• Posted by Melanie
• 07 July 2009
• E-Commerce Design, Ecommerce Marketing

Eye tracking? Heard of that? Know how it affects you and your store's sales?

Eye Tracking

Eye tracking is defined as  research to track where a user's eyes look while reading, then analyze the data to reveal behavioral patterns. In essence eye tracking is a core part of usability & accessibility.

So we know that you can drive thousands of visitors to your website a day and not make a dime.... These issues related to the usability of your store are the most common reasons for poor conversions and sales.

We are going to specifically go over some big issues for shop owners in the realm of eye tracking today. I promise to revisit the full usability side when I finish Steve Krug's, "Don't Make Me Think" 2cnd Edition.

Recent behavioral eye tracking studies have identified some very useful metrics regarding eye tracking and how user's navigate your online store. We learn more and more everyday about the user interaction and emotional responses to our content and pages. What I'm covering here are just some basic, fairly unconsidered facts, to help you gain some insight in to your shoppers habits and needs.

Eye Tracking Tips for Ecommerce

• Heading Tags - I have said this before and I'll say it again... Visitors read text first upon hitting your page about 1 second is spent scanning for text to identify the page as relevant or irrelevant to the visitor's query or need. Yes, that's right you have about 1 second to get them interested! Heading tags are a perfect way to grab the attention of these text scanning machines we call visitors. Keep your heading tags, short, logical and highly relevant to engage shoppers more quickly.
• Eye Movement Patterns - Your visitors will averagely read/scan your pages in a particular order (shown below from Eyetrack III). Notice where the user starts his quest to determine if your page is useful... Top Left. Ask any search marketing professional and they will tell you this is one of the most highly effective advertisement areas of a page. While I certainly don't want to see you with PPC ads in your store, utilizing this space properly is key to visitor engagement.

Basic Eye Tracking Path of Average Visitors

• People scan the first few words of a paragraph and then quickly make a decision to read it or move one. Back to high school with this one. Remember that English teacher teaching you to use a power sentence to start your paragraphs. Creative and visual writing skills have never been more important.... The first sentence is the hook.
• Keep it short! We know from that same high school English teacher that a paragraph is a container for a single thought. In keeping with that shorter paragraphs actually are less daunting and encourage better reading.
• People naturally seem to migrate top and left when seeking navigation. Right hand navigation has its place indeed, many blog surfers have come to expect right hand navigation from the reading they do... This has not yet, however, transferred in to the general reading and shopping ranks. Topside navigation while interestingly more effective according to the study can be a real nightmare for shoppers to navigate in ecommerce applications. In essence the top navigation is only going to work for your simpler menu options... Not 50 categories and children fly outs. So, standard left hand navigation is still going to be more effective and engaging in your online store.
• Categories are the key to every store's navigation, but also the biggest area of confusion and bottlenecks for shoppers as well. On one hand we know that the fewest number of clicks to get to paying you is most effective, we also know that logical and clearly categorized navigation will yield a better average order value. The biggest issue is when  a shopper is forced to browse through page after page of product index. Most times these products, say numbering 80 can be just 4 pages. However, we also know that the click through drops about 50% from page 1 to page 2 and by the time we get to page 4 only about 3% of the shoppers remain... The rest bailed. So shorter product indexes, ideally one page with your most popular products first will keep the shopper more engaged and on track.
• This I found most interesting, smaller fonts seem to engage readers. So those of you running those 14px fonts are actually encouraging scanning as opposed to reading! The standard is a 10px font, and I would recommend never larger than a 12px. If your visitor profile demands it, then get a text sizer tool for your pages.
• Textual ads within your store will be far more effective than graphics. Aside from the entire banner blindness issue, people are just more willing to click text ads. So just having a neat and crisp "Free Shipping" heading tag will do the trick nicely.
• I have been telling shop owners about the power of color psychology for a while now..... But here you go. In this study a HUGE contrasting red font containing information was completely missed 86% of the users tracked! BAM@!
• How about product pricing? This can really be a heated topic.... But here we see the nuts and bolts of how those numbers came to be .99 and what they should more effectively be .47 or .49 to catch price scanning eyes.

