"Optimized E-Commerce" pour booster votre stratégie

7/31/2019 "Optimized E-Commerce" pour booster votre stratgie

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Optimized E-CommerceSix Strategies for Winning the E-Commerce War

White PaperJune 2011


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White Paper:Optimized E-Commerce

This may seem simple, but youneed to give customers whatthey want, not what you thinkthey want. And, if you do this,

people will keep coming back.

- John Illhan, Entrepreneur

White Paper

Optimized E-CommerceSix Strategies for Winning the E-Commerce War

Table of ContentsIntroduction.. 3

- Challenges of Today's E-Tailers. 3- The Ghosts of E-Tail Past 4- State of the Industry.. 4

Six Strategies For Optimizing E-Tail. 51. Core Features Come First.. 52. Know Your Random Users. 53. Prepare For The Worst 64. Make It Mobile.. 75. Protect the Purchaser.. 86. When to Ditch Your Data 9

About uTest.. 11


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IntroductionThe Challenges of Todays E-Tailers

In 1985, sales gurus Albrecht and Zembre wrote that, Bad news travels fast. A dissatisfiedshopper tells around 10 other people about their bad experience. Today, with the advent ofsocial media, youd be lucky to have that same angry shopper only tell a thousand peopleabout a poor shopping experience. Its safe to say that Albrecht and Zembre hadnt plannedon Tweets like this:

I have been shopping online for HOURS now and have bought nothing. THISSUCKS

As unbelievable as it may sound, I hate online shopping. Seriously.I thought I hated shopping in stores, online shopping sucks!!I used to like shopping...but that was when I could actually find things to buy. Now I

hate it. Online too.

But disgruntled Tweets are far from the only concern of todays online retailers. Do theseproblems sound familiar?

Constantly changing design and usability standardsMountains of useless dataUser security and fraud protectionRolling out new features & functionalityWebsite performance (handling the peak periods)Developing a mobile presence

Challenging as they may be, it is important to remember that these problems are withinyour control! Theres little you can do about thehundreds of new competitors that seem to besprouting up everywhere you look, or the increasinglysluggish consumer economy. Why then do so many e-tailers lose sleep over these issues? Better to focuson what you and your team have the power to change.

And that is the subject of this short whitepaper. In thepages that follow, well show how todays e-tailers cando themselves a huge favor by revisiting thefundamentals of what makes for a quality software application and unlocking the secrets ofwhat keeps users coming back.

To do so, well lay out six essential strategies for optimizing your e-tail application coveringeverything from user loyalty to user fraud, mobile apps to metrics, data to downtime andother important topics. Before proceeding, lets take a quick look back at the evolution ofonline retail.

If the user cant useit, it doesnt work.

- Susan Dray, UsabilityConsultant


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The Ghosts of E-Tail Past

The year was 1995. A promising young startup named Amazon had just been launched,eBay was known as AuctionWeb, Michael Jordan was playing minor league baseball and

there were virtually NO standards when it came to online commerce. In fact, a good userexperience was predicated on the page loading withinfive minutes. Yep, those were the days.

Within five years, protocols like DSL and HTTP hadbeen implemented to ensure a speedier and moresecure online shopping experience. E-checkouts,shopping carts and search features were also cominginto their own. Old people were even beginning to buystuff online. Things were looking up!

And you knew it couldnt last for long. When the bubble burst in 2000, it brought down manyplayers in the space (although Pets.com became the poster boy) but fortunately not all was

lost. The major players that had survived quietly continued to improve the online shoppingexperience, and before you knew it, the industry was once again back on top.

State of the Industry

Look around you. Is it fair to say that just about everyone you see has purchased somethingonline in past year? If youre at work, they might even be doing it right now. More than likely,the answer to that question is a resounding yesand theres a ton of data to back it up.

Exhibit A:

As great as these numbers may seem, its no guarantee of future success. As noted earlier,todays E-Tailers must fight for every inch when it comes revenue, marketshare and mediaattention. So lets now take a look at how to gain the upper hand.

To open a shop iseasy, to keep itopen is an art.

- Chinese Proverb


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Six Strategies for Optimizing E-Tail

1. Core Features Come First

Few sites are revamped, redesigned and reworked more frequently than that of e-tail and theres nothing inherently wrong about this process. As companies begin to betterunderstand the space (and their customers) such changes are inevitable. The dangerlies in over-prioritizing new features while neglecting the core ones.

Its therefore extremely important to determinehow each new feature will affect your coreproduct before any plans are put into motion.These core features primarily include:

The online shopping cart The checkout process Registration Search Login

The best place to maintain this line of thought is within the testing phase. Not only isthis true when introducing new features, but it also applies to changes outside yourarena - namely, with new operating systems and browsers. In other words, do your corefeatures hold up under the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and InternetExplorer? What about Windows 7, Linux or Mac OSXLeopard?

