Learning from others

What can we learn from the experiences of other eCommerce sectors? What if anything do they have in common with your sector? Below we look at some of the challenges and solutions we've encountered when working with totally different sectors - from fashion to furnishings.

Fashion

Traditionally, it has been argued that fashion shopping would be the last to go online because customers need to try things on for size. It's an added layer of complexity. But not one that eTailers have shied away from.

We've found that stores that offer a good online experience allow shoppers to select their sizes upfront; and then only show garments that are in their chosen size/colour. Sounds simple, but potentially every product page is different; so there's extra load on the servers, as they can no longer serve the same product page to lots of customers.

Supermarkets

Here, website stock control and delivery are crucial. Whereas suppliers in other sectors may deliver from one central warehouse - with just one master list - many supermarkets such as Tesco arrange deliveries from their nearest store and use their individual stock levels to check for availability.

Moreover, the most effective supermarkets maintain real-time stock levels, rather than the more traditional over-night figures, and scale up their hardware to accommodate.

A further supermarket challenge stems from prices constantly changing due to in-store promotions. Prices charged on delivery may differ from those advertised on the website at the time of placing the order. To overcome misleading pricing expectations, the OFT insists that supermarkets explain how prices might differ.

Furniture

Most furniture retailers don't carry stock. Orders are usually passed on to the manufacturer to deliver the goods. The most effective furniture websites query the manufacturer's website for stock availability and lead times prior to the order.

Travel

If a travel website accurately checks availability for every query, caching can't be implemented, therefore customers receive slower performance. The alternative is to implement caching at the risk of offering flights that might no longer be available.
We've found that a surprisingly large number of sites make a full query to their databases, or third-party flight databases, for every single search a web user makes resulting in multiple database queries - checking out flights between London and New York, for example, may involve querying several possible airports and airlines.

Many travel eTailers will, to save server load, use caching - perhaps on slower moving routes. Here, however, it's not uncommon for a flight search made specifically for a defined date and destination to come up with a list of available choices. The customer chooses one and some pages later is dismayed to read that 'this holiday is not available for the dates you selected' - all because the caching presented incorrect data, which only came to light later in the purchaser's User Journey.

Insurance

Insurance involves complex pricing models that each insurance company needs to protect. The ability to automatedly visit your site and obtain quotations could give the competition valuable information about your pricing model. In effect, the web provides a new way for insurers to spy on each other!

A company's price matrix can be 'hoovered up' by a competitor's web robot, which patiently visits their site for a new quotation every few seconds for a different combination of postcode, address, and insurance details (car age and model; house details and so on).

Extra complexity can be built into your portal to spot this kind of web robot behaviour - but that complexity comes at a cost. More software development time is needed; more hardware power. And worse still, just a small oversight in later software development can mean that genuine customers' User Journeys are interrupted - or blocked altogether, if they are mistakenly flagged as robots.

Mortgages

Mortgage companies and other financial sectors are bound by distance marketing regulations (EU Distance Marketing of Consumer Financial Services Directive) to provide certain basic information prior to a contract being concluded. Potential purchasers can be presented with a sudden overdose of information often at the most decisive points in the purchasing process.

Some organisations keep one foot in the paper camp and insist that they post out documents for purchasers to sign. Here, the code development within the website has to accommodate the bespoke printing of individual quotes.

Other companies try to do as much as possible by email, perhaps coding in a PDF report generator to produce the tailored documents ready for emailing out. Given the extra server load to build these documents, they are often emailed out some minutes later - so again the User Journey often ends up being interrupted, and dropouts increase.

Whatever sector you are in, with so many potential pitfalls it's important to monitor the experience delivered to the customer and when implementing new technology or processes it's essential to load test prior to going live.