10 Online Shopping Personality Traits

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Aubrey Beck  |  March 7, 2012   


Retailers have typically approached marketing from a product-centric standpoint, but behavioral commerce technology now on the market enables retailers to take a more people-focused approach for giving shoppers an incentive to complete a purchase.

As online shopping gains momentum, shoppers are looking for online retailers to provide them with more personalized shopping experiences. Marketers can tailor these experiences to specifically defined target audiences by understanding the shopping personalities and buying behaviors of customers. Because when you've discovered what drives specific shoppers to buy, you're able to increase sales and margins.

Shopping behavior data derived from a behavioral commerce analytic platform used by several prominent online retailers was analyzed to determine the 10 most common shopping personality profiles.

1. The distracted shopper: "When I shop online, I often begin the check-out process but for one reason or another I don't always complete the purchase." 

Note: This type of shopper is frequently distracted and is prone to multitasking while shopping.
To close the deal: Offer 10 percent off the next order if she completes this one. You can also show her the types of products she was browsing to remind her to return and complete the purchase.

2. The premium shopper: "I only buy the best. I want premium name brands with the latest features and most advanced technology." 

Note: This shopper is a trendsetter who doesn't mind showing off or inciting a little jealousy in her friends.

To close the deal: Show this shopper the newest products that have just arrived. Increase the average order value by throwing in a small offer if she reaches a high order value threshold.

3. The determined shopper: "I always research before I buy. I'll view the exact item I want multiple times, looking for a drop in price, or a special offer." 

Note: This shopper wants to be absolutely certain she has made the right choice before buying.
To close the deal: Provide positive reinforcement during her shopping process. Let the shopper know that this is the right product by showing positive consumer feedback on the items she's browsing and, if necessary, provide an incentive like $10 off to write a product review .

4. The active shopper: "I'm always browsing but not always buying. I'm not looking for incentives, but they can help me convert when I'm window shopping." 

Note: Active shoppers like the positive psychological effects of browsing products online across different sites.

To close the deal: Try secret sales, daily deals, or flash sales to get these shoppers over the finish line. Try offering additional items that complement what they've been browsing.

5. The free shipping hunter: "I like to buy online, but if the retailer doesn't offer free shipping, I'll leave and find a website that does." 

Note: This shopper is turned off even if shipping costs are minimal.

To close the deal: Offer free shipping to these shoppers to ensure that they complete the purchase.

6. The thrifty shopper: "I like to buy used or refurbished items. If I can get the same product used for much less, I'll buy it." 

Note: For this shopper, the amount of savings can be more powerful than the product need itself.
To close the deal: Make used and returned items visible to them. Show her overstock and clearance items based on what she's been browsing. Those products might be just as attractive to her based on the savings.

7. The loyal shopper: "I only purchase if I can join a rewards club or special rewards program. This often leads to me purchasing at the same stores." 

Note: This shopper likes to build up and then cash in points from loyalty reward programs. This type of shopper will generally spend more than others in the pursuit of rewards points.

To close the deal: Remind her how many points she'll get for buying certain items. Provide extra points for items you're trying to clear out. Offer loyalty club deals so club members feel they're getting something in return for their loyalty.

8. The methodical shopper: "When I shop online, I like to browse for the exact product I'm looking for. I often use site navigation until I find that perfect match." 

Note: These shoppers are tenacious and don't like being distracted by marketing messages or product fluff. They follow site navigation and site maps to find the right product.

To close the deal: Present a message to these shoppers asking if they need help or have product questions if they seem to be getting lost within your site. Provide additional product suggestions combined with offers based on what they've been browsing to help generate sales.

9. The impatient shopper: "If I don't find what I want immediately, I look somewhere else."

Note: These shoppers are antsy to buy and be done with it. Making the navigation and checkout process fast will increase the likelihood of closing the sale.

To close the deal: Create a bold offer to grab their attention and maximize conversions. If they leave without purchasing, quickly present an offer combined with what they were browsing to try and win them back.

10. The wish list shopper: "I like to shop online, but I don't always purchase. I add everything I like to the shopping cart to see what the total price will be." 

Note: This shopper needs help moving from fantasizing about products to actually purchasing the products.

To close the deal: Daily deals, flash sales, and secret sales work well for these shoppers. Add to their shopping excitement by showing additional items that complement existing items in their cart. This completes the visual picture for these shoppers and can drive them to purchase everything.

