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Easy online shopping? Yeah, right

A recent gathering of the nation's top online shopping executives provided a heartening confirmation. My misadventures with Web retail sites, it turns out, are neither unique nor all my fault.

By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published February 14, 2007

A recent gathering of the nation's top online shopping executives provided a heartening confirmation.

My misadventures with Web retail sites, it turns out, are neither unique nor all my fault.

Fact is - despite working out the kinks for a decade - online shopping sites, touted for years as putting everything imaginable just a "few mouse clicks away," still need a lot of work.

How else to explain a recent experience buying theater tickets? The screen said I was buying center aisle mezzanine seats. Instead, the site dealt me stage-extreme-right in a nosebleed balcony. Where do you take a complaint at 11 p.m.?

Or how about that landscape lighting set I bought online. After sorting through the fog with five hours of e-mails and toll-free followup calls, I learned the 10 Web sites offering them were really only three vendors. The prices were different because one priced the kit as separate pieces without saying so. Another built the cost of "free shipping" into the list price. So the kits were all the same price.

To be sure, trusty old-timers like Amazon.com never failed me. But despite keeping my credit card number and personal information for five years, their e-mails customized to past shopping behavior never offer anything I want.

The eye-opener at the conference staged by Shop.org, a trade group for online shopping sites, was a test of how real people use their sites.

Creative Good, a research firm, put randomly selected shoppers in front of a computer, told them to put their brain on speakerphone and talk about their experience while shopping online. Web developers in a nearby conference room watched their faces on big-screen TVs and tracked each twitch of the cursor.

These were not innocent newbies. They were online shopping vets. Each had household income of more than $100,000. They would shop sites they use all the time.

Nor were these el cheapo sites designed by self-taught geeks. These were among the best. Best Buy, Circuit City, Coach, Finish Line and Overstock.com, to name a few.

The missteps, dead-ends and oversights caused by poor navigation tools and inexplicable design flaws piled up quickly.

One shopper found the exact white handbag she wanted. But when she hit a button for a blow-up photo, the handbag morphed into a brown one. The shopper had to futz around a minute to retrieve the white one.

When she finally pushed the button to buy what she thought was the white bag she wanted, she didn't realize it actually was a pink one.

One screen said a wallet came in six colors, but showed only three. The rest were labeled "no swatch available," meaning what exactly except "no sale"?

A general contractor trying to compare prices for computer hardware didn't fare much better. He noodled the cursor past where he should have gone because the product list was tiny type and search buttons hid just outside his roving eyesight. When he shifted his search to a rival retailer, he didn't realize he was comparing prices for a 17-inch monitor with a 19-inch monitor.

Shoppers couldn't find features they said they knew were there. They hit wrong buttons. They were tossed off track despite hitting the right buttons. They back-tracked past goods they had no interest seeing just for a path out of the forest.

After a few hours of this, one exasperated Web shopping executive asked: "Just who are we designing these sites for? Ourselves?"

"No," replied Phil Terry, president of Creative Good, a New York consulting firm. "We've done this same exercise using Web designers - real pros - and they don't do any better than these shoppers."

Most telling was each time the self-deprecating shoppers' intentions were frustrated by the site, they muttered it was their own fault.

Personally, I don't feel that way anymore.

Mark Albright can be reached at albright@sptimes.com or 727 893-8252.

[Last modified February 13, 2007, 23:15:40]