Even if you suspect that everything is up to par, you would be well-served to spend atleast week performing some type of regression test on the core features of your site. Italso wouldnt hurt to add firewalls, anti-virus and anti-malware programs to that list, asthese can cause major problems in online transactions if left untreated.

In doing this, youll be surprised at the number of broken links, mis-matched searchresults, missing images and a host of other overlooked problems that cost e-tail sites asmall fortune in revenue.

2. Know Your Random Users

Analyzing user data is one of the e-tailers favorite pastimes. In an attempt to learneverything about their current and prospective users, they spend endless amounts oftime and money breaking down their demographics by age group, gender, location,language, income bracket and a host of other criteria. They watch live usability surveysand pour over customer feedback to determine where users fall off, how they react tocertain calls-to-action and other types of user behavior.

Imagine if your cellphone changed the

location of its keysevery six months.

- Joshua Garity,Brand Strategist


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For obvious reasons, this type of data mining is extremely important to determine thewho, what, where, why and how of user disengagement:

When this happens, online businesses not just lose this sale, but also potentialrepeated sales. To add salt to the wound, an average online shopper spent anaverage of $1,200 annually and any shopper lost is equivalent a direct revenuedrop in your annual report. At a macro level, it costs businesses more than $44billionin total. Willis Wee,www.penn-olsen.com

Despite their exhaustive efforts to study this behavior, much of their user base remains amystery but this should be embraced! Often times the best form of feedback comesnot from your customers or prospects, but rather from objective users with NO previousconnection to your site.

Because of this, it is suggested that e-tailers run a series of usability tests with a focus

group that is less precise in terms of demographics, but still meets certain conditions. Tostart, assemble a group of no more than a dozen participants and create a series of usertasks for them to complete. A timeframe of 1-2 hours is reasonable. This could includeactions pertaining to the core features listed earlier, such as registration, login andsearch, but should also include things like:

Price and product comparison User reviews and ratings Live chat and customer support Promo codes and purchases

At the end of this session, have themcomplete a short survey that asks them to identify your sites strengths and weaknesses.Its best in this instance to leave room for suggestions they might have for improvementsto the site. Youll be surprised of the knowledge of the random web user.

The bottom line: Your users are changing every day, so dont limit your usability studiesto a static focus group. Mix it up a little.

3. Prepare For the Worst

Downtime aka the 404 error page of death is every e-tailers worst nightmare. Itstherefore no surprise that the industry directs so much of its attention to handling peak

user periods (for most, this refers to the holiday season). If youre like 90% of companiesin this space, you begin to take the necessary precautions roughly six months inadvance. Yet despite this attention to detail, there are likely several aspects of thisprocess that can be greatly improved.

Consumers are statistics.Customers are people.

- Stanley Marcus
http://www.penn-olsen.com/http://www.penn-olsen.com/http://www.penn-olsen.com/


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For instance, most e-tailers run some type of performance testing prior to peak season.These load testing procedures require complex software programs to determine howmuch stress your site can handle before its performance begins to degrade. This helpsthem identify how many users it

can support; the bottlenecks inyour servers and databases; youraverage time per transaction,bounce rates, page load speed andother important information. Its agold mine for data geeks.

But heres the problem: Thisactivity relies 100% on automatedsoftware there is virtually nohuman component. This is leaves a lot of room for error. For obvious reasons, youshould never trust software to verify your sites performance. After all, software doesnt

want to buy your products people do!

It is then highly advisable that you have real users examining your site while theseperformance tests are taking place. In other words, while the software automaticallytests the backend of your site, someone should be examining things like page loadspeeds, graphics and the functionality of your core features.

4. Make it Mobile

Theres no getting around the fact that more and more users are making purchases ontheir tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices. Unless youre in the camp thatmobile is a passing fad (unlikely) youve likely build a native application or mobile

website to complement your online presence. The problem with this mindset is that itleads some to see mobile as a second cousin to the web a monumental mistake!

Writes Helen Leggatt of BizReport.com:

Mobile users expect their mobile Internet experience to be every bit as fast andeasy to use as on their PC. In fact, 17% of mobile users will wait no longer than 5seconds before giving up and 37% said they would be unlikely to return to amobile site if frustrated by slow loading.

This is especially true of e-tail sites. So why do so many mobile sites seem lacking infunctionality, design and performance? Simple: Because ensuring a quality mobile site is

at least 2X times more complicated than the web. With your website, for instance, yourebasically dealing with browsers and operating systems as variables. With mobile,however, youre up against that in addition to hundreds of carriers and devices. Itsdefinitely a much faster game, and as a result, quality suffers.