When retailers factor shoppers' personalities and buying behaviors into their marketing decisions, everyone wins. Shoppers find products they're looking for and are rewarded with incentives that mean the most to them, and retailers don't waste money giving away huge discounts across the board.
By using a behavioral commerce platform, retailers can have a more thorough understanding of the shopping personalities of their site visitors and can maximize sales and margins by making strategic offers.

Understanding IA

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By Vicky Teinaki on February 28, 2012

Peter Morville takes us on a journey, Prezi-style, through that mysterious thing known as IA.

There’s been a bit of discussion recently about IA. OK, there’s always discussion about IA, but Elisabeth Hubert’s post on how IA is getting lost in a wireframe-first UX culture got a lot of traffic on twitter.

So, Peter Morville’s Prezei on understanding IA is timely.

Understanding Information Architecture on Prezi

Still a saddening lack of dinosaurs though.

Using Salience to Guide User Decision-Making

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by Colleen Roller

Most websites are designed with the intent, or the assumption, that people who visit those sites will do something, that they will take some sort of action. Indeed, website goals are rarely achieved unless users of the site do take action. Nonprofit organizations, for example, often depend on website visitors taking the action of donating.

But what is it that influences or determines whether people will take action? To answer this question, let’s compare two websites to see how they approach the challenge of getting people to donate, and whether one approach seems better than the other, and why.

Example 1: www.justgive.org	Example 2: www.goodwill.org

Which of these two examples makes you feel more inclined to engage with the content? If you’re like me, the second example feels much more compelling.

Motivating People to Donate

The first example tries to persuade users through the use of words. But will users actually read all that text? Probably not. Density of text usually acts as a barrier to user engagement. Reading, after all, is work, and humans are remarkably averse to the effort it requires.

In contrast, the second example contains almost no words. It invites interaction by providing a means to answering a question on most potential donators’ minds: How will my donation be used? Or what is the impact of my donation?

For each category, users can select the type of item they wish to donate. For example, if I click on the “Electronics” category, I get a list of items included in that category. And as I add items from that list, they are displayed in the “Your Items” section:



I can see from the “Your Impact” section that the donation of a TV results in 41 minutes of job search support for someone like Doyle McGee. This information is critical because it creates meaning. It answers the question: How is my donation of a TV actually used? Or how will my donation actually help someone else? I also get a picture of Doyle, and I can read his story by clicking the “Read More” link, which takes me to a page where I can post a comment. On Doyle’s page there were already 17 comments posted, indicating that this approach has been effective in engaging users.

The designers of this widget did several things that are key to increasing users’ willingness to donate. First, the widget immediately invites interaction. Users can explore the options available in the drop-down while getting immediate information about what impact each donation can make. The opportunity to peruse the options within each category may also suggest to users items they could donate that otherwise may not be top of mind.

Second, the widget makes the donation personal by supplying the name, picture, and story (written in the first person) of Doyle McGee. Doyle is a real person who we can personally relate to on an emotional level. Research shows that stories are extremely influential, as they are the means by which people communicate and relate to one another.

In short, the widget is successful because it makes donating salient. Users can readily determine what they can donate, who it will help and, specifically, how it will help. This is the type of information that helps users glean meaning. It may also motivate them to donate more.

Designing for Salience

From a design perspective, salience is important because it drives what users pay attention to. In turn, what users pay attention to drives their decisions, and their decisions drive their actions. This is important because ultimately user actions drive the bottom line.

We affect user actions, then, by designing for decision-making. A key aspect of designing for decision-making is to use salience to influence what users pay attention to. When considering the effectiveness of a web page, it’s useful to ask two questions:

• What is most salient on the page? What stands out and commands attention?
• What should be salient on the page?

Websites are typically used as tools to get users to do something. Getting people to donate to a worthy cause is challenging, as are many other initiatives, such as getting people to save for retirement.

Motivating people to save for retirement

Getting people to save for retirement is a tough nut to crack, and the problem has been approached from a few different angles, some of them more effective than others. A traditional approach has been to simply show people the numbers:



This approach assumes that numbers like these are meaningful to people, but are they really? Are people able to somehow determine what the right number is? Research shows that people are largely unable to meaningfully understand large numbers like these. People have no innate feeling for the difference, for example, between 350,000 and 365,000. Numbers like these become meaningful only when people can equate them to actual quality of life in retirement.

