The online Product Catalog
or Electronic Product Catalog (EPC) is e-Shops’
interactive front-end to potential customers. It offers a listing of all available products,
combined with classification and retrieval support, in addition to interfaces to other e-Shop
services. Formal definitions of electronic product catalogs vary in scope. Timm and Rosewitz (1998)
define them as systems, which “...allow customers to browse through
multimedia product representations and get relevant information concerning the product
...”, while Segev et al. (1995) describe them more broadly as “... a virtual gateway to a company through which customers obtain product
information, order goods and services, make payment, access customer support, provide feedback, and
participate in other corporate activities, …” A term very closely related to the
electronic product catalog is what Nielsen et al. (2000a) reference as “Category Pages,” described
as “…those mid-level pages in an e-Commerce website that help customers
find the product listing pages – and thus the products they want to buy.” In fact, in
this framework it is the combination of category pages along with the product listing pages that
amount to the meaning of an electronic product catalog. Ceri et al. (1999) claim that electronic
product catalogs can be seen as Web information systems that, in
addition to laying emphasis on the presentation of products/services, contain some standard
functionality regarding navigation, searching, selection and ordering of products (Koch & Turk,
1997). Online product catalogs have their origin in paper-based product catalogs, which provide the
convenience of home shopping and contain colorful and structured representation of products. Over
time, product catalogs have changed their styles along with the carrier of information for which
they were created and CD-ROM based catalogs came into play, which compared to their paper-based
predecessors, offer sophisticated search functionality, as well as multimedia product presentation.
Online product catalogs materialize the paper-based catalog metaphor[1] (Nielsen, 1993), but, due to the fact
that they provide a much more powerful source of information on products, and that purchase
decisions are usually made on this information, they are considerably more effective. As in a
physical store, merchandise in an online store can be grouped within logical departments to make
locating an item simpler. And while in most physical stores each product is kept in one place only,
a Web store has the advantage of including a single product in multiple categories, just as easily
(for example, running shoes can be listed as both “footwear” and “athletic gear”).
In its simplest, primitive form an electronic product catalog is a listing of goods and
services. At the time of their first appearance on the Web, catalogs were simple static HTML lists.
Operations such as editing an item’s listing, deleting or inserting an item required editing the
HTML code of one or more pages. The large commerce sites handling big volumes of products, require
sophisticated navigation aids and effective product organization, and thus use dynamic forms of
product catalogs which retrieve contents from one or more databases. Dynamic catalogs can feature
multiple photos of each item, detailed descriptions and a search mechanism that allows customers to
check item availability. Yet surveys have indicated that the search for products in e-Shops is a
cumbersome process. Customers have trouble finding the products they are looking for, and many
abandon the online search before buying. This shows that there is great potential for online sales
which is lost and that catalogs do not fulfill their task successfully. E-Customers have problems
locating the right product(s) usually due to poorly structured product information and information
overloaded sites offering no navigational support. In this chapter we examine catalogs from the
perspective of information organization, management and retrieval, as well as usability. We will
briefly review the functionalities typically provided by online product catalogs and propose a set
of design guidelines for efficient information access and display. Figure 14-1: Electronic product
catalog on Amazon.com (accessed 10/23/2003)
The Shopping Cart (or “shopping basket,” “shopping bag,”
“shopping sled,” or “wheelbarrow”) refers to a single page in an e-Shop, listing the items the
customer has chosen to purchase. Like in the case of electronic product catalogs that serve as
metaphors of their paper-based predecessors, the shopping cart is also a metaphor used for allowing
customers to utilize their existing knowledge about how to buy products. The functionality
typically supported by a shopping cart, allows customers to place products in it, remove one or
more of them, or proceed to the checkout process.
Figure 14-2: Icons for shopping
cart
A well-designed shopping cart can facilitate the transaction and encourage consumers to buy
more (Robn, 1998), while poorly designed interface and functionality frustrate and prevent them
from completing an online transaction. According to a BizRate.com survey[2],
78% of online buyers abandon their shopping carts. From them, 55% abandon carts before they enter
the checkout process. Another 32% abandon their carts at the point of sale (e.g., when they are
asked to fill in shipping and payment information). The reasons why shoppers abandon their carts
vary and include (Hill, 2001) insufficient information, poor navigation, difficulty at handling,
limited functionalities, confusing buttons or icons, time-consuming checkout processes, low quality
of user interface, and more. According to Rewick (2000), the key is the understanding of customers’
psychology, needs, requirements and interests and how these factors are influenced by Web site
design. However, abandonment does not always indicate specific design problems, as in many cases it
is driven by the way consumers shop online (Smith, 2000). And nevertheless, products in a shopping
cart (even in an abandoned one) convey a piece of valuable information: customer’s interest in
specific products.
Effectiveness plays a central role in this chapter. For an online shop to be effective, it
has to reassure user satisfaction. According to what HCI and more specifically UCD (User-Centered
Design) experts dictate, e-Commerce should practice natural selection. People by nature will select
the easiest way to accomplish a task (find what they want, buy what they want, or do what they
want). According to Vredenburg et al. (2002), “Complexity is the biggest
inhibitor of product success.” They argue that especially in the domain of e-business
applications usability is vital to a company’s success, its competitive edge, and perhaps even its
survival. In this chapter we will present the conceptual model of the shopping cart and discuss its
typical functionalities. Our primary goal is to reach a set of design guidelines that can guarantee
user satisfaction and diminish shopping cart abandonment. Moreover, in terms of both the online
product catalog, as well as the shopping cart, we explore the potential of incorporating
personalization features for improving information presentation and access, speeding up interaction
and upgrading the overall user experience in the e-Shop. In the
last section of this chapter we conclude
the topic of effective catalog and shopping cart design and its crucial effect on enhancing the
e-purchase experience and increasing the look-to-buy rates (Lee
& Podlaseck, 2000) of an online shop (i.e., the percentage of product impressions, meaning
customer accesses to a product page that are eventually converted to purchases). [1]A metaphor is a possible way to achieve a mapping between the computer system and some
reference system known to the users in the real world. A metaphor can provide a unifying design
framework and facilitate learning by allowing users to draw upon the knowledge they already have
about the reference system (Hudson, 2000). [2]BizRate.com Web Site. Accessible at
http://www.bizrate.com
Introduction