomes an experiment in patience at the exact point in time when pharmacy customers want speed and efficiency.

I ultimately got my Mucinex D (and a righteous bout of post-nasal drip, thank you very much). But I also got overwhelmed. Is this the best way we’ve found to treat the sick?

My wife and I went shopping this weekend for a product about which we know virtually nothing. We hit four stores to look at varieties and learn how it works. This is an item where first-time buyers usually go in cold, so to the retailers, we were typical clueless shoppers.

Store #1 was full of customers, employees, and stock. We spent a long while (15, 20 minutes) looking around the overstuffed sales floor and were never approached by an employee. Finally we asked for help, and the woman behind the counter shrugged, and said, “Maybe in a few minutes someone can help you.” She did not offer to help us herself, nor did she attempt to ease our wait. As soon as she turned away from us we left.

Store #2 was as busy as store #1, but had clear aisles for browsing and an inviting atmosphere. Sales clerks had their hands full, yet when we made eye contact with one, she responded with, “I’m with a customer, but I’ll make sure someone gets to you as soon as we can.” Moments later she approached us, saying, “My client stepped away for a minute, I’m still with her, but can I help you in the meantime?” She worked with us until the client returned, politely refocused on the other customer, then came back to us a second time when she was free. She patiently walked us through different products, pros and cons, noting her favorites–which seemed unbiased by price point or commission.

Store #3 was quiet, and a saleswoman approached us immediately. She answered a few questions, then faded into the background, letting us explore without pressure. Each model was on display in several colors and with varying options, making it easy to compare styles. A few minutes into our shopping, the saleswoman returned to us with a print catalog and handy photocopies of each product’s dimensions. On the sheet she had handwritten the prices of each item we were considering, too, so we could review at home and make a decision on our own time.

Store #4 had the smallest display collection we’d seen. Half the items had no tags displaying product names or pricing. The store seemed to have very few sales staff, and after a few minutes, we shrugged and left.

At home, we reviewed our one piece of printed literature, and spent time measuring and discussing our options. We looked around online sparingly, since we’d seen so much in person.

Guess which stores are most likely to get our business.

A fascinating study was released last week that observed people find expensive items more desirable simply because they’re more expensive. The same bottle of wine is more appealing to consumers who believe it’s worth $90 than others who are told it’s worth $10.

Pricing reactions also rely on contextual cues. Panasonic has found midprice items sell better when shown next to pricier models. The “reference prices” around a product significantly affect their perceived value.

These discoveries are not really new. Consider the make-up artist my wife hired for our wedding five years ago. After agreeing on a price, he forgot what they had decided, and quoted a second rate 80% higher. When my wife expressed shock, he quickly reverted to the original price. He explained that many of his clients were upper-class women who wouldn’t think he was as good a stylist at the rate we were paying. Raising prices actually appeals to his audience, the cost verifying the talent on offer.

These theories are particularly interesting with regard to online merchants. As noted in the New Yorker article, websites create price transparency, which makes for savvier consumers both online and off, and forces retailers to compete in other ways.

The most intriguing question is raised by reading the two articles above as a single unit. In the first, The Economist argues that prices create emotional response, which could be used to sellers’ advantage. In the second, James Surowiecki suggests almost the opposite: that the Internet has eliminated much pricing opacity, creating empowered consumers who understand right-priced items. Observing which one proves more accurate–or whether these theories work in parallel–will help define a generation of sales strategies.