web assignment

Mark Ingram




Online shopping

Over the past decade e-commerce has seen a massive expansion, especially in the area of online shopping. There has been an increase in the volume of online shoppers and as a result companies have had to restructure their business in order to accommodate this increase in demand. The target demographic in this report will be America’s online shopping community. I am going to explain what they are looking for, want, need and, desire when they are shopping online. I will then evaluate the two websites and determine whether they meet the needs of the consumer. I will also give an evaluation of how functional the sites are and then try and establish which delivers a better service.
Who is shopping online? John B. Horrigan of PEW (2008) reports that Two-thirds (66%) of online Americans say they have purchased a product online, such as a book, toy, music, or clothing. (para1) He Also Reports that,
• 78% of Internet users either agree (53%) or agree strongly (25%) with the proposition that shopping online is convenient for them.
• 68% of Internet users either agree (47%) or agree strongly (21%) that online shopping saves them time.(para2)
People shopping online want to take advantage of cheaper deals then one would traditionally find on the high street. People are also looking to save time and effort when they order online, they are looking for a service that can deliver fast results and is easy to use. Safety is a major issue for most people when contemplating making a purchase online; most feel like the system could be more secure. The number of online shoppers would likely increase if they felt like their transactions were guaranteed safe.
Many ask questions like, is it safe to put my credit card details online? Is my identity going to be safe if I do make a purchase? Horrigan’s Report (2008) states that there is still widespread concern amongst the Internet population about the safety of financial and personal data online. And fully 58% of Internet users say they have felt frustrated, confused or overwhelmed during online shopping (para3).
According to the Nelson Company (2008) announced that consumers will shift their gift buying online this holiday season, citing convenience, time saving and price among the primary reasons for shopping on the Web (table1)

Table 1: Top 10 Reasons to Shop Online (U.S.)

Reason : Percent of Respondents :
Able to shop 24 hours a day 76
Saves time 74
Avoiding crowds 65
Saves gas 59
Sales/Discounts/Promotions 55
Low prices 53
Comparison shopping 48
Selection 40
Available product information 37
Items are in stock 37

Source: Nielsen Online, Pre-holiday Survey, November 2008
Horrigan (2008) also states that demographic factors such as race or gender have no significant impact on predicting levels of online shopping, and the impact of income is small; if low-income Americans suddenly had at least average incomes the incidence of online shopping would be one percentage point higher (para 5). Now that we have a better idea of why, what, and when people tend to do their shopping, as well as any concerns that they may have regarding safety and security, we can now compare the effectiveness of two websites.
Due to higher overheads and costs, companies like Borders have had to make some serious changes in their infrastructure in order to keep up with online community.
Borders was originally apart of amazon.com but in May 2008 they broke away and launched their own website. According to Internet Retailer (2008) the new Borders.com wanted to present much of what shoppers loved about browsing in a Borders bookstore, plus add the magic of e-commerce to create a unique shopping experience (para1).
Borders wanted to create an environment where the shopper felt like he or she was actually browsing the isles. The quality of the content is very good, you can see the books lined up on a virtual shelf just as they would be at one of their stores, and when you click on them a little blurb pops up with a description of the book and a user rating (based on stars 1 being poorest 5 being highest) which give the audience an unbiased review of a book, CD etc. This technology is called “magic shelf” and was built with Flash technology by Allurent Inc. and search technology from Endeca Technologies Inc. According to Kevin Etrell, senior vice president of e-business, Shoppers who use the Magic Shelf place 62% more orders per shopping session than shoppers who don’t use it (2008). The site is very easy to navigate and features a search bar at the top where you can search any anything, and it has the option to refine your search in categories, which is a nice feature. Contact information is provided at the bottom of the screen and is very helpful, when you click on it brings you to a screen that has FAQ’s with answers, but if you need more they offer an email address and phone number. All in this entire site is very well structured, in fact its one of the best I have ever seen.
If there is one thing that I did not like about the homepage of the site is that it was too cluttered, they were promoting too many of their deals on this page. The use of bright color and too many items to click on was confusing to look at. Maybe because of the holiday season the push is on to sell, but there is no need to have every single offer on the homepage in my opinion. Add that to all of the Christmas colors and it becomes quite annoying to look at for elongated periods of time.
According to Online retailer (2008), Amazon.com is the world’s top online retailer. Amazon offers a similar service to borders, but they also sell a wider variety of products, and services some of which include, books; electronics and computers; toys, kids, and baby; sports and outdoors; movies, music, and games; home and garden; apparel, shoes, and jewelry; tools, auto, and industrial; digital downloads; grocery; and health and beauty. Amazon is clearly a bigger company than borders, with arms that stretch out to nearly every business, they made their start as an online bookstore and now offer so many services that it is hard to say exactly what they do. Due to the gargantuan amount of services provided it is clear that they are trying to target every online shopper.
I found that Amazon.com was much easier to look at cosmetically than borders.com. They didn’t make use of vibrant and bright colors, instead they stuck with a plain white background with blue color schemes. They offer the same online veri-secure purchasing system that borders uses. They too offer customer feedback on all products just like borders, which creates an unbiased description of how a product works. Navigation of the site revolves around similar search functions as borders, categorized searches via java script. This is not a flash based website either, which means it can be linked to by most browsers and does not require flash plug-ins. Because there is so much info coupled with so many products and services the site can be daunting to navigate, you could potentially spend hours looking for something that should only take a few minutes. Perhaps the biggest let down about Amazon.com is the fact that nowhere on the homepage is there an option to contact the company. It is extremely frustrating you’re your forced to scroll though pages and pages or arbitrary information just to get an email address or phone number moreover this gives the impression that customer service is not a top priority for Amazon.
Both of these sites were very effective at getting the products into full view and I enjoyed reading some of the UGC especially the product reviews as some were hilariously funny. However neither offered any guarantee that shopping through their sites guaranteed safety for the user. There was not a single mission statement reassuring the customer that their identity would be safe, which poses a major concern, is really safe to shop online?










Works Cited
John B. Horrigan. (2008, Feburary). Online Shopping: Convenient but Risky. Retrieved from http://pewresearch.org/pubs/733/online-shopping

Nielsen Online. (2008). More Consumers Plan to Shop for Toys & Video Games and Books. New York, NY: Suzy Bausch.

Internet Retailer. E-retailers showing off with innovation. Retrieved from http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=28554

Internet Retailer. Internet Retailer Top 500 Retail Web Sites. Retrieved from http://www.internetretailer.com/top500/list.asp

Http://www.amazon.com

Http://www.borders.com

----------------------------------
I used this to evaluate the sites, http://infoacrs.com/nm/evaluatingwebsites.html