RATING: 4/10
Harris Technology first went live in 1996, making them one of the most experienced online stores reviewed. Their site quotes a range of 30,000 items and apparently gets 10,000 to 13,000 page queries daily. Our first experience after typing in the URL was being shown a redirection page! Not a great start to the buying experience. The homepage of Harris Technology isn't very informative and certainly doesn't welcome the shopper. At first it seemed there were no products displayed, we had to scroll down to find them. Instead of seeing products, prices, and descriptions first, the top of the page is dominated by a photo of the call centre, information about the business connection with Coles Myer, an article about investing by Robert Gottleibson, and ads for other Web sites--not very conducive to shopping.
Hits
- There is a very large range of computer related items.
- Harris also offers a wide variety of payment options, including Rent Smart finance.
- Customers can receive an order confirmation e-mail almost immediately.
- Users can print a quote, which may be handy for price comparisons offline.
Misses
- The poorly designed homepage makes it hard to see the relevant information and important links are not obvious.
- Use of frames is sometimes very confusing, as they all change the information they display.
- There is a chat forum available for customers. It doesn't seem like a useful feature for an online store and no one seemed to be using it.
- Clicking home didn't cause the right-hand navigation to reappear so we couldn't see the options available until we accidentally found the button in the top navigation.
- Customers aren't told how much they are saving on specials.
- The back button provided on the main page didn't always work.
- Items suggest "less than 10 items"--that means there could be anywhere between nine and none. They need to specify.
Purchasing Process
- Getting stock availability information is easy in some cases and hard in others. If the stock level is not reported on the Web page you can e-mail or call, but you can only e-mail about one item at a time, making this process a hassle.
- There is no comparison feature to help decide which laptop is the right one, but at least all the information was in a similar place in the description page, making comparing products a little easier.
- The purchasing process was not easy to follow, as the customer is not guided through the process. This should have been more intuitive.
- Buttons on the basket page are not well organised and require the customer to search for the button they need, making the process potentially confusing and somewhat drawn out.
- The information required on the order processing page is not well laid out and information that may be irrelevant to the majority of shoppers is placed in amongst the important details.
Member Benefits
- The member benefits are not very enticing for most customers, as there is no significant simplification of the process. However, you do save some time on filling in forms.
Search Facility
- The simple search facility uses three criteria: keyword, the price range you want, and part number. You don't need to enter all of these.
- The search returns surprisingly good results and also allows you to narrow down your search by allowing the selection of categories containing the search term. This is handy when you want only to look at certain sub-categories of the product.
General Usability
- The navigation system of the site can be confusing to use, as all frames can be changed to show different information. Customers may get "lost" and not know how to navigate back, as the buttons and their names are sometimes not as intuitive as they could be.
- The wording used on the site was sometimes a little confusing and could be simplified to make it clearer for customers.
- The page layout is not consistent, with items in odd places and information poorly formatted. This makes it hard for the customer to identify, find, and read product information.
- Harris Technology has a large range of items but the customer experience could be greatly improved to make purchasing quicker and easier.
- The site does not comply with W3C accessibility guidelines.
4%
2%
