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To: Mr. Big who wrote (63651)	9/28/1999 7:47:00 PM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 120523

Interesting.....Online Shoppers Frustrated By Confusing Sites (09/28/99, 4:40 p.m. ET) By Mo Krochmal, TechWeb A research company estimates online retailers could lose as much revenue as the entire retail industry is set to earn during the upcoming holiday shopping season. "We are about to experience a $6 billion loss in sales," said Mark Hurst, president and founder of Creative Good, a New York-based market researcher, speaking at the Real Strategies for Online Retail conference. Hurst said online retailers are driving traffic to the Internet, but making it hard for visitors to become buyers. "We call it the customer-experience gap," he said. "Sites are serving up more complexity than what customers are looking for." Other industry researchers are predicting this year's holiday shopping season will establish a high-water mark for business-to-consumer e-commerce. Earlier Tuesday, Jupiter Communications, another New York market researcher, released a report estimating online shopping will be $6 billion during the holiday season, of which $5 billion will be spent on products. Last year, holiday shoppers spent an estimated $3.1 billion in what was regarded as the first year for a significant online market. In a consumer research study conducted on a dozen of the largest online retailers, Hurst said 39 percent of customer buying attempts online and 56 percent of product searches failed. Even companies that are entirely online fail to make an easy shopping experience, Hurst said. "Etoys has one of the worst-performing interface elements," he said. "Disney has confusing cross-promotional links. This is the state of e-commerce. Companies are buying $3 million machines or hiring 200 people to answer e-mail, but they are not investing in making the site easy." Hurst took a virtual tour of the Levis website, looking for blue jeans. He went four levels deep into the site without finding a simple graphic or display of the San Francisco-based company's core product. "There is no excuse," he said. Customers have slow modems, small monitors, and very little online experience, Hurst said. "The average user has very little tolerance for complexity," he said. The harder customers have to look for a product, the easier it is to just leave a site, said an executive of a San Francisco-based systems integration company that has worked on such sites as the JCrew.com site. "It's our experience that you lose about 25 percent of your customers with each click," said Heidi Gibson, marketing director at Fort Point Partners. Related Stories: