If I Have Made Up My Mind to Buy a Product All Else Is Distraction

Imagine you went to an apparel retailer at the mall, and made a broad request such as, "where can I find something nice for my boyfriend?" In return, the salesperson asks you some questions about your preferences. Or (s)he starts showing you the latest collection, or the most popular apparel. That would be the right approach, as you clearly do not know what you are looking for.

Now let us consider an alternative situation. This time, you enter the same store and say, "I want to buy seamless white knee-high cotton socks, where are they located?" If the same salesperson now starts asking you about your preferences and suggests popular apparel, wouldn't it drive you crazy?

I think that the difference in the two situations is obvious. In the first case, the usual navigation, alternative generation, and product selection made sense. In the latter, it would make sense for the salesperson to say something like, "those socks are at the far end of aisle 4."

Unfortunately, ecommerce websites are not well equipped to figure out which of the two situations they are encountering. I would love for much more research to go into mapping a customer's motivations, and I am sure it will. But for now, I find that most ecommerce websites assume that they can sell me far more stuff, even if I want to buy something specific.

Ecommerce Website Check 1: How Much Time Does It Take to Drill Down to a Specific Product?

The first part should be trivial: if I know what I want to buy, you should help me reach the product description page in one or two clicks. Unfortunately, that is not what I experience. In fact, to speed up the process, I often end up searching an ecommerce website using Google.

That is usually the fastest way to get to where I want to go. And that is quite a shame. I wish I could as easily search an ecommerce website.

Ecommerce Website Check 2: How Much Time Does It Take to Checkout After the Specific Product Has Been Added to Cart?

Unfortunately, slow speed is not restricted to merely locating a product. Even after you add it to your shopping cart, several ecommerce websites make you jump through seemingly endless hoops before you can actually check out. Rest assured I would abandon my shopping cart before I have to suffer the rigmarole.

I prefer websites that have some kind of a "checkout now" option, which allows me to exit in the shortest time.

Final Words

Ecommerce is all about speed and convenience, and usually that promise is fulfilled. But in the case of customers who want to buy a specific product, the extra minutes it takes to finally order the product can be quite frustrating. It is your job to ensure that is not the case.

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