To that end, another approach has been to show people what kind of home they will be living in based on the amount of savings they are expected to have at retirement age. Studies have shown that this approach is much more effective than merely showing people the numbers. This is because the images provide a means of translating the numbers into something concrete that reflects quality of life in retirement:


A similar approach is to encourage people to envision the type of retirement they want. The goal is to direct people’s imagination to future uses for money, thereby enticing them to reduce spending so they will save more:



These approaches have been more successful than simply showing people lists of numbers. A more recent approach, however, works by using a somewhat different approach. Instead of asking people to envision their future retirement, they are asked to empathize with their future selves.

Researchers have experimented with enabling people to interact with age-progressed images of themselves as they make decisions about how much to allocate for retirement savings. Findings from this research show that ordinarily, people are not able to realistically identify with the person they will become decades into the future. Indeed, for most people, thinking about their future selves is like thinking about future generations; they know there will be future generations and that what they do now will impact them positively or negatively, but they are not "me."

Brain scans show that when people think about their future selves, the brain region that becomes active is the same as when they think about strangers! This disconnect between the present and future self correlates with their reluctance to save for retirement. For those who can’t identify with their future selves, saving is like a choice between spending money today or giving it to a stranger many years from now.

Because of the myriad things that could happen in life, it is difficult for people to imagine themselves decades into the future. At best, the image invoked in people’s minds is uncertain and vague. But in research studies, when people were shown age-progressed images of themselves, they were better able to identify with their future selves because it was definite and specific. The future self, then, became salient, which in turn motivated them to allocate more savings for retirement.

Lessons for Design

Through the examples in this article, we’ve seen how salience affects what people pay attention to, as well as their ability to glean meaning from information. On a website, what people give their attention to drives their decisions, their decisions drive their actions, and their actions drive the bottom line. If we want to affect user actions, we need to design for the decision-making that precedes those actions.

Designing for effective decision-making requires that you first clearly identify what you want users to do. Knowing what you want them to do frames the next step: determining what you need them to focus on (or not focus on) so they are able to derive meaning from the information you’re providing.
People can’t make effective decisions unless they are able to meaningfully understand their options. This is why it’s essential to design for meaning. From the examples above, we’ve seen that it’s difficult for people to derive meaning from numbers alone. People need to be able to translate those numbers into something that concretely represents the value of those numbers. The designer’s job is to help people see the meaning of the data—to make it visually and/or emotionally tangible.
Also, because people are largely averse to the effort of work, they typically take the path of least resistance, focusing their attention on whatever is most salient in the design even if it’s not necessarily the thing they should be focusing on. It’s important to understand that users generally consume the design (or information) exactly as it is presented to them.

This is both a blessing and a curse. The good news is that the design itself has considerable power to influence user perception, decision outcomes, and user actions. The challenge, however, is to ensure that the design creates a path of least resistance that leads users to the right decision outcomes.
This is why it’s so important for designers to thoughtfully and proactively think about what users should focus on, and then on how to make that most salient in the design. The designer’s job is to create the path of least resistance that enables people to extract the right meaning so they can make effective decisions that lead to appropriate actions on the site.

Decision Architecture

Historically, the UX design toolbox has not included a focus on the importance of designing for decision-making. This needs to change. User decision-making plays a critical role in the achievement of website objectives.

It’s important to understand that there is no such thing as a neutral design. Every design has an effect on user decision-making, regardless of whether designers have proactively designed for effective decision-making. It’s no different from designing for usability. Every website is more or less usable, regardless of whether it was designed for good usability.

Architecting for decision-making results in a win/win/win outcome for designers, for businesses, and for users. This is why decision architecture—architecting for an optimal user decision-making experience—deserves a prominent place in the UX toolkit.

Why Email Sabbaticals Are An Essential Part Of danah boyd's Work Flow

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BY Amber Mac | 03-08-2012 | 10:34 AM

As a Senior Researcher for Microsoft, danah boyd, (yes, all lowercase, she had her name legally changed), studies how we work, live, and play on the Internet. While the well-known researcher truly loves social media and the online universe, she also understands that sometimes we all need to turn off and tune out. In our Skype chat I ask danah about her slightly controversial email sabbaticals, which include bouncing emails and other sneaky tactics. Oh, but there is one person who always knows where to find danah, no matter how hard she hides.

"The thing about an email sabbatical is that it doesn't come straight out of the blue, it's something I set up over an extended period of time."

Configuring an Ecommerce Site for International Orders; 8 Tips

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March 08, 2012 · by Louis Camassa

 

 

International orders are an often overlooked market for ecommerce merchants. Prior to accepting them, however, merchants should configure their sites to increase international profits and reduce potential losses. Here are eight tips to help.

