CelebriteCommerce: Oh Oprah…
The Queen of talk shows, the most successful woman in entertainment, Oprah has a simple, small, online boutique. It is attached to her main site, Oprah.com, and feels somewhat like an afterthought. Selling only a handful of items, Oprah’s Boutique is mainly filled with clothes for her bookclub.
Oprah has ingeniously used her acclaim and popular book club to enter into an affiliate program with Amazon.com where members of her club get 10% off her book club books.
Joining Oprah’s free book club is somewhat longer than necessary and has required fields that seem unimportant and intrusive. First off, why do I need to fill out all this information that is already on my Amazon account? Second what do these categories have to do with anything, but obvious demographic research?
Getting back to the boutique, you use your Oprah.com name and navigation is simple, but small improvements could be made to increase the sites usability. First off, make a more obvious navigation bar at the top or bottom of the page. This helps customers who are simply browsing to return to the main page faster and lowers bailouts due to navigational frustration. Second, make the ‘help’ bar big, bold, and bright so I can see it when I need help! This tiny little ‘customer service’ button just doesn’t hold water.
Product pages are extremely simple. Product, price, purchase is all that is offered. All you have to do is select your size. Maybe this simplicity is good, it does fit the modus operandi for the site, but in an eMarket that now features color searches and 360 degree product interaction, this seems too little.
Non-member purchases are made with ease and do not ask for extraneous information. Required fields are clearly marked with *’s; however, certain fields like phone number do not display the format accepted. Submitting a form with missing or incorrect fields returns you to the page and tells you what’s wrong with your information.
Overall this is a good site, simple, but good. Usability could be improved, but its feel is friendly and warm which is what has made Oprah so successful.
Posted by Chris | June 26, 2006
The Usability Consultant: A Bad Egg » eCommerce Cache :: Varien eCommerce Blog :: A blog focused on the design, marketing, and implementation of online commerce June 28th, 2006
[…] This is the first in a new feature we’re going to start on the blog. A transition from our Monday feature, CelebriteCommerce, to a more businesslike it’s-Wednesday-you-have-two-more-days-until-you-can-sleep-in-article about the effect design, functionality and their implementation have on customer satisfaction. Two companies, Foresee Results and FGI Research, conducted a customer satisfaction survey on the top 40 revenue grossing Internet retailers. We are going to take a look at the 10 sites with the highest customer satisfaction scores and analyze them using the following criteria: 1. Design of Pages: Is the site clear enough that the customer knows what is required at every step of the checkout process? 2. Upselling: Does the upselling hinder the checkout process, or is it tastefully done, and in the best cases, does it actually help the customer by providing necessary products (such as a flash card for a digital camera)? 3. Error Recognition: Does the site catch user errors and help the customer correct them in an intuitive and simple way? 4. Process Efficiency: Does the customer get bored/frustrated with the process before completing the purchase? This is determined both by the amount of pages that must be loaded as well as the amount of information a customer must provide. 5. Shipping Options: Are different options presented clearly and with enough information for the customer to decide which is best? […]
Holden July 23rd, 2007
I found some great new products on this site. Check it out: http://www.seenontvnow.com