Having observed hundreds of customer test sessions and chatted with thousands of consumers, we've noticed that customers, when looking for hardware over the Web, fit into one of two categories:
(1) those who are researching certain items,
(2) those who've already researched and have decided to purchase online.
These people are not loyal to any of the online services. Rather, they choose the site that has the best price on the goods they want. But if it's difficult to find what they're looking for, or if the buying process is too long and obscure to understand, then they'll leave your site and move on to your competitor. Your competitor's site, until now, has been minimised at the bottom of the browser. You guessed it, the good ole days of "if you build it they will come" are over. If you're not considering the usability of your site, then forget it.
So it's this second category of shopper we're focussing on, you know the type--in fact it may even be you. You're busy (I think we like to call it "time poor"), so you're looking for the cheapest offer at the highest speed, you will open several stores in your browser at once, clicking madly between them in an attempt to simultaneously find the best option on the market. You have no time for bells and whistles--that is, you don't want to be baffled by high-tech design features that get in the way and make the products hard to find. Don't get us wrong, floating navigation is great for marketing or advertising sites, but not for functional ones. You just want your Palm, and you want it now.
So to set the scene we decided to have a specific shopping list of items that we needed and worked under the theory of, "give me the cheapest deal quickly . . . and don't make it hard for me". With this attitude in tow we set out to buy the following items:
- A laptop
- A Palm m100
- An optical mouse
- An extension to fit between the new laptop and Palm (data cable)
- Project 2000 upgrade
- CD-RW media
- 5m Ethernet network cable
The sites we selected to review were:
- AusPC Market: www.auspcmarket.com.au
- City Software: www.citysoftware.com.au
- Computer Market: www.computermarket.com.au
- Corporate Software: www.corpsoft.com.au
- Dick Smith Electronics: www.dse.com.au
- E-Store: www.estore.com.au
- EYO: www.eyo.com.au
- Forte Computers: www.fortecomputers.com.au
- Harris Technology: www.ht.com.au
- Harvey Norman: www.harveynorman.com.au
- International Software Warehouse: www.iswh.com.au
- Ozbuy: www.ozbuy.com.au
Clearly, there are several stores we have missed, with our selection criteria based on the sites ranking in the Hitwise Top 100 (most popular sites via hits). It should also be noted that in the ever-changing world of Web sites, we reviewed the list between the 18th of October and the 7th of November. With Christmas coming up, we've looked at some of the pros and cons of buying these types of products online.
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