Maes et al. (1999), based on traditional buying behavior research, identify six fundamental stages in the buying process: (1) need identification, (2) product brokering, (3) merchant brokering, (4) negotiation, (5) purchase and delivery, and (6) product service and evaluation. Product catalogs facilitate the first three stages. To better understand the use of catalogs one should take into account the goals and tasks of consumers that mediate the search for a product. The model in Figure 14-4 describes the way an e-Customer interacts with the e-Shop while browsing or searching in order to locate products of interest. This part of online shopping is of great importance, not only because it is an integral portion of actually buying, but also because it determines user impressions and first-level assessment of the e-Shop they have come to contact with. Users consume most of their time during this task and use the feedback from this process to decide whether they will go on with the payment or leave their shopping cart at the cash register and exit. E-Shops suffer from this phenomenon but after all, the Internet is an impersonal, remote and extremely competitive world, which may prove both a blessing and a curse. In order to get the most out of it, customers must be kept satisfied. In the browse/search phase, satisfaction means that the customer should walk through as few states as possible in Figure 14-4 before—hopefully—ending up at the bottommost left state (i.e., proceed to payment). Failure to locate the item(s) means one customer lost and a hard to estimate spreading of disrepute for the e-Shop.
Figure 14-4: e-Customer browse/search model (a revised version of Krug, 2000, p. 56)
An efficient product catalog facilitates easy and fast product identification. The next section discusses the features that when implemented according to each special case requirements, assure catalog efficiency.
According to one of the primary rules of Web design, a Web site’s home page should vividly express the purpose of the site. Specifically for e-Commerce sites, the value of this guideline is enormous. The most straightforward way for an e-Store to indicate its purpose is to place products right on the home page (just as conventional shops place products in their windows). Therefore, guideline number one is that the products catalog should be featured on the home page of the e-Store. More over, it should be either appearing or be one click away from all e-Store pages, thus enabling easy and fast shopping. It is, though, important to point out that apart from the product catalog, links to information about charging, return policy, shipping, credit cards, and delivery should also be available on the home page. The rationale behind this guideline is that in many cases before searching for products to purchase, users may wish to find out whether their credit card is accepted, or that the e-Shop sends products to their country of residence, or that the product can be delivered by a certain date.
Constructing an effective catalog classification scheme is not an easy task and it is one of the parts of setting up a successful e-Shop that requires knowing customers well. Product classification should be useful to the customers, helping them locate products without moving forward and back in the hierarchy. Nielsen et al. (2000a) claim that “what constitutes good classification depends on the intended market and how familiar consumers are with the subject matter of the site.” There are cases where classification based on brands makes sense (e.g., in a tennis equipment e-Shop) and cases where it is absolutely senseless (e.g., in a flower e-Shop). Or it may be the case that a classification scheme that is useful for some customers it proves rather cumbersome for others, usually due to issues of internationalization, age, profession, sex, culture or education. A solution to such problems may be the support of multiple classification schemes (with links pointing to each scheme from the home or an upper-level page of the e-Shop) and also where appropriate classification of items in more than one of the hierarchy categories. Both ideas can be easily implemented online and are a good deployment of the trivial hypertext conveniences (i.e., cross reference linking).
The optimum input for deciding on the scheme to apply is the customers themselves. A typical method for acquiring this valuable knowledge is the card short technique (Pearrow, 2000, pp. 63-69). It is one of the simplest yet most useful techniques since it requires little time to complete, and few resources but can offer valuable insight helping designers and e-Shop builders understand how customers (intuitively) expect to find the products organized in categories. After having implemented a classification scheme, usability testing may be applied to indicate further modifications (rearrangements in category listings or additional product references).
In many cases, e-Shops deploy advanced technologies and features for presenting the classification of products (such as Java or Flash) but this can cause problems when a browser does not support such features, or when the connection bandwidth is low and cannot afford long downloading periods.
Before closing the classification topic, it is important to note that prior to deciding on an effective classification scheme, there is a crucial issue to consider: does the e-Shop under consideration really require product classification? The answer to this question depends mainly on the number of available products. When this number is small, it is much more efficient to list products in alphabetic order without any grouping. Direct product listing is quite appropriate especially for products customers like to browse, as they can access a product and see details by clicking on its name and by one click (backwards) return back to the complete product list.
Once a user has chosen to enter a catalog category, the displayed page contains all products that belong to the specified category. At this point it is crucial for the customer to be able to see what the product looks like. Depending on the kind of the product advanced visualization features and tools may as well be required. For instance, when the product type is running shoes, it is important to provide multiple views from various angles, details about available colors (even the ability to preview the product in the various combinations), and size information. Concerning sizes, e-Shops should provide for internationalization by taking into account for instance that US sizes differ from EU and provide either all size formats or a size conversion mechanism. Information on product availability is also crucial and should be available at a visible spot, since it is a factor that may affect the final buying decision. In general, the type of information appearing for each product listed in a category page depends on the product itself. Designers should keep in mind that customers expect one more level of detail for each product: the product page itself. Thus the product category page(s) are not required to list all product details (nor are they recommended to). They should though contain the kinds of information assumed to be affecting the comparison among products of the same category. After the user has decided upon a product, there is the product page—just one click away—to answer all specific questions and provide a much bigger image.
