|
A Case for the Importance of the Intuitive Customer Experience
Heated debate recently ensued on an eBay stores message board thread proposing that store items ought to show up in the eBay search results along with auction items, prompting me to more closely examine the entire eBay Stores model before arriving at some pretty startling, yet, in hindsight obvious, conclusions.
Store Item Visibility on eBay
To eBay's credit, the site has rolled out many innovative enhancements for sellers and specifically to help sellers promote stores and buyers to find them. Along with a powerful cross-merchandising feature, eBay has made the Store icon much more prominent next to the user name and has provided a box around the seller info which also serves to highlight the stores link. Other positives have included merchandising calendars, themed promotions and community activities, as well as planned page redesigns and improved listing tools.
It's clear that for those who utilize primarily the auction model, an eBay store, when used properly, can be a wonderful way to drive repeat and incremental sales for eBay sellers. It's also apparent to me that those who plan to use eBay as a host for their store without including an auction component in their marketing plans will struggle. Without auction listings, store items languish unless outside promotion is used to drive traffic. Unfortunately, it's not in merchants' best interest to drive traffic to their eBay stores or items using outside ads such as Google AdWords.
The Fatal Flaw and the "A-Ha" Moment
Because eBay's store solution doesn't provide a store-branded customer experience with an integrated, store-specific shopping cart, eBay creates a non-intuitive experience for shoppers who find themselves clicking an outside link to an eBay store expecting these elements as part of a true storefront experience. Instead, after leaving the ad banner or search engine page, the customer lands on a page on eBay, creating a fatal flaw in the process.
But wait - for the merchant, it gets worse!
Beginning with the first product, the identity of the store that the customer entered is shown only by the basic store icons mentioned above and whatever store branding is built into the HTML code (without links). Much more prominently displayed is the full eBay Navigation Bar and the link right to the category list of all the products that are competing for the shopper's money.
Although shoppers have many choices, most people will agree that if a store has just opened the door to all of its competitors' stores and pointed the customer right to the similar items, that action will probably affect the close percentage and sale prices of its own items. A-ha!
Intuitive Experience Stops "Cybervertigo"
For the end-user customer, the plunge into the eBay auction environment when a store was expected can be confusing. For the merchant, it is unprofitable to pay to create a confusing experience through outside ads. Confusing the customer exacerbates the risk of creating a negative customer experience my friend John-Scott Dixon, Sr. VP of eCommerce at Insight, calls "cybervertigo."
Online shoppers experiencing cybervertigo are on a dizzying trip through links that leave them unsure of how they will find their way back to the item they sought through the original link from where they ended up. eBay Stores should be simple and intuitive for customers to use and delivered as a store-branded exclusive experience, to provide the greatest long-term value for the customers of both eBay and its merchants.
|
