Incredible Sitemap

[Mike Hughes]

I think this is very much the area that we need to work on. We spend a lot of time helping people find the products, telling them all about them and making a good offer. By comparison, we typically put very little effort into getting them from this stage to order completion.

Whatever we do needs to be intuitive and very unobtrusive, yet cover a huge range of circumstances. I don't know what the best solution is but I think of it a bit like trying to find a shop assistant on the odd occasion when you want one. Most of the time you avoid them and get on with what you're doing but sometimes you just want to find out when they could deliver the TV if you order one today, or whether the delivery guys will take the piano up a flight of stairs.

I'm not talking a virtual shop assistant because they're just daft, but there ought to be something that can help customers find the information / reassurance they need online.

As you say, I don't think is anything really new. Just that I'm not aware of anything that does a particularly good job or is widely used.

Maybe I'll just build something myself* as it's not really that complicated. It just takes a bit of thinking about and setting out.

Mike

* Given my usual progress, I'd estimate that I should have something to demo by around 2014.

[Mark H]

"They wouldn't land in a section full of blue widgets to mooch, they'd end up in a section of blue widgets that only met their criteria."

The only possible downside to this in certain markets (ours included I think) is that quite a lot of purchases (can't give you a figure but we know it happens) arise from people being exposed to products that they didn't intend to buy and might not have even see before. In our case I think we would retain the conventional section structure, but implement some sort of finder wizard alongside it.

[jont]

At least everyone can rest assured that there is no such things as perfect navigation and everyone will use the site differently and still get confused no matter what you do

[george]

This means something like 96% of potential customers are still not buying.

Good call fella, work on the 96% and not the 4%.

So we're looking for CO (Consumer Optimisation) once the eagle has landed.

I'm impressed Michael.


*waits for Gabriel to swoop into the thread with a grand plan*

[Mike Hughes]

I think it's definitely an area for improvement. Most of us are still using the standard actinic 'terms' page for info about the company and that's really just a big page of text about everything that isn't product related.

I see George has already got a 'help desk' idea going so he's already identified the problem and been doing something about this.

Mike

[chris ashdown]

So were looking for CO (Consumer Optimisation)

Great new phrase George , you should quickly trademark it, if it takes off like SEO you would make loads of dosh

[fergusw]

So were looking for CO (Consumer Optimisation) once the eagle has landed.

Just don't combine it with Customer Knowledge