Most of us, at one time or another, have purchased something on the Web.  The fact that not just the Web, but commerce over the Web has proliferated shows the ubiquity of the web in our every day lives.  Yet for most people, web commerce is still an iffy proposition and this is largely due to the user experience we face in the solutions that exist.  The purpose of this lecture is to examine the reasons that the user experience in web commerce is so poor and how we as web designers can consciously create better experiences for our users.

In order to get a better understanding of how to approach designing for web commerce, we need to examine what makes that experience so poor in the first place.  Here’s a short list of some of the problems with the web commerce experience.

1. Most e-commerce solutions are poorly designed structurally
   While most of us understand the general flow of the process, there is still very little in the way of standards.  While people like “cool” designs, the purchasing process needs to make the user comfortable by presenting recognizable features and elements and following a generally standard flow of events.
    
2. E-Commerce processes are not the same as brick-and-mortar shopping
   As much as we’ve attempted to equate the digital buying process to normal, everyday shopping experiences, there are still fundamental differences.  Where in physical shopping we are able to see, feel, smell, and taste (note that I’ve left out the last sensory value), the digital world lacks that capacity so users are left with two options: trust or research.  To research, the user has to either embark on a (long) digital exploration for information or possibly go to a store physically to conduct his or her research.  To trust, the site must provide enough assurance and information for the user to be comfortable with making the purchase.
    
3. Most e-commerce solutions are poorly documented – users have difficult time finding things
   The more inventory that gets added to the store, the more difficult it is to find things.  This can be attributable to a number of issues: nomenclature in categorization, lack or improperly functioning search capabilities, or just poor inventory management.  And past inventory, we still have the problem of presenting viable ancillary information, such as return, shipping, and privacy policies.
    
4. Payment solutions work the opposite of normal web standards – the fewer the pages viewed the better
   Since the advent of e-commerce solutions, one problem developers face is how to shorten the purchasing-cycle life span.  In the physical shopping world, the longer we make the process, the more likely that the user is to purchase.  By the same token, the quicker the payment process, the more apt a person is to buy.  In the Web world, it works the opposite – the longer someone spends on a site, the less likely he is to purchase.   The payment process, however, remains the same – the easier we make it to complete the purchase, the less likely we are to be left with unpaid carts.The payment solution is a big gaping hole in web design – frequently the process is more elongated than the user would hope for, increasing the possibility of losing the customer before the payment is complete.  This is exacerbated by the problem that the payment process requires large amounts of information, which the user is required to manually enter – a procedure that is not required in the physical shopping world.
    
5. Users still don’t trust web commerce/difficulty assuring customers
   Two primary trust issues pervade commerce web sites.  The first is the assurance that a storefront is a real store.  The explosion of phishing and digital identity theft has only served to worsen this problem.  The experience that the user has during his or her shopping process can often alleviate this problem but still does not remove the comfortability of the physical storefront.  Second, customers to this day are still leery of the security of passing rather sensitive information over the web, despite the increased use of SSL (and note here that pretty much anyone can acquire an SSL certificate – the only thing the SSL truly serves is to prevent outside parties from intercepting data during transmission).
    
6. Payment solutions are expensive
   For (Web) store owners, the cost of doing business over the web has its price.  While we aren’t burdened with the expense of operating a physical storefront, the cost of transacting can still be high.  Remember that every page viewed has a cost, so if a purchase is not made by the user, there is still a cost to operating the store (just as if we were operating a brick-and-mortar store).  The cost of collection is also higher, as we will examine later today when we look at how transactions are processed.
    
7. Still requires time-delay
   With the exception of digital media purchasing, there is no instant gratification with Web shopping – the user almost invariably has to wait for his or her product(s) to arrive.  This, in turn, can become elongated depending on the provider’s turnaround – the longer it takes the provider to fulfill and place the item into the delivery process, it’s just added time.
    
8. Shipping solutions are costly
   Web store purchases come at a cost to the consumer in the form of shipping charges.  Depending on the honorability of the store owner, the geographic disparity of the user and provider, and the weight of the items, this can often be an expensive issue for the buyer.
    
9. Tax difficult to enforce
   In the US, the government still wants its piece of the pie.  This is frequently an issue for the designer/developers who has to collect the information of where the purchase is being make from (or shipped to) in order to determine if tax should be collected.
    
10. Still requires manual intervention
    The web store still requires manual intervention in the form of the provider potentially having to box and ship items.  Because the web is a 24/7 business, the delay can cause buyers concern.

There are probably many other issues that you might have experienced.  As web designers, it is critical in our every day browsing to notice these experiences and what makes each of them good or bad so that we can design our own sites better.

The Shopping Cycle

For a typical web shopping experience, the overall flow of events is pretty much the same.  In a shortened view, they would be:

But for a designer/developer, we have to be concerned with all the steps in between.  Below is a diagram showing the typical flow of events from a functional and structural standpoint:

While this is only a simple illustration, it should give you an idea of how much more involved the shopping process is and why functional considerations easily get in the way of design considerations.  However, don’t ever forget – it’s the user buying … if they can’t buy easily then they won’t buy at all!  Design considerations must still take some importance (now I’m not saying you have to lose functionality but don’t lose sight of the design too).

How Are Payments Collected

There are many ways to collect payments over the web and the designer/developer is frequently faced with more options to choose from than a physical store operator.  But this can also pose a problem for the developer since this means we also have to decide which options will best serve the user experience.  One problem the web operator faces is that the cost of offering credit cards is more expensive than in the physical fulfillment world.  This is largely because of risk assessment – the fact that there is no physical exchange of goods at the point-of-sale is a concern for credit card processors and the fact that historically web transactions have a higher chargeback rate.  Likewise, the smaller the operator, the more expensive the option (since the processor stands to make less out of the operator and have a higher rate of risk).

