December 03 2007

Websites have two minutes to win over consumers

Nearly three-quarters of online shoppers (71%) in the UK will leave a retail website within one to two minutes of not finding the products they are looking for.

According to research from SLI Systems consumers are a fickle lot and a retail site has less than two minutes to grab their attention. At IR we are surprised that it’s as long as two minutes, a straw poll in the office of user dissatisfaction was nearer twenty seconds than two minutes, perhaps SLI’s research ignored asking short-tempered journalists for their opinion.

The research highlighted that 59% of consumers plan to purchase more products online this Christmas than they did last year, but 31% would not return to a site with poor search capabilities. 59% would only come back if the site had unique items that couldn’t be found elsewhere.

The majority of online shoppers (91%) find retail sites through a major search engine, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL. And, 88% of respondents visit retail websites that they’ve never heard of simply because those sites rank highly on the major search engines.

“Consumers have become more adept at shopping on the Web and demand the same level of service as they’d get offline,” said Dr. Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems. “As a result, retail sites need to show shoppers what they’re looking for in a matter of seconds or risk losing a sale – or, even worse, losing a customer for good. To do this, retailers need to think about in-site search as well as general search.”

To help online retailers improve their customer loyalty and increase sales SLI Systems has developed a five-point guide which should improve the stickyness of your site:

1. To meet consumer demands, increase sales and keep customers coming back, a site search strategy should deliver the items shoppers are looking for on the first page a majority of the time.
2. Search engine optimisation can be a full-time job, so implementing an automated SEO solution that manages part of the process – by determining which keywords to optimise for and automatically creating the appropriate landing pages – will make life easier for e-commerce vendors while driving needed traffic to their sites.
3. Taking advantage of the combination of e-commerce search and online merchandising, known as “searchandising,” enables merchants to realise higher levels of customer satisfaction and returns.
4. Finding an affordable, hosted site search solution that offers leading industry features with immediate deployment – in a matter of days – means less management hassle and a quicker path to more satisfied and more loyal customers.
5. Utilising site search to determine trends, such as what visitors are looking for, the terms they’re searching with, and what they’re finding and not finding, provides unique insight into the best ways to promote products and to provide a personalised shopping experience that keeps customers returning for more.

Does anyone have any further hints and tips? We have always been advocates of Search boxes on websites, and it’s still a constant surprise to us that so many sites ignore search boxes. In fact we would probably go as far as saying if you haven’t got a search box on your site then you’re mad.

by Marcus Austin (Web Editor)