One of the primary design issues raised when it comes to product category pages is how many items should be listed. Is it better to list all category items at once (resulting in a long and slow page the user has to scroll) or to limit the number of products on each page up to a maximum that usually ranges between five and 20 items (but make the user request successive pages for the complete listing)? Both approaches face the user abandonment threat. In the former case, the single but long page may take too long to download. In the latter, the user may get tired of clicking on successive “next product listing page” links. Thus the guideline can not be very specific.
The final design decision should depend on the kind of merchandise, the amount of information on each product and the estimated downloading times (bearing in mind that users’ delay tolerance is usually around 10 seconds). It is important though to note that users may be a bit more patient if the page starts appearing soon (even if it takes a while longer to complete). In general, a complete category product list should not take more than three page requests and users in the case of product listings expect to scroll down and do so without nuisance. Note also that in order to make sure that the user will scroll down to the bottom of the page and will not miss the last product listed, it is useful to place at the top of each product listing page the total number of products included. By increasing the number of category products listed per page, the e-Shop allows the visual comparison of more products, thus enabling a trivial process for making a buying decision, either online or off-line.
When an e-Shop sells a wide variety of products (e.g., Web marts), the information load the customer has to handle until locating the product(s) of interest may be “unacceptably” heavy. Thus consumers need additional tools to answer fast and correctly their product enquiries and speed up their decision making process. Such tools comprise filtering tools, comparison tools, search utilities, as well as customer community tools.
Filtering tools. They are used for narrowing a large item set down to the subset that satisfies a number of additional criteria. Nielsen et al. (2000a) refer to this category of tools as winnowing tools, where winnowing literally means the separation of wheat from chaff (but more generally, the separation of useful from the non-useful). This process is similar to the option “search within search results” offered in some cases along with trivial search and is the further refinement of the returned results set. The set of criteria that can be used by consumers for the filtering is predefined by e-Shop designers and depend on the product distinguishing features, as well as the set of similar products the e-Shop has to offer. Typical criteria comprise price ranges, brands, colors, sizes, and performance characteristics (i.e., speed, capacity and more).
Comparison tools. Apart from filtering, there are cases of products that are difficult to compare even when the list of all similar products, along with their values for the criteria attributes, is available. Thus the customers’ decision making has to be further assisted using comparison tools. Comparison tools typically offer summarizing tables with similar products on one dimension and features on the other and make it easy to compare them on a feature-by-feature basis. In such settings it is important that the e-Shop allows the customers to specify the products to be compared. In certain cases where each product may have a lot of attributes, it may prove important to allow the customer to also specify the features upon which to base the comparison. There are even cases where the product to be purchased is made up of many separate components, such as a PC, where the comparison may regard alternative configurations (combinations of components). It goes without saying though, that regardless of how useful such decision support tools may prove in the case of large e-Shops, they are a diminishing factor for user satisfaction and efficiency when they are not well-implemented or are available in shops that do not need them (products are either few or not comparable).
Search. Web users are familiar with the notion of searching and browsing through search results. Thus search is a provision they expect to find available and visible on all pages, so as to resort to it whenever in need. The general guideline is that search should operate the way customers expect it to. It should be tolerant to minor misspellings, allow for synonyms and string keywords, return an easily interpretable results page and link to product pages. The “No results” page should also clearly indicate lack of returned results and where possible provide a way for customers to refine their search until they succeed (provided that the e-Shop has the product(s) of interest available). Search is indeed a big issue and would require a chapter of its own in this book to be covered properly. Relating thought to the online product catalog, search should be regarded as the feature that must be provided in combination with the catalog in order to be a reliable alternative tool to customers for locating the products of interest, compensating for a poorly designed catalog or a customer that cannot “afford” to navigate through the product classification hierarchy (Figure 14-4 illustrates the close connection between catalog browsing and searching). A remarkable finding of Nielsen et al. (2000b) is that if users don’t find what they are looking for on their first search attempt, the odds that they will succeed in their search decrease with each subsequent attempt. This observation imposes a quite demanding requirement for e-Shop designers and builders to “create sophisticated - but simple - search engines capable of delivering the goods on the user’s first search query.”
Community tools. Information such as customer opinions about a purchased product or product ratings by experts is useful for customers, as it is regarded as less biased (compared to product features as described by their manufacturers or traders). Moreover, ratings and in general recorded opinion of other buyers or experts is a positive sign for e-Shop credibility. If an e-Shop is used by other customers then it has been tested, and if customers return to it and submit their opinion about products, then they are positive about the shop (regardless of their positive or negative opinion about the product). In fact, it is a proof that a customer community has been shaped around the specific shop and this is a plus to its professionalism and trustworthiness and communicates these virtues in an indirect yet clear way. In many e-Shops, such ratings appear on the product pages and not on the product category pages. It is though much wiser, to provide visual rating indications (ticks or stars, for instance) on the product listing in category pages because this way customers can use them as a product comparison factor. Textual comments on the other hand—due to space constraints—should better be placed in the product category pages.