1. Enable Fraud Protection

Fraud is a huge concern when accepting international orders. Working with payment processors can help to reduce fraudulent orders. Although, experience and detective work usually trumps all technical firewalls.

Payment processors are usually equipped with fraud prevention services that detect the shipping address, bank lookup, and security-code number of the submitted order information, all of which can help reduce fraudulent orders.

If an order looks fishy, some ecommerce companies will call a customer, or request the customer send a copy of the front and back of their credit card for verification. Companies may also call the bank that issued the credit card to verify the address.


At ThinkGeek.com, a highly visible link is provided to explain why certain countries are disabled for ordering.

2. Restrict Promotions

Carts should have the ability to limit promotions — such as free shipping, gifts with orders, large discounts, and bulk discounts — based upon a specific country or state or province within the country. Free shipping offers in the U.S., for example, often exclude Hawaii and Alaska.


You do not want your cart to offer shipping options that you cannot actually provide.
In graphic above, the country — i.e. France — has already been entered. Ideally, the "Free Shipping" promotion, as well as the U.S. shipping methods, should be eliminated from the list, since the customer is based in France, and these promotions and methods do not apply.

3. Limit Shipping Options

There is a small list of shipping carriers that offer international shipping. The U.S. Postal Service is a low cost method, but it sometimes has issues with tracking and delivery and signature confirmation with international orders.

UPS and FedEx typically offer more delivery options, but they charge more. Shipping options should be configured on a per country basis so the customers are not shown options that do not pertain to them, or are not profitable to the merchant.

The leading shipping providers provide lists of countries they ship to — here's the USPS list. Unless the shopping cart can filter the shipping options based upon countries accepted by the shipping provider, however, the shipping estimate will be wildly inaccurate.

4. Properly Identify Postal Codes

Many countries have numeric postal codes, only. Some countries have spaces and hyphens in their postal codes. Countries like Canada contain a mixture of letters, numbers, and a space.

When on the checkout page, the system should be able to verify the code based upon a country selector first, which should use the applicable logic to determine if the code is proper — characters, length, and spaces. This will prevent incorrect data, mismatched codes, and allow for accurate shipping estimates.

Enlarge This Image Your shopping cart should be able to handle the full variety of postal-code inputs for all countries you ship to.

On the above cart page — prior to checkout — as customers enter their country then postal code, the system is not properly configured to decipher the numeric and letter based postal code. The customer is not provided a shipping estimate, and no error message is shown, leading the customer to assume the site does not ship to the selected country. If that is the case, why is the country available as an option?

5. Understand the Provinces and States

Not all countries have provinces or states. Others require them to be included in the shipping label to be delivered. Carts should be set up to allow for flexibility in requiring province or states on a country level. Also, unless the cart has a full list of every country's provinces or states, it would be more effective to allow customers to type in their state, rather than select from a list, which may not be accurate.


Be sure that any province or state selectors you use are appropriate for the country your customer is in.

This checkout page, above, allows shoppers to choose a country, but then forces them to choose a state that has no relation to the country. The state and province field needs to be updated based upon which country is selected. Moreover, if the merchant's payment processor is set up to verify addresses, it is possible this customer will get an error as the state will not match with the country.

6. Accommodate All Addresses

Some customers have addresses that span more than 50 characters. It is important that your shopping cart accepts longer addresses, and you can to print them on the shipping label. This may require investigating the addresses, or speaking with the customer to refine what they provided. Trying to fit the address on packing slips and shipping labels may prove to be a challenge.

7. Understand All Payments

Make sure the payment methods you offer align with the habits of shoppers in your customers' countries. Credit cards are a staple form of payment within the U.S. and many other counties. Other forms of payment include PayPal, Google Checkout, and direct bank draft. Chargebacks, fees, and other associated costs in accepting payments from international customers vary from domestic customer orders. Most payment processors configure their products and services to streamline the acceptance of payments from other countries.

8. Check Local Restrictions; Character Encoding

Items that can cause headaches in international orders include returns, taxes, duties, product selection (what can and can’t be shipped internationally), and character encoding (acceptance of foreign language, such as vowels with an umlaut — ä ö ü — in the German language).

Many of the leading turnkey carts handle these scenarios quite well out-of-box. However, the business owner must configure the business rules for these scenarios and use the tools provided to make sure the customer experience is smooth.