The basic point of this is to establish one thing in your mind... You have no idea what your shoppers need until you ask them. Doing a simple usability study with friends will reveal problems you would have easily missed.

Never stop improving your store, solicit the feedback of your shoppers. Most importantly whether you pay for a usability study, conduct a small usability study on your own or ask for feedback... YOU MUST LISTEN!

Remember, it's not about what you think... It's about making a living.

• Posted by Melanie
• 15 May 2009
• So you want to be a Shop Owner Series

Ecommerce Confessions

Confessions of a shop owner:

Yes I can admit when I am wrong and make stupid mistakes and I have made plenty of them. I am writing this as a reference for anyone else that is considering diving into the wonderful world of eCommerce, feel free to learn from my mistakes and succeed.

Not Testing the REAL Market

Well I did, but how I went about it was all wrong. I simply took surveys on price and interest in each individual product. I received nothing but excellent feedback, yet only to sold two products in the first 4 months. Alaskan Salmon sounds good in theory but gaining the shoppers trust is a completely different step. If I were to start all over I would probably just put my products on eBay just to gauge the response to the product, this would allow me to plan for any unforeseen market issues and adjust my services accordingly.

Extremely High Overhead

And the sad thing is I started this business with nice, manageable low overhead in mind. There are many shopping cart systems (Like Zen Cart) out there that will do all of the dirty work for you. For some dumb reason I felt my site needed a custom system from scratch which ended up costing me around $12,000. Now I am implementing a more functional and user friendly system that is FREE! Yes open source and FREE! My cost has only been $800 to implement the open source cart and the additional of this blog on my site is a part of that as well. Needless to say I feel like a big, BIG idiot.

Check References!

Another mistake I really overlooked, I found my first two web designers on car forums that I frequent. That would be the equivalent of looking for a home builder at a car dealership. Between these two snakes alone I lost $5,750 and ended up with nothing. A portfolio does not tell the full story, talk to the people that have hired the design company you are considering, and ask tons of questions.

Offline Marketing for an Online Business

There is a local publication here in Douglas County Georgia, where I live,  that caters to the community. I read that offline marketing generally does not convert to online sales but I am the type that has to touch the iron several times to know its really hot. (I actually did that as a youngster) The publication hits 30,000 homes in the area and I just knew at least 10% of those would visit my site. I ended up with 10 visitors and no sales, just another one of those hard and expensive lessons.

Content is King!

For an eCommerce site content and page real estate is tough, other than product descriptions and store policies there is not a great deal to say. This is why a new business blog is so valuable, search engines love the rich, unique content and what better way to present it? It also allows better communication between the business and shopper. I finally understand this and that is why I have added this blog to my site.

Patience

I still struggle a bit with this one but I have learned that while we would like to have an easy, overnight success it does not usually happen that way.  Some online stores take off immediately, others it may take years but I have learned that you work just as hard today as you did yesterday.

Discounting the Importance of Search Engine Optimization

I really thought this whole SEO thing was spammy BS. However, once I had failed miserably and was forced to really work hard and learn... My opinion have completely changed. I now realize that SEO, is really as much, if not more about the user as search engines. I also realize that SEO has nothing to do with spam or cheating... That is another kind of practice (black hat and positioning). So now I know that Google and my shoppers really want and need the same things. I spend 30 minutes 5 days a week surfing my site and trying to determine what is best for my shoppers... This keeps Google very happy! Viola!

1 Extra Tip

Be flexible and open for change, and I'm sure this holds true with any business out there. You can plan every aspect of your online business, but over time things will change and you really have to embrace that. I had no intentions on carrying Cheesecakes or Gift Baskets but saw an opportunity to give my customers better options have not regretted that decision since then. The Internet is really a changing tide, everyday.. every dollar... every shopper and of course every product. Since this is the nature of your profit stream... You MUST be willing to change and grow along side of the web to succeed.