Climbing the North Face of the Uxbridge Rd

Gareth    Planning    

Had a chuckle when looking at the Piton the other day. Complete class

Great customer experience

Gareth    Planning    

One of my closest friends had a son not so long ago. On hearing the news, I logged on to the net, intent on sending the tired but happy couple something nice. I liked the idea of a hamper, something nice for mum to get, after the inevitable stress of giving birth. 10 minutes of browsing later, I came across the heavenly hamper company. I liked the site, thought the hamper selections were nice and original, and so ordered a hamper for my friends, to be delivered to their house in London.

Checkout was good, got the usual emails to confirm everything, and felt happy with the purchase. But, at this point, I didn’t have any real positive or negative feelings about the company. The experience so far had been good and on a par with other sites I’d used in the past. Was I likely to go back? To remember them, their name or web address? Honestly, not at this stage.

The hamper turned up, on time, and was happily received by my friends. Great. Job done. Happy customer (me) and happy friends. Still, though, no real impression has been formed, but I am now slightly more likely to go back.

I use the net for shopping a great deal, and for one off or irregular purchases, I’m not that easy to impress these days, as I’ve seen and bought from too many sites that are all, effectively, the same. Now if I get a bad experience, perhaps late delivery or a poor checkout, then I’m likely to remember and not use them again. Worse still, if something terrible happens, for example they don’t deliver at all, or I can’t get any kind of reply from them, then not only do I not go back, but I tell my friends how terrible they are.

This kind of negative marketing is common place in markets where the bar is high for customer satisfaction, and getting things right is no longer enough to stand out.

Back to the hampers; a couple of days later I got a letter in the post, with a hand written envelope. Inside was an A5 card, my receipt and a hand written note, on a printed complement slip, thanking me for my purchase.

Now I remember the Heavenly Hamper company. When next I want to send a hamper, they will be my first (and probably) last visit.

From a Webtogs perspective, it’s all very well planning the perfect checkout and agonising over the colour of the ‘Add to basket’ button, but taking care of your customers and making them realise how important they are, is far more relevant and effective in the quest for perfect etail.

Snow business like snow business

Gareth    General Outdoor    

The mountains are beautiful places to my mind, and to lots of other people, but although we are in the middle of summer right now, I think they are at their most stunning with a hefty dump of snow on them. At the same time though when they look at their most beautiful however, they can also be extremely dangerous. A bit like Anna Nicole Smith according to one of my more hollywood familiar walking friends…….

To walk the hills in winter you need a specific set of skills, and although I often gazed about winter hills with a look of hunger, I never felt I had the skills to ensure I could get on and off them with any safety. As a result I decided to get some training with the good folk from the national mountain centre at Plas Y Brenin and signed up for their introduction to Winter mountaineering course.

The course was held on the West coast of Scotland, we were based at Ballahulish, in between Glen Coe and the Ben Nevis range. This gave us a wide range of hills to wander up, depending on which ones had the most snow. In particular, I most enjoyed heading up Bucaille Etive Mor, I think the stand out hill in Glen Coe, guarding the entrance from Ranoch Moor.

The main basics are snow skills, crampon usage and Ice Axe arrest. Although you never want to have to use an ice axe arrest in anger, it was the most fun part of the course as this video hopefully shows!

Our marketing whiz says hello…

Gareth    Planning    

Philip Wilkinson, our resident marketing expert, would like to say hello. In this short video he talks about why he got involved with Webtogs, what his role is moving forwards and a load of other general fluff that we could have done without

Ok, so Phil made me post that one. A slightly more sensible version…

Shopping baskets

Gareth    Planning    

We’ve been taking a look at how the major e-commerce players handle their shopping baskets. It’s an interesting exercise, as things like this have a massive impact on how easy your site is to use, and so how well you convert the traffic to your site.

Throughout the design of Webtogs, we’ve had this idea of a cone, that represents the customers journey through our site. We see it as our job to get them to the tip of the cone as quickly and as easily as possible.

Our cone theory…

eConsultancy took a major look at the checkout process of the top 100 e-commerce sites and published a very interesting report. Whilst it’s not directly relevant to my post here, it provides some interesting background reading on the whole basket / payment / checkout side of things.

Opinion on “best practice” is divided on the basket issue, with many successful sites using very different methods. What I want to do here is take a look at our top 2 ‘basket’ issues and describe how we have dealt with them for Webtogs. I’ve picked Amazon.co.uk, Zappos.com, Play.com and Gap.com as sites to look at here. These are all hugely profitable and popular e-retailers, so it must be good practice if they do it? (I’m not trying to put Webtogs in the same space, these sites bill billions of dollars a year, we’ve yet to make a single dollar!). I use amazon and play frequently, so I know how they deal with this. Zappos and gap, however, I’ve never bought from, so I’ll be finding out how these 2 do things as I write this (so, in effect, we’ll be going on this little journey together!)

