SOHO Solo West Cork

Selling online: user experience is key!

For many SOHO Solo’s the web plays an important part in marketing their businesses. Their website is a fundamental part of their operation — the hub of their online marketing endeavours and one of their main opportunities to attract and engage with customers who are often geographically remote.

If you’re one of the many SOHO Solo’s that relies on selling goods directly through your website here’s some good advice from Kim Krau Berg, writing on usability and online user behaviour for the Search Engine Land site. While the start and end of the article are a bit anecdotal and rambling, the meat of it is a series of solid tips for landing that all important online sale.

One of the main thrusts of Kim’s argument is the importance of helping your customers know how to use your site/shopping cart. If you want to secure that sale, then offer them guidance when and where they need it (you can use your analytics package/service to find likely steps in the sales process… but a bit of common sense works wonders too).

4. No guidance, no interaction, no sale.

…is one of the mantras she advocates among her list of usability tips for e-commerce websites.

I’d probably go a step further, and say that as well as offering all of the instructions, guidance and support a customer is likely to need to complete their order, the real key is to build your web application/store to be intuitive and easy to use from the ground up. Have guidance available, sure… but strive to make it unnecessary. Some customers will read instructions, many won’t bother.

Don’t try to be clever with your design — stick to online conventions that users expect and are comfortable with. There are areas for breaking new ground with web user interface design… the place where you’re trying to close the sale isn’t one of them.

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Tags: business, Marketing, Usability, Website
Posted in Web, e-commerce, internet | 1 Comment »