The e-commerce sector has continued its double-digit growth year over year. And to make it easy for you to understand the growth of e-commerce industry in US and all across the world. We’ve created an infographic “How big is E-commerce” that will cover some interesting facts about the E-commerce industry, its growth and latest trends.

Infographic by- Conversion Optimization Company Invesp

To Publish this Image on your Blog or Website . Copy this code

<a href="http://www.invesp.com/ecommerce.jpeg"><img src="http://www.invesp.com/ecommerce.jpeg" alt="How Big is E-commerce Industry" width="580" /></a>Infographic by – <a href="http://www.invesp.com/">Conversion Optimization Company</a> Invesp

Did You Know That

In 1979 – Michael Aldrich invented Online Shopping

In 1990 – Tim Berners-Lee created the first World Wide Web server and browser

In 1994 – Pizza Hut Offers online ordering on their Web Page

Netscape launchs first commercial Browser – Navigator

In 1995 – Amazon starts selling Books Online

E-bay is founded by Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb.

Facts

More than 85% of online population has used internet to purchase something.

More than 50% of online population shopped online more than once.

73% of Consumer prefer Online Shopping because it is time-saving

Global E-commerce sales are growing by more than 19% a year and will be of almost $1.4 trillion by 2015

E-commerce Sales in US growing at 10% a year and will grow to $279 billion by 2015

There are more than 178.5 million consumers are in US and will grow to 201.1 million by 2015

54% of Online shoppers are of age group 18-30 Years

75% of Online shoppers use Credit/debit cards for online shopping

India is the highest growing and Portugal is the least growing E-commerce  country right now

Residents of North Dakota spend the highest percent (16.9) of their online income in online shopping whereas residents of Maine spend the least percent (1.83) of their online income

Illinois has the lowest average Shipping time of 2.55 days Whereas Hawaii has the highest average Shipping time – 4.10 days for online orders

40% of the items that sold online are Books

Mobile e-commerce market is growing year over year and will be of more than 23.8 Billion by 2015

During the last two weeks we analyzed our 2009 projects to assess the average improvements in conversion rates and increases in revenue our team helped clients achieve.  Before we get to the numbers, we wanted to reiterate that 2009 was one of the most challenging years for our clients.  Our projects for clients were focused on plugging the leaky faucet of online shoppers due to the external factors of the economic recession. Promotions, pricing structures, and free shipping became huge motivators and persuaders for the online shopper throughout the year.

And here are the results:

Invesp clients’ average increase in conversion rates is 65.98%, average increase in online revenue is 109.2%.

If you are wondering how clients achieved such a large increase in revenue compared to the increase in conversion rate, this is because increases in revenue result from a number of factors such as increases in average order value, monthly traffic, as well as average conversion rates.

Our methodology has not changed, although our aggressiveness and razor sharp focus has been enhanced due to the strenuous economic pressures. Gone are the days of making a simple change for a big result.

The release of Pii – first ecommerce conversion rate optimization software

Perhaps one of the biggest factors that helped clients last year was the release of Pii. The power the software provides is mining website analytics to determine which areas of the site should be optimized. It allows analysts to use the knowledge from hundreds of conversion optimization projects to provide focused recommendations that have been tested with other ecommerce websites. Our goal was to determine the weak areas of any website and use our experience in resolving common problems in these areas.

Rethinking the basic package

What was the rationale behind the basic package?

The purpose behind the basic package creation was to help out the little guy. Some client’s simply can’t afford other packages, and we wanted to do our part for the smaller company. But what we consistently saw was that client’s that signed up for our basic package were just not getting the bang for their buck because too little time was spent analyzing what and how to optimize throughout the site. The numbers have to make sense for both parties, and from our team, we just could not afford spending more time on their projects.

That being said, our increases in conversion rate and revenue would have been tenfold if we discounted client’s that signed up for the basic package. Which is why, as a company, we have determined that although we want to help small businesses by offering them a small package, we do not want to waste their time nor our time with a package that will essentially be ineffective. Unless they are able to commit to something a bit larger, than we cannot give them the improvements they are looking for.

What did Conversion Focus on in 2009?

It’s quite fitting that in a year where the economy was taking a turn for the worse that discounts, pricing layout, savings, etc. were the factors that impacted client’s the most. Homegallerystores.com came to us with a product page that could use some usability enhancements. But the biggest impact did not come from changing the flow and ease of usage of the page but rather by placing the discount offer right below the call to action button.

