The Two Type of Visitor

When it comes right down to it, there are basically two types of visitor to any Ecommerce website, those that will look and look for what they want and those that will 'go and ask'.

This mirrors people's behaviour in the shops when you come to think of it. Many shoppers prefer to drift around a store, glancing at the directory signs to see if they can spot where they need to be (just like you do on the navigation bar of a site), looking in the different isles (on the web = pages) until either they get fed up and walk out (click to another site) or find what they want and potentially buy it. These shoppers are of the 'We'll do it ourselves' variety and can well be put off if approached by an assistant (or by an 'annoying Can I help you?' chat box appearing on the screen).

The other type of shopper will make a bee line straight for customer information or the nearest assistant and ask where what they want can be found. In the shops it is highly likely that the assistants will be able to point the shopper in the right direction, often taking them to the item themselves, all very helpful. On the web however it can be very very different. On the web the helpful shop assistant is replaced by the SEARCH box.

The first thing that the 'I will just ask' web shopper has to do is to locate the Search Box. More often than not this is on the top of the screen and is easily found and often has the word 'SEARCH' in a button by it. This is great and makes it easy to find and better still you know what to do next, click the button. Some such boxes are not however that easily found and may have a magnifying glass icon instead of a nice big button. Now I'm not saying that people don't 'get' the connection between the icon and the action, but remember not everyone is a Sherlock Holmes fan and may not therefore associate the icon with the action 'to search' so beware and keep it Simple.

The next potential pit fall on the web is the quality of the Search Results. This is totally dependent on the quality of the programming behind the search facility and in many cases the results are far from helpful, being incomplete, inaccurate, poorly laid out and in extreme cases leave the user thinking 'so what do I do now?' which in web terms is always, always a very bad idea.

So, if you have a Search Facility on your site, you MUST ensure that the results are true and accurate and that using it all is like falling off the proverbial log. If you can manage that you will have gone a long way to increasing conversions on your site, after all, we have all turned into 'I will just ask' shoppers at sometimes in our lives.

There is however one more trick that the wise website owner should know about when it comes to the Search Box, more on that in the next post.