Research in e-commerce: Building a store to test out ideas

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

April 10, 2005 [3619 views]

Over the next month the OTHER media (my company) and I will be designing and building Food Parcels; a site selling gift hampers containing wine and specialist foods. This is the tenth e-commerce store we have built but in many ways it may turn out to be one of the most important because it will let us test out many ideas without having to ask permission from one of our clients.

The site will sell gifts and food and wine hampers and is the start of a series of food and wine sites that will be run under the same umbrella.

E-commerce to this point has been about getting a store online, connecting it to the company’s business and payment systems, making sure that it is on brand and providing tools to control and manage the stores.

But after three years of running stores for our clients we have moved into a new phase which is much more about understanding their customers and how we can tune the sites to make them a better experience and improve revenues. Looking across all the sites we run we can observe the following:

1. Wide variations in conversion rates (visitors to customers) from around 0.5% to over 2%
2. Very different styles of sites from news/publishing sites with associated stores to simple online shops with little additional content.
3. Different integration and payment modules including payment inside third party till systems and integrated payment within the stores themselves.
4. Wide variation in traffic levels due to the familiarity of the brands and how much advertising and marketing is being done online and offline.

Using these observations we can begin to construct theories of how particular stores can be improved and how we can change our tools to provide more information but to be able to test out the ideas that follow we need a guinea pig store where we can experiment. That is why, in association with Bedales in Borough Market, we are developing and building Food Parcels.

Here is the progress to date:

1. Established the aims and objectives for the project including agreeing the name and the types of gift products we will sell.
2. Developing a logo and overall brand look and feel; outsourcing the design itself to our friend Iain in Canada to keep costs low and avoid resource conflict with other client projects
3. Agreeing terms of Joint Venture between the OTHER media and Bedales
4. Developing sample products and testing them out as ideas on colleagues and staff
5. Development of ‘wire frame’ diagrams to show the customer journey through the site and allow discussion of usability and site functionality
6. Implementation of design using CSS and xHTML
7. Development of database to store products, customers and orders
8. Development of holding page to allow Google to start to find the site
9. Development of pages inside OTHERobjects CMS
10. Creation of example versions of each product
11. Photography of each product

We still have lots to do before an scheduled launch at the end of April:

• Complete legal agreements
• Test usability of proposed shopping system with test users
• Obtain SSL certificate
• Sort out banking and payment issues
• Sort out transport and shipping issues
• Complete all the copy for all aspects of the site
• Complete all design elements
• Process all the images for the products
• Start search engine optimisation
• Design promotions and launch offers

Even then this will only be the beginning. The real power of this site will come from our ability to test out ideas. Here are a few we hope to experiment with during the first few months after launch:

1. Do customer ratings and reviews help instil trust in potential consumers?
2. Can we simplify the registration process to improve conversions?
3. Should we save shopping cart contents between sessions?
4. Do landing pages help boost organic search engine traffic?
5. What sorts of offers do customers prefer?
6. How can we build long-term relationships with Food Parcel’s customers?
7. What sorts of information can we collect that will help us understand our customer behaviour?

I will report here regularly on the progress of the site and the results of our experiments.

What do you think?

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