Feedback on ecommerce site evaluation
Written by: Jonathan Briggs
October 13, 2005 [3830 views]
Thanks to all of you who completed the task. It wasn’t hard but a few of you still cannot follow instructions. I will be lenient this week but not next week. Remember that you have to complete the majority of the surveys for this module to get the credit for the work and I am looking at the quality of your answers as well as ticking the boxes.
Here are some general results from the survey
59% of the sites you looked at were already selling. That means there is still a considerable number of retailers and museums who have not embraced ecommerce. I suspect that the others could generally be improved.
75% of the sites were easy to navigate, 67% had quality information and 71% offered opportunities for feedback.
On the other hand, according to you only 27% offered an internal search, 27% offered some sort of personalisation, 44% had a sense of tempo, 34% offered recommendations, 39% offered frequently asked questions, 25% were tightly integrated into the business and only 9% helped customers choose what they wanted. Only 46% of the sites were accessible. Remember that this is now a legal requirement and not simply a nice to have.
I think that some of you may change your opinions over the course of the module especially about search engines. You thought that 74% of the sites were well optimised. I expect to change your minds about this.
When you looked for some negative things you found them. 21% of the sites presented a some kind of barrier (registration, Flash movie) to transacting and 35% of the sites were fault, 53% were rated poor for internal search and you felt that 40% offered poor reassurance to customers.
31% had poor classification of products, 24% challenged visitors with mystery menus and 37% did not live up to their offline branding.
From these figures you should be able to see that there is lots of scope for improvement. The key now is to start to think which improvements will have the biggest impact on the businesses you are reviewing.
In terms of your comments these varied widely from well thought through suggestions and observations to repetition of the question eg “found it in search engines”.
I liked the following observations because they had not been included in the list of things to look for…
You liked…
good use of interactive game, multiple languages, “made you feel you were in the real shop”, integration between the site and the shop, good jobs section, “provides all the basic information you would need as a customer”, customer forum, ability to zoom in on product images, “the site map with a link to every page on the site”, picture library.
And you disliked…
Text size too small, “coming soon”, map interface hard to use, annoying sound clips attached to pages, damaging the brand, site seemed childish, pop ups, “at least provide hyperlinks to the stockists”, navigation changes as you move around the site, no sense of security, “poorly targeted to its audience”, “site felt cheap”,
What do you think?