Xtreme Terrian made changes to how the price was displayed, the headline that pointed to the fact that they carry a wide range of products at the best prices, and as a result saw significant improvements in their conversion rates. Again, the  key was what would appeal to the visitor from a savings and price perspective.

Conclusion – looking forward to 2010

Every year we face different challenges with optimization, but 2009 proved to be the most difficult year for our company. Trying to help a range of clients, from the large to the very small, and maintain the same strategy and methodology for the varying companies was difficult. We learned early on that because of this range in clients, and their specific difficulties and expectations, we would have to adapt our strategy and methodology accordingly. Although the essence is always the same, the swiftness, razor sharp focus, and aggressiveness changed dramatically. Best of luck to all of our clients and colleagues, in a hopefully better 2010. How did your company do in 2009?

© 2006-20010 Invesp

Our experience has proven time and time again that copycats never win. Taking a design or site functionality, and slapping it on your ecommerce site; although you may share the same industry and sell the same items; is never a good idea.

A recent client of ours took the same exact PPC campaign ad of a competitor, worked for weeks on it, and was shocked with 0 conversions at launch. Worst of all is within a couple of weeks, the competitor had completely shifted to an entirely different design.

We always encourage our clients to keep tabs on competitors. It’s important to know what they’re up to, are they optimizing and testing? What new features have they included? But all of this information should not drive e-tailers to make the same exact changes as competitors, but rather, continuously improve upon their own site considering their very own target market.

This all came up when we were approached by a new client, and lo and behold they had the same exact assurance center as a previous client of ours that sold nursing scrubs. The assurance center’s color was the same, it happened to have the same text, same shape, and the placement was also consistent between the two sites. The two sites are not in the same industry and have no connection, but maybe along the line they hired the same designer? Whatever the reason, we have seen too many company’s copy competitors and other sites, only to be surprised that it didn’t bring them the uplift they expected.

The problem does not stop with ecommerce companies following, but even “conversion” experts tend to take an idea and generalize its importance. When we published an article in the Internet Retailer online magazine on our success with Metrouniforms and their assurance center, we started hearing all these experts talk about the importance of an assurance center.

But don’t these “experts” know that there isn’t a single rule that applies to all online stores? Each ecommerce store has a specific market they cater to, and what works with that same market on one site, does not necessarily work on another.

We aren’t against getting ideas from other sites, but there’s a lot of analysis that goes into whether or not an idea would work for your particular site considering the current design, customers, objections, market conditions, analytics, etc.

How to properly monitor competitors:

1. Compete.com – Not always accurate, but it gives you sense of how they are performing relative to your site.
2. Spyfu.com – are they spending on PPC? Spy on them to figure it out – what ads are the running, keywords ranking for, etc.
3. Snapshots – every couple of days take snapshots of your competitors to monitor any changes. You can always go to the waybackwhen machine and pull up a competitors site to figure out how a competitor’s site evolved through the years.
4. Change according to YOUR market and YOUR analytics. Although a competitor may have made changes on the homepage, they doesn’t necessarily mean you should too. Figure out the pages that have the greatest index value and begin optimizing there.

Copycats can only get so far, so monitor the progress on a competitor’s site, but never copy unless you have justification that the change would make sense for your site from a market and analytics perspective. Have you ever copied from a competitor’s site? What was the result? 

© 2006-20010 Invesp

Here at Invesp, we work with all sorts of ecommerce platforms, hosted, customized, free, or paid. Working with the vast variety of platforms out there has always posed a challenge for our team, which is why, in many situations, we require our clients to do the actual implementations of the recommendations we submit to them. That does poses another slew of problems since time estimates are often miscalculated and delivery dates can’t met. However, we manage to work around all of these issues by offering our clients step by step instructions and unmatched customer service.

To top the list of difficult and challenging hosted solutions to work with though, has to be Network Solutions. We are constantly challenged with limitations in the recommendations that our clients can and cannot implement. Testing? Not an option! Network Solutions is not compatible with Google Website Optimizer.

The folks at Network Solution are unresponsive as well. So a rigid platform and poor customer service, what’s keeping these clients?

