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Current Question
I have a great idea, but my site isn't getting the results I'd like. What can I do about it?More often than not, increasing the usability of your site is the single most effective way to grow your e-business. Usability as it pertains to e-business can be boiled down to one simple question: "When users visit your site, can they perform the tasks they need to perform and find the information they need to find?"
Sounds obvious, doesn't it? Why then the following statistic?
27 percent of all Web transactions are abandoned at the payment screen. (Forrester)
The reason? Bad user experience. To put things in perspective, imagine if a brick-and-mortar lost 27 percent of its customers at the checkout counter because they couldn't figure out how to pay. The cost of paying lip service to usability is failure.
While poor usability can break you, good usability can make you. As an illustration, look at two of the Web's highest trafficked sites, Amazon and Yahoo. Neither of these sites will win any awards for groundbreaking graphic design, they may not even offer best-of-breed solutions in their markets. However, they attract and retain customers because they are easy to use.
There is a direct link between usability and the success or failure of your e-business, which is expressed in the following equation:
Number of users X conversion rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of users who are performing the desired task, typically making a purchase. So, according to this equation, to triple your e-business, do one of two things: triple the number of users or triple the conversion rate. Increasing users is typically expensive and risky. Marketing costs must be paid for each new user, and it's a toss up as to whether or not the expenditure will pay off in the long run.
Unless traffic levels are unusually low, it makes more sense to increase conversion rates. Investing the time to build a usable site that meets customer's needs and expectations increases the likelihood that customers will convert (buy).
On average, Web conversion rates have been hovering around 1 percent for the last few years. Using the store example, imagine if only 1 percent of the customers at a brick and mortar actually made a purchase and the other 99 percent left because they got lost in the aisles. Would it make sense to run a sale in order to attract more shoppers? Or would it be more effective to adjust the floor plan?