Ruth P. Stevens Articles and Columns: IM Press (Interactive Marketing Press)

Site makeovers: A regular refresh is essential to e-commerce

E-commerce is in its boom years, having grown in 2007 nearly 6 times faster than total U.S. retailing, according to Internet Re-tailer magazine. Last year, online sales reached $165.9 billion, or 21.8% growth year on year, and this is only consumer sales, not including B-to-B. As a point of comparison, total retail sales grew only 3.9%, to $2.41 trillion.

U.S. Internet retailing is now more than a decade old, and developing a new level of maturity born from experience. Site redesign has emerged as a critical "must-do" for successful e-tailers who want to keep ahead of changing consumer tastes as well as emerging technological options for serving customers. Let's look at some examples of the whys, hows and results of some recent e-commerce site makeovers.

bestbuyeyeglasses.com (see website)
Concerns that their conversions and sales were suboptimal, the spectacles e-tailer bestbuyeyeglasses.com hired a web strategy consulting firm to analyze their site, and found several opportunities for change:

A new shopping cart that focused on both improved customer experience and better search engine rankings.
A more powerful on-site search tool, dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine, which allows faster and broader searches among the site's 40,000 SKUs.
Analytic tools to assess customer on-site behavior and identify promotional opportunities in real time.

The improvements resulted in conversion increase of 7% and a sales jump of 23%.

Lancome-usa.com (see website)
Parent company L'Oreal spent a year examining its Lancome cosmetics brand's e-commerce site and concluded some changes were required. In an unusual move, L'Oreal decided to tap into its network of department-store sales people, to better understand shopper needs and behavior. Then, working with two site design firms and an IT consulting company, they developed a new design and improved underlying functionality for the site.

Among the new features:

Ability to keep all previously viewed items on a single page, eliminating the use of the "back button" when browsing its 1,100 SKUs.
Page layout at top and left side allowing shopping by category, topic and color.
Mouse-over on products pops up a Quick Shop function allowing the customer to view size, quantity and price, and add the product to a wish list, or buy on the spot.
A query tool that lets customers type in the name of a favorite old product and receive suggestions about current products that are similar.

The results: Average order size is up 10% after the redesign.

ActionEnvelope.com (see website)
Action Envelope recently undertook its 4th makeover since it began e-commerce channel in 2000. This time, the redesign focused on new technologies, including asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) to improve interactivity.

Made to Order, through which customers can easily place orders for completely customized envelopes.
Faster sign-in for current customers, using an easy drop-down tab.
Shop by color, where customers can select a color palate and view all the envelopes available in that range.

Online sales rose in the following year by 15%, to $10.5 million.

Scholastic.com (see website)
Scholastic is a publisher of educational materials for children, parents and teachers. Last summer, the company revamped its website to make it easier to shop from, especially for its 1 million registered teachers. Some of the improvements:

Easier to find and download lesson plans and unit plans, which are now organized by grade and subject.
Added a microsite called Printables, which is a library of more than 10,000 useful items for grade school classrooms, like flash cards, awards, practice materials and games, available to teachers for an annual subscription fee of $34.95.
Parents can search for techniques to help their children with homework and study skills.
Homework for Kids, another microsite, offers kids a wide variety of games and tools for such tasks as building vocabulary and writing a better book report.

Scholastic online sales grew 24%, to $372 million in fiscal 2007, due to the redesign, in combination with other programs.

Rules to live by
As e-commerce evolves, some key principles of site redesign are beginning to emerge:

The site needs to serve your particular customers. So the more you know about your target, the more effectively you can design the site.
While there is no hard and fast rule on redesign frequency, most e-commerce sites find they need a refresh every two or three years.
Keep up with new technologies, but don't let your site get over-crowded with features. Simplicity helps your customers buy.

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