Typical credit card processing fees:

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	Retail Store	Web Store	Digital Media	Third-Party
Discount Rate	1.2-3%	1.7-7.5%	1.7-7.5%	11.5-16%
Transaction Fee	15-20¢	15-30¢	15-30¢	n/a
Reporting Fee	$10-20	$10-20	$10-20	n/a
Terminal Fee	$0-10	$0-20	$0-20	n/a

Approaching the E-Commerce Task

As a designer/developer, there are numerous questions that should be asked before attacking an e-commerce project.  These questions and answers should be fully detailed in the project plan.  Here is a list of some of the questions you should ask, whether developing for yourself, a client or for a company you work for.

• What are we selling? Is/are the item(s) products or services (tangibles versus intangibles)?
• Do we have brick-and-mortar support?
• How do I/we expect to fulfill orders?  Are we directly shipping product or is it coming from a remote warehouse/fulfillment house?
• What is the taxability of the product(s) or service(s) we are selling?
• If a product, what is the weight of the items (hence, the cost of shipping)?
• What methods of shipping are we going to offer?  What shippers are we going to use (USPS, UPS, Fedex, DHL)?
• Are our product costs comparable to competitors, particularly brick-and-mortar locations?
• How are we processing payment (mail-in payment, third-party provider, direct credit card processing, ACH)?  Who is providing each of these services?
• What is my current and anticipated sales volume?
• Is the business incorporated?
• Are there clearly defined shipping, return, refund/exchange, privacy and terms of use policies?
• If digital media products, am I licensed to sell the product?

Once these questions have been fully answered, we can begin the design phase of the project.  Research into e-commerce processes by UX experts (particularly Nielsen in his books Defining Web Usability and Prioritizing Web Usability) indicate that users expect certain things of e-commerce sites, so when we approach the design phase, we need to bear these issues in mind and how they might affect the design of the rest of the site.  Some of these expectations include:

• If there are more than 20 items, the items should be searchable
• Consistent categorization
• Comprehensive categorization (don’t expect users to understand made up terms or what product lines mean – use globally recognized terminology)
• Images of products (don’t ever discount the power of seeing)
• Clear descriptions and/or specifications
• Clear pricing
• Shopping carts with the ability to adjust or remove items
• Secure payment processing (SSL)
• Abbreviated payment processing flows
• Clear navigation to store policies
• Email confirmation of purchase

The basic tenet is, don’t forget to visually remind the user as much detail as possible without inundating them with information.  From the UX side, also don’t forget that each item in your store represents a new opportunity to optimize your search engine visibility.  Digital storefronts are in the top five robot-friendly web site types, so proper markup is important.

My recommendation is to break the shopping experience into three parts: the shopping, the carting and the payment.  The shopping experience is the portion where users search and locate specific items to purchase.  How they do this follows the normal path of user experience.  The carting portion is where users acquire a view of the items they’ve selected and are provided the opportunity to modify the cart contents.  This portion should be provided on no more than a single (dynamic) page that clearly details the items, quantity, unit price and total price.  The payment portion is where the user must provide payment and shipping details.  The divide between the carting and payment segments is critical – this is where the users are finally hit with the total amount of the purchase after the shipping and taxes are added in.  This is the most common place where potential sales are lost.
Special consideration needs to be given to the payment segment.  Here we typically have to collect large quantities of information.  Consider that in a normal, physical product storefront we have to know:

1. The recipient name (shipping name)
2. The shipping address
   1. Street Address/PO Box
   2. City
   3. State
   4. Zip or Postal Code
   5. Country
3. Additional contact information
   1. Email Address
   2. Phone number
   3. Fax number
4. Billing Information
   1. Payer Name
   2. Payer Account Information
   3. Credit Card Number with Expiration and the CSC number, or
   4. Bank account, routing number and account type

Most of us realize that from a user experience standpoint, completing 10-20 input fields is normal, but we also recognize that this can be a tedious process.  From a design standpoint, this can also be a daunting process – should we ask for the information all in one shot (and potentially increase errors, lose the customer because the form is too big) or over several pages (customer loses interest, customer loses connection).  The reality is that there is no steadfast answer, but from a design perspective you should look at different scenarios and even mock-up different flows to see what works best.

In the end, e-commerce can have both positive and negative impact on both the web site as well as the business.  Constructing e-commerce with user experience in mind will only serve to emphasize the positive, but there are several additional considerations that we have not looked at before that need to be examined before tackling the job.

• Required Reading: Web Usability Illustrated: Breathing Easier With Your Usable E-Commerce Site by Eric Schaffer and John Sorflaten and Better Web Forms: Redesigning eBay’s Registration by Garrett Dimon
• Required Listening: The Ecommerce Checkout Report from Get Elastic (blog) – please also download and read the white paper
• There will be a quiz on December 1 (the next class) covering e-commerce usability issues from today’s lecture, the reading and the media item (you can opt to listen or read)
• Assignment 5: will be done in class.  Download Instructions & Return Sheet.  If you are not attending class today, you can still turn in the assignment.  If the assignment is returned by 5pm on the day of class (as in 11/17/07) there will be no point deduction.  After that, the final due date is Monday, 11/19/07 at 5pm for 25 points off (maximum 75 points).