Migrating to another platform is a headache. Although, ultimately, the migration would give our Network Solutions clients flexibility and ease of mind, the initial pain of migrating and ensuring that everything stays in tact is a resource, time, and financial commitment.

In June of 2009, at the IRCE in Boston, Khalid was mentioning some of the challenges we face when we give clients recommendations at a website clinic he was conducting. Implementation delivery time becomes an issue, and more so when a client is limited because of their solution. He went on to mention a few particular clients that are hosted with Network Solutions. To his surprise, an executive from Network Solutions happened to be sitting there. She quickly introduced herself and noted that she would personally make certain that our client’s needs were met. We were relieved for our clients because we felt like we made a good connection.

Several phone calls, voice mails, e-mails and months later…we are yet to hear back from her.

Before considering Network Solutions for your ecommerce platform, we’d like to give you a heads up:

1. You can not test freely. There are too many limitations when it comes to testing: how to deploy it, on which elements, and what the conversion page must be; so much so that it ends up not being worth the hassle.

2. You can not optimize freely. The pages are hard-coded so that any specific glaring areas throughout the site can not be moved, changed, reorganized, etc.

3. You are at the mercy of Network Solution engineers. Whenever they roll out something new, or upgrade, you have to go through the pain and agony of doing a complete migration. It’s a taxing process, and you have virtually no control over it.

4. Support is poor to say the least. Sure, they ensure that the site is up and running, etc., however, if you do run into an issue, getting to a reliable agent is a tiring process.

Every solution has its positives and negatives, but when you have little control over your website because you are tied down to a specific layout, your ability to grow and prosper as an ecommerce company is suddenly limited as well. Are you on a hosted or custom platform? What are some of the challenges you’ve faced?

© 2006-20010 Invesp

We previously discussed 13 Areas to evaluate ecommerce solutions  while selecting an ecommerce technology or platform(Part 2 can be of selecting ecommerce solution can be found here). Mainly you have three main options to choose from:

1. Custom built websites that are developed specifically for that site

2. An ecommerce package that is deployed on a server (think Magento, oscommerce, ATG, etc)

3. Hosted e-commerce solution (Yahoo!, Network solutions, Cloud craze, etc)

Each of these options has its pluses and minuses. As an ecommerce architect, I have experienced both ends of the spectrum, helping companies select the right solution for their business as well as the selling ecommerce solutions to companies.

During the selection process there are hundreds of criterion you must evaluate before deciding on the right solution. All of these factors can be summarized in selecting the most cost effective solution that will return the highest ROI. 

Hosted ecommerce solutions

These solutions come in many different forms and flavors. The most popular solution is software as a service (SaaS) model, where the vendor provides you with both software and hardware. You are leasing or renting their software from them. If you follow technology consulting, you know that many claim SaaS the way of the future. And while that might be the case, SaaS in the area of ecommerce does not make sense. I know some will argue that SaaS and hosted solutions are different but I will use the terms interchangeably in the blog!

Companies that sell hosted ecommerce solutions will focus on the following pluses:

1. The speed a company can be up and ready to go live. For a brand new website, go live can be a matter of one week or less. For pre-existing website, the largest time delay takes place in migrating data from the old system to the SaaS system.

2. There is also cost effectiveness of the solution. Getting a custom application written requires a huge time and resource commitment. In the SaaS model, you are spreading that cost over the different companies that share the software with you.

3. Support, upgrade and maintenance: Each of these comes with its costs and headaches. In a SaaS model, you do not have to worry about any of them. If the site is down, the SaaS company will take care of it. If the hardware or software needs an upgrade, that is all done for you behind the scene.

All of these are huge pluses. The biggest challenge with the SaaS model is the amount of control it allows the client to configure and customize the solution. The very flexible solutions provide each client with his own installation of the software. That allows the client full control over the solution. Of course with that level of flexibility, you will be giving up some of the advantages mentioned above.

On the other end of spectrum are hosted ecommerce solutions where you have few minor configuration tweaks you can deploy on your ecommerce website. This is typical of many of the small hosted ecommerce packages available. How much control you have over your own website can very limited to the point where you are only able to create a small number of categories, not change colors on buttons, or not even make simple layout changes.

Hosted solutions work well based on the assumption that all the hosted companies share the same general business process and that there is very little customization required for each of the participants.

That is where the problem start happening for e-commerce.

