Winning websites know the art of gleaning orders
10/09/2003 | Robin Robertson, Australian Financial Review
"When you set up your own website, you are buying yourself a piece of virtual real estate," says Nima Tassini, general manager of Glass Onion, an online communications company. "What do you want this site to do? Do you want it to generate sales or do you want people to pick up the phone and put in an order? Are you selling trust, a service or flowers?"
Pearsons Florist sells flowers. It receives 15 per cent of its orders through its web site. When you browse through the site, you find a floral bon-bon, an invitation to send a bunch of flowers to a loved one and a secure site for payment over the internet. It also offers its phone number because most people cruise the site, then ring an order through.
And this is Pearsons' aim. This website is a shopfront which leads to sales, and consumers are responding to its credibility. The credibility of a website can make or break it - but what is it?
“The connection between design look and perceived credibility suggests that creating websites with quality information alone is not enough to win credibility in users' minds.”
Robin Robertson
Australian Financial Review
In a general sense, credibility is not measurable, although Stanford University tried. In a study released in August last year, 2684 people were asked to evaluate the credibility of live websites. Their comments were analysed to pinpoint those features which gave a website its credibility. The results were surprising.
Consumers paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site - its design look - than its content. Nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of its overall visual design, including layout, typography, font size and colour schemes. Information structure and information focus came in second.
The study says: "Our result about the prominence of design look was not what we had hoped to find; we had hoped to see that people used more rigorous evaluation strategies." The connection between design look and perceived credibility suggests that creating websites with quality information alone is not enough to win credibility in users' minds.
"In most cases, website designers need also focus on the impression that the visual design will make, creating a site that achieves what many of our participants described as "a polished, professional look". "But the connection between visual design and credibility may not be so simple. Slick-looking websites frequently received negative comments. Participants seemed to make judgments about the people behind the site on the basis of the design look."
One purpose of this study was to help Consumer WebWatch fulfil its mission of ensuring that the internet is a place where consumers can safely and efficiently find information and make transactions. Consumer WebWatch has outlined five guidelines involving transparency and fairness:
- Identity: Making clear who owns the site and how people can contact them.
- Advertising and sponsorships: Distinguishing between ads and content and disclosing relevant business relationships.
- Customer service: Disclosing costs and policies relevant to consumers.
- Corrections: Correcting past information that was false or misleading.
- Privacy: Disclosing how personal information will be used.
“We would have 1500 to 2000 customers, and probably about 200 deliveries a day, apart from Valentine's Day, when the volume is 20-fold.”
Barbara Pollak
Pearson's Florist
Whether or not Pearsons conforms with these guidelines, its website leads to sales: customers trust the website with their payment details. These details are entered in a secure area of the website.
Usually, this secure area is controlled by a separate billing company, a gateway into a bank which will authenticate credit cards. After the transaction, both billing company and bank subtract their fee.
However, Pearsons has removed the billing company, and handles the transaction manually. They log into their secure area, print out payment details and transfer them into their system.
Pearsons director Barbara Pollak says: "We already have a payment process set up with a bank, so we do not use the website to process the transaction. I like to control the payment in the same way as I control a phone order. I punch the credit card details into our Eftpos machine."
Pollak says for further security, she deletes the order from the website after she has printed it out. "My customer orders are not stored through a third-party provider. I want my customers to feel secure. Besides, I do not want people to hack into the website and steal my client base."
Pearsons is a Sydney-based family business, with 50 staff and 11 stores. It has had a website for about four years. For the past three years, customers have been able to order online.
"We would have 1500 to 2000 customers, and probably about 200 deliveries a day, apart from Valentine's Day, when the volume is 20-fold." She says they get more "joke" orders on the internet than through the telephone. "But you can normally tell.
"If you do not sight the credit card and check the signature - and this is not possible with phone or internet orders - then we have to wear the cost if the order is fraudulently made."
Pearsons has been taking phone orders for flowers for more than 20 years, so they can sense if all is not as it should be. For instance, alarm bells ring if someone orders three dozen roses, a big bear or champagne, yet sounds like a 16-year-old on the phone.
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