This week I'm looking into how different companies are promoting trust on their websites in order to assure potential customers to spend their hard-earned money online. This analysis compares 3 different companies to give you an idea of what to do, and what not to do.
The Good
This menswear site gives instant perception of
credibility with “real world aspects” and tremendous ease of use. The site
demonstrates its expertise with the company blog covering various topics
related to the site, clothing and dressing up in general. Trustworthiness is
build through pictures of the people who blog and are responsible for the site.
On the bottom the shopper can see easily all the accepted methods of payment.
Even though shoppers can’t “Like” or tweet about specific items, they can join
the Bridge55 Facebook site and follow them on Twitter. The site also let’s you
see the items you’ve previously viewed adding to the “tailored user
experience”.
The ease of use is done through clear product
categories separated to clothes by categories in one bar and clothes by brands
in another one. The site has a professional feel and looks, and it’s not over
selling items to shoppers. On the other hand it’s not utilizing cross-selling,
which could be implemented on the site in a tasteful way.
The Bad
The launch of the new H&M website last fall
has become a great example of what not do. The key issue to pleasant shopping
experience is clear navigation, which H&M doesn’t have. The categorization
of clothes is fairly adequately done but it has categories like “DIVIDED” in
the top horizontal bar and L.O.G.G in the vertical bar which don’t mean much to
a person who is not fairly knowledgeable of fashion or H&M.
- The site doesn’t have breadcrumbs to help
users track theirs steps back.
- The site doesn’t have search to help people
to find exactly what they’re looking for
quickly.
- Doesn’t scale to
appropriate screen size (fills roughly 1/4th of my 23inch widescreen
dispplay)
The site doesn’t offer any
means of sharing through social medias. “Likening” clothes or tweeting about
shoes would go a long way in making the shopping experience more sociable.
What is even more appalling
is the cross-selling used by the company. I browsed the website for a while,
going through only men’s clothes. I browsed through all the men’s categories
and paid special attention to Jackets & Blazers. After choosing a blazer
for purchase and proceeding to checkout the site offers me women’s tops and a
dress, with a slogan “Something for you!”
Points for relatively clean
design, which might deceive people into believing the site is credible.
(I could probably write a dissertation on the mistakes, problems and
issues I have with this site)
The Ugly
When it comes to website
design, I think a 13 year old could do a better job in designing a website for
an airline. The sit looks messy, it’s confusing to navigate and the different
tabs don’t make sense or are overlapping each other. The initial credibility
feeling from this site is probably as low as it can get, and I think that’s all
a carefully planned strategy by RyanAir.
The colors, the layout and
the display ads all give an idea of a cheap website and I think all gives users’
subconscious a perception of “this airline has be the cheapest choice”. The
whole “Lidl” look of the site combined with cheap and anesthetic display ads is
meant to, in my opinion, to convince people of the cheapness of Ryan Air and
built credibility of that competitive advantage.
RyanAir has also pretty much
perfected their website’s purchase funnel with cross-selling items and
services. From the main page to having chosen your flight dates you get to the
passenger details page, which offers a myriad of additional things the
passenger, can purchase. Passengers have to pay extra for pretty much
everything that is normally included in the price of a ticket by other
airlines. The pricing of the different items and services is also quite low so
the hurdle to add them to your basket isn’t too high.
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