The assumption that all ecommerce solutions are the same shows a lack of understanding of how people buy on the web. Thinking that all catalog or product pages, checkout processes, main home page can be generally the same is absolutely false. We experience this every day, several times a day.

A product page that works very well for one website causes very low conversion rates on another. Checkout process complexities go beyond single or multistep checkout. What elements you include on the page, what colors you use, how you design the page, what checkout paths exists, and the list goes on and on. The SaaS model simply breaks down in e-commerce.

And while the hosted solution model gets high points for enabling clients to go to the market faster, adding new features becomes a lot more complex. As a client, you are held a hostage to the SaaS provider and when they might decide to add a new feature you desperately need. Ecommerce is continuously changing, can you rely on SaaS providers to adapt quickly?

But this is not unique to e-commerce.

Sales Force, is a leader in providing CRM application in SaaS model faces the same issues with enterprise clients who have different CRM needs and processes. To deal with this need, Sales Force allows these clients to customize their hosted application to a very high level. Sales Force provides the framework and does all the plumbing, clients are able to add modules, modify screens and integrate with external systems. I have had many clients who use and are happy with their customization of Sales Force.

The caveat of course is that these companies are investing in Salesforce and making a long term commitment to stay with the company. On top of that, these companies ended doing custom development which was the thing they tried to move away from in the first place.

It might be just me, but if I am going to invest in something, I would like to own it completely and have full control over it.  And no matter how much custom development you are able to do, there will always be limitations.

The SaaS provider must continuously worry that any upgrades they perform on the application will not cause problems to their clients. If they allow you to add a lot of custom code to your instance, they lose the control over that assurance.

An ecommerce hosted solution is a quick short term solution but rarely does it work in the long term.

I have many questions to ask you:

• Did you have to choose between a hosted solution versus another ecommerce package or even your custom development?
• What factors affected your decision the most?
• Do you think you made the right decision?
• What are some of the biggest lessons you learned?

© 2006-20010 Invesp

The IRCE 2009 was bustling with etailers and vendors alike, although the majority of people we spoke to felt that the numbers were significantly lower than previous years. Khalid and I arrived in Boston late Sunday evening and rushed our way down to the exhibit hall Monday morning to set up and then up to the ecommerce workshops to consult with online retailers. It was a busy Monday morning, and the entire stay was eventful and quite eye-opening.

Khalid and I both felt that the retailers sitting at our tables during the website consultations were engaged and interested. Website clinics are really a big hit because online retailers are given actionable items to implement and consider optimizing on their website.

Observations during website clinics:

I had an interesting mix of individuals sitting at my table:

• Those still did not have an online store but were hoping to persuade upper management.
• Those who had just launched their online store.
• Those who had been online for 10 years but had a lot of optimization work to be done.
• Those who felt they knew everything they needed to know about online optimization.

Each group had their own set of worries and obstacles they needed to tackle in order to continue improving their websites. Overall we had excellent conversations. Online retailers benefit tremendously from website clinics.

Once the clinics had concluded, we made our way to the exhibit hall and that is where we spent the rest of our time at IRCE. It was my first time exhibiting, so did not anticipate the pain and aches to come.

I made quite a few observations about etailers and their vendors during my experience

All the retailers that passed through the aisles at IRCE exhibition halls fell into 3 MAIN categories

1. The ones who make a conscious effort NOT to make eye contact with vendors. They either:

• Are not interested in anything because they don’t have the budget.
• They are not decision makers in the company.
• They like to do things in-house for ecommerce store and just come to the conference for ideas.
• They think their company is doing very well as is.

I must say, it is tedious to keep saying hello and stop at every vendor. But similarly, if you are an etailer at IRCE, the wealth of opportunities to grow and expand your company are tremendous and available. Ecommerce is at the cutting edge in so many different areas, and during tough times, you need to stay current and distinguished.

2. The ones who don’t make eye contact with vendors but still say a quick hello:

• They will not talk to you unless you catch their eye and ask them a question.
• They may ignore you but take a quick glance at your display (and possibly come back if a message touches a nerve).
• They are looking for solutions, but also hesitant for one reason or another (maybe financial).

3. The ones who are actively searching for solutions and will take time to stop at different booths to get information and figure out what is best for their company.

