Gaining Click-time in the Virtual Storefront

Marketing researchers examine how to improve the consumer experience online

By Sommer Hamilton

 
Competition among electronic retailers in the burgeoning online market boils down to consumer trust: How long do customers click through a virtual storefront, and what keeps them interacting with the site? In e-commerce, getting Web surfers to rely on your online services can be just as important as making the sale.

 By 2010, researchers estimate that actual online purchases could double or triple from what they are today — underscoring the importance of knowing how to tailor the consumer experience for a new breed of impatient shoppers with information from other stores and services only a click away.

Research from Mays Business School’s Department of Marketing finds that privacy and security features — which most consumers now expect — aren’t the biggest drivers of trust in online users across all sites. Instead, the sites most online consumers inherently trust play up ease of navigation, brand recognition and interactive advice mechanisms such as customization, Coleman Chair in Marketing Venkatesh Shankar finds in his October 2005 co-authored Journal of Marketing paper, “Are the Drivers and Role of Online Trust the Same for All Web Sites and Consumers?”

“What surprised us most was not just the influence of navigation and advice functions, but the extent to which those items increased the willingness to buy more, the willingness to interact more with the features on the site and spend more time there — the willingness overall to trust that site,” Shankar explains.

That doesn’t mean sites for travel, community, shopping and car hunting can downplay privacy in consumer interactions. In research that surveyed 6,831 users of 25 Web sites, the study found that privacy and security are essential, but just having a privacy notice or a seal of approval from the Better Business Bureau doesn’t rev up consumer response to a site, Shankar says.

One thing that hasn’t changed with e-commerce is how strongly a product or service brand is associated with effective trust building, Shankar says. Though the researchers expected brand to be important, they found that a strong brand was so important that customers were willing to trust those companies’ sites (think Nike, Dell and E*TRADE Financial) more than they would trust other sites with some superior features.

But for a smaller brand, such as a search engine portal, problems with navigation or a lack of features key to build online trust can deter future visits to the site entirely. That includes errors on a site, which can frustrate site users and show a lack of response to user needs.

“What we learned is that we can tell the key determinants to creating trust with your Web site in every category we could think of,” Shankar says. “And this is so important today — if a company isn’t getting customers to use their sites to decide online, then they are in trouble.”

Lessons from shopper needs in e-commerce should apply equally to physical store locations and catalog services, the research also concludes. Shoppers accustomed to personal advisers online will start to expect the same service in salespeople, and managers should approach store layout, goods display and catalog readability with the same eye for ease of navigation. “What’s online drives purchases at the retail store,” Shankar explains. “And the same customer expectations have to be met.”

Shankar is already working with researchers Fareena Sultan and Glen L. Urban to understand precisely what navigation forms and virtual advice wizards best inspire trust in online consumers — and how. In forthcoming research, the team will judge user interactions in different experimental sites built for Intel. They hope to discover just what functions, implemented in which formats, gain the most user time and engagement with a site.