A very important criteria to consider when planning any website is what a visitor is going to want from your website – not: what do you want to offer visitors.
In my experience this is a very difficult way to think for many businesses. In particular for business that have been operating successfully for a number of years without any real online focus.
In the case of a traditional retail store, the customer has made the effort to leave home and come to the shop, so the shop knows the customer has a genuine interest in buying a product. They also know that while there might be another shop in the town selling a similar or same product, the customer is somewhat unlikely to make the comparison because the other shop is probably a few minutes walk away, then there’s the effort of getting through the crowds and pushchairs to the right department – and the uncertainty that the other shop will even have it in stock, or be any cheaper.
Knowing all of this, the shop has a certain amount of control over the customer. The customer wants something, and if the shop doesn’t have exactly what they want – it’s reasonably likely they'll buy something else because the effort of going to another shop is too great. It’s the same with pricing. A shop can attract a customer with a general suggestion that they have some great prices – and the windows can be full of products with huge discounts. But once the customer is in the shop, that's a pretty key objective achieved. It doesn’t matter if the great prices are only applied to a small range – the customer is through the doors with that price incentive and it's not easy to compare prices with the shop down the road.
Online this model is completely different. Customers shop more speculatively because they can browse a shop catalogue in seconds from their desk. With tabbed browsing they can directly compare prices and services almost instantly across several stores with no barriers such as crowds or queues at the till. Offering great prices on just a few products doesn’t have the same effect – it has to be carried across all products on the site. Getting a customer onto your website is in itself quite difficult, but it's so easy for the customer to jump across to another online store – you have to ensure the user experience on your website is completely focused on user requirements.
Businesses that have been following successful offline business models can be very reluctant to change their way of thinking and still want the business model of the website to be skewed in their favour. As a web designer I can talk about research studies and accepted best practices that show the most successful online business models are those that do everything possible to support the customer and give the customer what they want – and I always get the same response: yes, yes, but I don't think that will work with our customer base …
All these established offline companies think the customer buying models they've seen in the past will somehow continue to apply to a new online customer base – regardless of any other published evidence from other companies.
What the companies do instead is put more features on the website. More bestseller lists, more people who bought this also bought this, more video clips, audio tracks, little interactive bits and bobs, tools to help you pick the right cut of jeans or type of vaccum cleaner. There's nothing inherently wrong with offering any of these on your website, quite the opposite, but don't think that these extra services will allow you to fool the customer into accepting less customer centric approaches elsewhere on the site.
You need to be open and transparent about all aspects of your product(s) because if information isn't available from you, you can be sure it will be available on some other companies website and the customer will end up going to a competitor.
Several years ago, if a customer wanted a brochure, it would be an opportunity for the company to take a name and address to mail out a brochure and then make subsequent mailings to that customer. Today the model has changed, the brochure can be viewed online without any user information being passed to the business and business owners don't like this – they can't make subsequent mailings to these customers. So they start asking for email addresses before a customer can get certain information off the website. The problem is – whatever information you’re trying to elicit an email address for, you can be sure an equivalent source of information will be available elsewhere on the internet and users hate these extra steps being put in their way, they hate having to give away personal information, so will simply leave your site and download a competitors brochure instead.
Business directors too often have read industry articles about the potential of the internet and like the idea of expanding their business online, but when it comes to actually structuring a website, they have a real struggle adapting longstanding offline business models. They feel like they’re sacrificing profits or giving away sensitive company/product information. But it's important business owners understand that these are not negatives, it’s simply a new way of structuring a business and if you accept them and work to give customers what they want rather than what you want – the scope and availability of your website to a global audience has the potential to pull in huge numbers of customers that traditional offline business models could never hope to achieve.