We shop online in spite of frustrations
Shopping online is easy. Well, relatively easy. Okay, sometimes it’s just downright frustrating. For the most part, though, I am willing to jump through the hoops in order to get the items I want because either they are not available to me locally, the prices are better or it saves me a trip to a brick and mortar.
Shop.org, a trade group for online retailers, performed a study of “real shoppers” and their experiences online. You can read the full article here.
The sites they chose to use in the study included Best Buy, Circuit City, Coach, Finish Line and Overstock.com, among others, meaning these were not your little niche or upstart sites. They are well-known and presumably the most well-designed sites out there. The shoppers were also not newbies. They considered themselves “veteran” online shoppers, and represented an upscale demographic.
Shoppers were asked to talk through their experiences shopping on these sites, while web developers watched them via closed circuit TV. What they found out was that most of the sites had inherent design flaws, or were missing key functionality that would help a shopper make choices or compare products more easily. The research company reported that web developers themselves were just as frustrated when shopping online, finding the same issues with the sites.
I will admit there are sites I shop that perpetually frustrate me. When an item comes in multiple colors but I can not see a photo of the item in each color, that frustrates me. When I want to continue shopping after adding something to my cart, but I have to back click to return to the section I was browsing, that frustrates me. When I am not allowed to “view all” to make my browsing faster, that frustrates me. When I am not given multiple ways to search or browse, that frustrates me. But, I suffer through the frustrations because most of the time for me, the advantages of online shopping outweigh the disadvantages.
I think in the near future we will see some drastic changes in the design and functionality of online shopping sites. Retailers are beginning to understand that they’re not designing web sites for themselves, so they had better catch up to what online shoppers really want. And, with more and more competition online, those sites that don’t function the way we need them to will lose out to the ones that do.
Online Shopping, Shop.org, Web Development
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