Retailers could choose from over 350 vendors displaying at IRCE this year. The exhibit hall was massive. In retrospect, I can understand when an attendee doesn’t want to respond because when you have over 1000 people saying hello and how are you today, it wears you out! I made me rounds around the exhibit hall, and it’s tough to keep that smile and talk to everyone that’s trying to grab your attention in some way, shape, or form.

The majority of ecommerce stores are aware of conversion rates in general terms

• There is a wealth of information out there that etailers are still unaware of. Many were floored by sessions that were still at a very basic level.
• There is always the assumption that if sales are good so no need to do anything further.
• Very few online retailers have deployed conversion optimization or online testing whether or not they realize the benefits it can bring to them.

Numbers are down in general

• You feel the recession at the conference because numbers are down and people are afraid to engage vendors usually because of financial issues.
• Every conference we have attended thus far, numbers are lower. That doesn’t mean that competition is subsiding, it is only confirming the fact that the online retailers that don’t do MORE, will be getting less.

Certainly IRCE offers a little of something to every online retailer. Statistics are pointing to a large percentage of online retailers that want to get an edge through various marketing and merchandising techniques that will enhance the user’s online experience. This can only mean that those retailers avoiding on contact may be missing out on great opportunities to grow.

Your turn:

• Did you attend the IRCE 2009?
• What were your thoughts?
• Did you like any of the sessions more than others? Did you hate any of the sessions?
• What did the guys at IRCE do well? What could IRCE do better?

© 2006-20010 Invesp

During such tough times, incentives are everywhere. Companies are struggling to get customers through the door. Even major conferences are “extending deadlines” for their “early-bird specials” because, simply, people are not buying. But more likely than often, incentives do work. They motivate and persuade the customer that is in a latter part of the buying stages. But what if your incentives were designed to motivate the customer that is in the initial buying stages, or just a browser, as well?

What NOT to do when it comes to incentives:

© 2006-20010 Invesp

Yes we know it’s not easy to optimize an entire ecommerce site – but a few best practices and blunders have given us hints on “easier” ways to approach optimization. Here are some tips on what NOT to do.

1. Recommendation Implementation Galore: Slow down with the recommendations! Very often when you see a page you assume that 50 different elements can be changed or shifted in some way, shape, or form. And that may well be the case. But, SLOW DOWN! Don’t go changing everything at once! Record what changes you want to make to a specific page, then make a single change and monitor the progress before moving to the next change.

2. Optimizing blindly: A recent client told me that they make changes and as long as the conversion rate doesn’t go down, they think it’s okay! But we don’t want to make changes for the sake of making changes – we want to track positive progress of the site! Although conversion may not decrease, there are other factors to consider.

Monitor your analytics closely to see did exits increase on the page? Did users navigate to one particular page more than the other as a result? Did firefox visitors respond differently than those who browse with IE? Were users using different browsers more likely to go to specific pages more than others?

Everything must be calculated and analyzed before determining how the change impacted your site’s performance.

3. Optimizing without testing: Testing goes hand in hand with any implementation. Never implement if you don’t have a plan for detailed plan to deploy A/B or multivariate testing. Without testing you’re limiting the results. You can never see what change works best, what change out performs the next, and you can never explore the different scenarios for a single element, etc.

We are advocates of light testing, meaning, rather than testing millions of scenarios, do your homework so you only have to test a few scenarios (minimizing the process tremendously in order for you to see results faster!). Your few scenarios, though, have to be well thought and calculated in order for you maximize the effectiveness of the changes. The point is, even if it’s minimal testing, it’s crucial.

4. Listening to your Colleagues over Gut: If you’ve done your research and taken all the steps mentioned into account, move forward with making changes on your website. Some team members may argue, and don’t get me wrong constructive feedback is great because you can always tweak your changes and limit testing scenarios. But ultimately, when you’ve done your homework, hold to your guns and don’t waiver!

5. Accepting A Half-Ass Job: Never accept something half done, or not perfect. If you specified an element to be designed or implemented in a certain fashion on your site, don’t accept the second best thing. The design must be done EXACTLY the way you specified before moving forward. In our experience, outsourcing work can be daunting, especially to countries outside of the US mainly because of language barriers. But more importantly because outsourced employees (like any employee) may try to get away with work done poorly as a result of limited monitoring capabilities from your end. Never accept anything but the best.

