Your eShop Customers and Internet Shopping
Return to the articles index
A few months ago I drove from Cambridge down to the South Coast of England. Thanks to the infamous M25 motorway the journey took 4 hours, however, on reaching my destination it felt like I'd only been travelling for an hour and I had no clear recollection of large parts of my journey.
It turns out this is not unusual, in fact a recent study revealed that nearly 1 in 4 drivers have motoring memory blanks after travelling familiar roads.
You're probably asking yourself what has any of this got to do with your eShop customers! The answer is more than you might first imagine.
eShop Customers on Auto-Pilot
It would be unfair to describe all of your eShop customers as being in some kind of self-induced Internet trance, simply following the path of least resistance around the Web. Those very same individuals will on other occasions have moments of clarity and focus and hunt down their chosen product with cool calculation.
However, for a significant pecentage of regular Internet users a relaxed auto-pilot mental state is more typical as they trawl the search engines and shops looking for items of interest.
Your eShop Through a Looking Glass
As with driving on auto-pilot, although you can see everything around you, your brain is only pro-actively processing the critical zone of information directly in front of you. You are passively aware of what you see outside of that central zone but you are not paying any significant attention to it.
We first noticed this behaviour years ago without fully understanding what it meant. Having run a successful eShop for some years, we made a series of changes to page layouts and styling in an attempt to evolve our shops design into something more modern.
The changes that diluted attention away from the product, no matter how visually appealing when viewed with a focused critical eye, resulted in a drop in sales particularly at weekends.
Subsequent changes that lessened the shops graphical appeal but thrust the product to the forefront resulted in increased sales, again this was more noticeable at weekends.
More recently we have been amazed at the number of attempted orders through eShops we have for sale that carry a 'For Sale' message at the top of each page. When talking to those that phone through their enquiries it is apparent that they have just not seen or registered the message at the top of the eShop's pages.
There appears to be nothing unusual about those we speak to about their failed orders, they are normal Internet users like you and me, the common factor is that their attention was only on the product and aquiring it, nothing else about the eShop's pages registered in their minds.
Creating a Path of Least Resistance
So what does this mean for your eShop? Does it have any impact at all on how your eShop works, its design and what you fill its pages with?
We wrote an article a while go about what components make up the best web shops, citing Product, Useability and eShop Design in decending order of importance.
More so than ever before we now understand that having your products as the focal point of each of your shopping pages is by far the highest priority of any eShop.
Useability in terms of easy and obvious navigation through your pages is a close second, and with this in mind we can add a well known rule but one that is often ignored: create paths of least resistance from your product being displayed through to your final payment page.
Minimise the number of clicks a visitor to your eShop has to make to buy an item, and avoid features like demanding that customers sign up to your eShop before they can order - that's a sure way to snap your eShop visitor out of their relaxed state and chase them off.
We are all different and some of us will be genuinely impressed by flashy graphical features while others get excited at video clips and zoom in product pictures, but at some point we all slip into our comfortable auto-pilot state, and its with that very specific combination of passive viewing and narrow focus in mind that you should revisit the design and layout of your eShop.