The great strength of computers is thatthey can reliably manipulate vastamounts of data very quickly. Their greatweakness is that they dont have a clueas to what any of that data actually

means.- Stephen Cass, 2004


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While developing for mobile is a job for a small team, testing for mobile is not. Rather, itis a task best suited for crowdsourcing defined by author Jeff Howe as the act oftaking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) andoutsourcing it to a large group of people in the form of an open call.

With a crowdsourced community, e-tailers can verify the functionality and usability oftheir application across virtually any type of criteria language, location, browser,carrier, operating system and others.

To learn more about crowdsourced testing,click here.

5. Protect the Purchaser

The cost of protecting your users (and your business) has skyrocketed in recent years,and the trends for fraud show no signs of ceasing any time soon:

Writes The Federal Circle:

It's no wonder that retailers are prime targets of cyber crime. The high cost ofcomplying with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards, whichrequires that all sensitive data be encrypted and secured, leftmany companiesskimping on security. In 2007, the National Retail Federation cried foul, callingfor an end to the requirement that shops and online stores archive credit carddata themselves.

This is especially true for e-tailers that accept mobile payments, which today, is nearly all

of them. Although Reuters reports that user fraud has a disproportionate impact on largemerchants (i.e. those earning more than $50 million in revenue) this is a problem everye-tailer must deal with. No exceptions.

While e-tailers go to great lengths to ensure a safe shopping experience, they frequentlyoverlook the little things that can make a huge difference. To point you in the right
http://www.utest.com/landing-interior/eight-essentials-of-crowdsourcinghttp://www.utest.com/landing-interior/eight-essentials-of-crowdsourcinghttp://www.utest.com/landing-interior/eight-essentials-of-crowdsourcinghttp://www.utest.com/landing-interior/eight-essentials-of-crowdsourcing


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direction, here are a few questions to consider as you deal with the security of yourapplication:

Can a user easily get an app to cough up the private data of another user?

For example, if they see user_id=232 in the URL, what happens if they

change it to user_id=231? Do they get to see someone elses personal

data?

Are you sharing personally identifiable information about your users with

third-parties like Salesforce.com or Google Analytics? What about the

company thats hosting your app?

What happens if your website is cached when it shouldnt be? Does it share

the wrong data with people? What happens if you actually wantcaching? Is it

sending out the right things to be cached? Are end users actually seeing a

benefit?

Is your site vulnerable to common security exploits like XSS, injectionflaws, broken authentication, flawed session management, invalidated

redirects and forwards?

Is your web app behaving the way your privacy policy claims it does?

In light of the time constraints that plague many development teams, it can be helpful tooutsource some of this activity to a reliable, third party vendor. In doing so, youll besurprised at what a fresh pair of eyes will pick up.

6. When to Ditch Your Data

Sorting through mountains of data in an attempt to extract something meaningful canseem like a baffling ordeal, though this need not be the case. The real problem fortodays e-tailers is not the data necessarily, but the source of the data. Software guruand data expert Michael Bolton explains why common metrics can be misleading:

Businesses could learn a ton of useful information from their own customerservice and technical support reps, and they could learn plenty about the projectby listening to their programmers and their testers. Product and projectknowledge gets mediated by middle managers and numbers; it turns frominformation into data. When your car is about to go off a cliff, its a weird timeto be thinking about gas mileage and drag coefficients; better to take theright control actionlook out the window and steer or use the brake until

youre back on course. Once youre back to being productive, then you canstart thinking about optimizing.

The point is that data can only help you make decisionsit cant make them for you, asit requires both knowledge and intuition. This human factor tends to frighten the data-driven types, who see every problem as technical in nature. Unfortunately, e-tailers


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operate in an uncertain, continuously changing world, where numbers only tell part of thestory. They cannot provide complete answers to these questions:

Are your customers satisfied? Is the site intuitive and user-friendly? Is the site providing a safe user experience? Is it consistent across both web and mobile platforms?

So when you feel swamped by piles of data in front of you, step back and ask yourselfhow closely the numbers pertain to the questions above.


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About uTestuTest provides in-the-wild testing services that span the entire software development lifecycle including functional, security, load, localization and usability testing. The companys communityof 50,000+ professional testers from 180 countries put web, mobile and desktop applicationsthrough their paces by testing on real devices under real-world conditions.

Thousands of companies -- from startups to industry-leading brands rely on uTest as a criticalcomponent of their testing processes for fast, reliable, and cost-effective testing results.

More info is available atwww.utest.com or blog.utest.com, or you can watch a brief onlinedemo atwww.utest.com/demo .

uTest, Inc.153 Cordaville RoadSouthborough, MA 01772p: 1.800.445.3914e:[email protected]:www.utest.com

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