Conversion optimization is tough but necessary for any website. Your website is like a basket with holes, you will continue “dropping balls,” if you don’t patch it up. It’s a continuous effort and should never be ignored. What are some best practices that you’ve noted?

© 2006-20010 Invesp

My last post was a longish rant about Netflix’s decision to remove its email customer support feature.

After writing that, I thought that the most logical follow-up would be a post that included some tips to help you refine your own email support system.

So, without any further intro text, here it goes…

Can the canned responses

One of the most frustrating things anyone can ever receive in their inbox is a canned response- especially if the inbox owner is a customer looking for an answer to a very specific problem. Think about it: your customer went through the trouble of finding contact information, describing his problem in detail and sending off his request. He’s waiting for you to offer resolution. Instead, he gets an indifferent-sounding stock response that tests his nerves and destroys his faith in you. Is that any way to treat a paying customer?

Your customers are people. They deserve to be treated like people. The only time you should ever consider using canned responses is if, for some reason, you’re unavailable at the moment or if you have a very important announcement to make. Otherwise, keep your responses personable and coming from the fingertips of humans. Believe me when I say that customers can tell the difference and they’re not happy when confronted with a person-substitute.

Respond in a reasonable amount of time

Though one of the benefits of email support is the ability to address issues at your relative leisure, this freedom does not permit you to take an undue amount of time to get back to customers. Timeliness is key to a customer’s support experience. That said, punctuality can have some degree of leeway in it, depending on your type of business. If your business is centered around technology, like a hosting company, you would benefit in keeping email support open 24 hours a day. If you’re selling non-technological wares, you may be able to get away with a 24-hour turnaround time and still keep customers happy.

Include options

Even if you’ve gathered that customers are more likely to email you for support, you should never discount the fact that some customers may have different contact preferences. Include at least one other support option and put it on the same page that you offer your “main” one. Don’t make customers hunt for a submission form, phone number or live chat button. Remember that not everyone will have email or phone access 100% of the time. Consider that some customers might even want to use fax or snail mail to correspond with you.

Use relevant email addresses

That’s right- “addresses.” As in, plural. Assigning a different email address for each general issue can help streamline your support work. Think about the main issues associated with your products or the buying process that may arise. Billing? Technical? General Inquiries? All of these things can be assigned a different email address and it can make receiving and replying to emailed support requests easier. This is especially true if you have different employees working on each type of issue. Even if you’re the only one answering support email, logging into an issue-specific account and getting into that frame of mind to answer similar emails in the account can help you work faster and more efficiently. How? Because using one account for support and having to go back and forth between many different issues at one time can lead to brain drain.

However, don’t overload your customers with too many different addresses. Keep it simple and down to a couple. Overlapping issues can just irritate your customer as he or she tries to deal with the frustration of his problem and the task of having to determine which address to send an email to.

Optimize your support

Like any other facet of your business and its website, you should optimize your support services. Good word-of-mouth about customer support is something that can go a very long way. You can make sure that you’re always providing your customers with great support services by asking them to participate in a survey or another feedback mechanism. Allow them to rate various aspects of your customer service, including timeliness, helpfulness, the friendliness of representatives and more.

Knowing exactly what your customers want and need will help you achieve a stellar reputation for customer service and can even help you cut down on support inquiries. For example, you may end up amending your FAQs with some of the most popular issues.

Raise the bar

Let’s be honest: online customer support doesn’t have the best of reputations. When customers opt for it, they almost always bring a sense of self-defeat to it. Sometimes, they expect to not be helped at all. That’s why you should pleasantly surprise them with the best service you can muster. Not only does it reflect well on your business, it validates your customers’ decision to buy from you.

The result? More business in the form of returning customers and positive word-of-mouth.

Do you already implement these tips into your email support?

© 2006-20010 Invesp

Not a single day goes by without some question or comment from clients, potential clients, or subscribers to our RSS on the validity of personas for an ecommerce website. Of course, once we get our clients results, they are certainly on board. But convincing them of the personas role and effectiveness at the ecommerce front before beginning a project, has posed as a challenge.

Let’s get something out of the way though: is it possible to optimize without the use of Personas? Definitely.

So why personas for an ecommerce website? Let’s dissect this further:

1. Personas guide the optimization process: Gathering the demographical information of your target market is very valuable. But pairing that information with user behavior on the site is even more insightful.