What happens when I click the “add to basket” button?

First I tried Amazon. Theirs is a simple system (always a good thing in our minds), simply click the add to basket page and when you do, you are taken to your basket (i’ve not talked about 1-click here at all, but it obviously changes things for amazon…)

(It’s interesting to note that Amazon use very little screen space to show what’s actually in your basket, with most of the screen showing what else you can buy, up-sell as it’s called.)

Then came Play. They use a persistent shopping basket, that’s on every page. Here’s the before and after…

I really like using this system, as it’s simple and keeps me on the page I’m looking at. The downside here is, (a) I wonder how many of these get ‘dropped’ compared with Amazon and (b) there’s no system in place to let me know I’ve added something to my basket, other than the change in the basket itself. I don’t find this a problem, but I wonder how many other users don’t realise something has been added…

Zappos is very similar to Amazon here. Click the button, see the basket page, with a link to go back. Nice and simple.

Zappos, however, have given more space for the actual basket here, and have shown the total cost, before delivery, which is a nice feature, as some sites don’t show delivery charges, until you are half way through checkout.

The most interesting one (for me at least!) was Gap. They do something different again. Here’s the before shot…

And this one shows the pop-up notice they use to tell the customer the product is now in the basket…

Having to click the X to close, is annoying for me, but it does mean the customer knows they have added to basket. What I also noticed on the Gap site, is they have a neat little ‘QuickLook’ system that allows you to configure and buy an item, from the list view. Here’s a shot of how this works…

We played about with this kind of thing as a feature for Webtogs, but decided in the end it was too confusing to use. I do really like the way Gap have done this, though. Perhaps we’ll re-visit this in a future release…

So what will Webtogs do? well, we’ve gone the simple route and opted for the ‘click the button, view the basket page’ approach. Here’s our before and after…

Our various designs have used every method there is, but ultimately we think this is the way to go. It stays true to our ‘cone’ theory, is nice and simple and should offer the best conversion rates. The only issue for us, is the break in navigation for the customer, but if they’ve added the item to their basket, do they still want to be on that page? We think they will have read / looked at enough by then.

How can I see what’s in my basket and how do I change things?

This is another big ‘basket’ issue. If you’re shopping for stuff and you add something to your basket, chances are (if the site takes you to your basket page), you’ll checkout your item. But what if you want to buy something else? Well, you’ll click back on your browser or use a ‘continue shopping’ style link and start looking for more things to buy. Now, what happens in this scenario if you want to check your basket? Perhaps you forgot the colour or size you chose?

The play.com method of showing the basket in full on each page, makes this easy…

Click the ‘x’ to remove your item (actually it decreases qty by 1, which annoys me!). If you want to increase the quantity, you have to add the item to your basket again. To be honest, this works ok as Play’s product set is mainly music and movies, and I can’t see too many people wanting more than 1 here. So, in dealing with issue 2, the play basket works out ok. But it’s not so good for issue 1.

Amazon, on the other hand, make it harder to change your basket. You need to click the view basket link, that’s in the header on just about every page, this takes you to your basket page (which is actually different from the page you see when you add to basket…)

And here’s the basket page itself:

Now, this always worried us. It’s a fairly bad customer journey, as if you want to make basket changes, you are taken away from the page you were looking at. I guess Amazon are keen to get people to checkout, and considering how successful they are, I’m really not one to argue! So, this is not so good for issue 2, but good for issue 1, the opposite, if you like, of the play basket.

On to Gap..

Now here, I can see how many items are in my ‘bag’ on every page, but not how much it’s going to cost (interesting!). If i click the ‘my bag’ link, i get…

Now, this shows me my item, allows me to change stuff, etc. But, I’ve still had to leave the page i was on, so similar to Amazon. Gap do, however, provide a neat continue shopping link, that allows you to choose your destination… (another idea for the melting pot!).

Zappos, again, only provide a link to the basket, they don’t show an item or cost count, and if you click the link, you get the basket page.

So, if you’re still reading this rather long post (and top marks for stamina by the way!), here’s what we’ve come up with, as a sort of solution to this issue:

The ‘Ajax Basket’ or ‘Quick Basket View’ for the less techy amongst us. Basically, if you rollover the ‘View Basket’ link, this appears. It allows you to increase / decrease quantity (with a real-time stock check, of course!), remove an item or checkout. If you click the ‘View Basket’ link, you are taken to your main basket page.

Now, it’s entirely possible that we’ve gone too far with this, and conversions will suffer as we give customers more power to change / remove things from their basket. Personally I think it’s a great feature and makes the site that much easier to use, which has got to be a good thing.

Amazon.co.uk, Zappos.com, Gap.com and Play.com are in no way affiliated or connected with Webtogs Ltd. The opinion herein is that of the author alone, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of Webtogs Ltd. All trademarks acknowledged. E&OE.