There is not a single component or element that defines your target market, specifically the target market of an ecommerce site. We define 3 main areas that need to be focused on for our purposes when creating personas for an ecommerce website:

• Psychographics,
• Demographics,
• Usability behavior

Optimizing an ecommerce site based on mere basic market demographical information does not allow you to really get into the heads of the users enough to define their motivations, likes and dislikes, anxieties, and online behavior.

Let’s say that your target clients are 25-35, white, college-educated females. How does that demographical information impact the way you design the main page on your site? Why would you include or not include certain elements on a product page? But if I target Elizabeth, 29, white, nurse, who enjoys comparative shopping and searches by brands – suddenly I understand what elements I need to focus on and I can really relate to Elizabeth.

The more information you are armed with going into the optimization process, the more successful you will be at catering the site to their needs. The more personalized the user becomes to you, the more likely it is that you can relate to them and optimize accordingly.

2. Usability testing is key to succeeding in optimization: Personas not only guide the optimization process, but they allow us to select the correct individuals for usability testing on an ecommerce site. Of course, we do not optimize a site blindly. Prioritizing what elements or pages need to be optimized first relies on 4 main factors:

• Personas
• Analytics
• LOE (level of effort)
• Usability testing

But we can’t move forward with usability testing until we know who we need to recruit for the test.

For instance, if I have the persona John Edward, 38, construction worker, enjoys riding motorcycles, is an aggressive yet logical personality type, not very web savvy, and takes his time when he shops – I can easily locate users that matches this persona profile before moving forward with a usability test. What’s the point of a usability test if the “user” does not fall into the target market. The more specific I am with the personas, the more likely I can locate individuals that fall into that category and target market for usability testing. If we create 4 personas for a given website and for each persona we recruit 5 individuals that fall under the specific personality, motivational, demographical traits of the personas, our usability test becomes a lot more insightful and helpful when prioritizing what needs to be optimized and how it should be optimized.

3. Humanizing the optimization process: Like we mentioned before, your users are living, breathing individuals. Just because online shopping can be impersonal doesn’t mean we have to make it an impersonal experience for the users. Put a face, life, personality to your different market segments and suddenly optimizing for them doesn’t seem like a daunting task.

Okay, so what are some of the counter arguments against personas, specifically for ecommerce websites:

Complaint: Back in November, EcommGuru made this comment on one of our posts about Personas:

My two cents worth on why personas are not useful in an ecommerce environment.

Take into consider our scenario. We sell products that are higher end products (price range of $400 up to $5000).

We have identified our site visitors into three groups: small business owners, network administrators and value added resellers. We have also identified ages, sex, and other traits for these personas.

HERE IS THE PROBLEM IN DETAIL:

It is near impossible to create product descriptions for each of these personas and present them in an organized fashion. Example: we can easily create three product descriptions for each item. However, you cannot control the product descriptions based on the user’s persona unless you invest a LOT of time and money it to creating a hyper-dynamic ecommerce application. It’s not worth the resources.

This is the problem companies face when dealing with personas. Even having two personas complicates the matters beyond any reasonable means to invest in pursuing.

Our Response: There is no way that you can possibly create product descriptions for each persona! Of course, that is not how we utilize our personas for large ecommerce sites.

Product description of course is very a small part of ecommerce stores. Personas impact hundreds of other elements in an e-commerce store. Even on a scale of only production descriptions though, we had clients who invested the time and had copy writers who would create product descriptions that catered to the different personality types.

Sometimes it even makes sense to start with small set of products. Consider your best selling products, and test with varying descriptions to see the impact. A perspective client had a product that generated over 60k in sales per month. Would we target the copy for that particular product page? Of course we would.

So, if I know that there are these specific personality traits, motivations, interests, guiding factors to 4 or 5 distinct individuals that visit my website – it’s a lot easier for me to cater to what they need than to 15,000 individuals that land on that page per month. I can take site product descriptions and add persuasive elements that would appeal to each of these personas. I can enhance a product page, beyond description only, with varying elements and applications that would cater to each persona type.

With personas, we’ve ultimately shrunk the target market tremendously and added some personality to the buyers we are dealing with. It’s no longer JUST a transaction – it’s Jane Kim from San Diego who owns a small business and worries about costs, but will spend money only after calculating a sizable ROI. 

© 2006-20010 Invesp