Does Homepage Design Influence Net Sales?
There is a creative tension that occurs in homepage design. Businesses must constantly balance the need to sell merchandise with the desire to communicate emotional aspects of the brand. Both issues are important. In some companies, the concept of "selling" wins. In other companies, the concept of "branding" wins. In either case, driving profitable sales should be the end result.
Which style drives more business, selling, branding, or both?
I analyzed data from the top 300 businesses in the Internet Retailer Top 500. I wanted to make sure I analyzed businesses that had at least $15,000,000 in annual sales.
Next, I created three segments, segments that loosely describe the selling technique employed by the website.
- Selling Websites: These websites have a strong focus on featuring a lot of products on the homepage. Frequently, the customer has to scroll down the page to see all product. Many individual items are featured on the homepage, and numerous links make most of the website available to the customer. Examples of "selling" websites include Super Warehouse, Abt Electronics, and Drugstore.com.
- Hybrid Websites: Websites that balance selling and branding are classified as "hybrid" websites. These sites typically include the entire homepage display on your monitor, without need to scroll down. There is ample white space or empty space, so that the customer is focused on a specific area of the website. Examples of hybrid websites include Eddie Bauer, Crate and Barrel, and Collections Etc.
- Branding Websites: These sites embrace the customer by evoking emotion. The homepage is not about directly selling merchandise. Instead, the website creates a mood, a feeling, something that differentiates the website from all the others. Examples of "branding" websites include Patagonia, Coach and Tiffany.
First, let's review the results among the 125 top selling websites.
- Conversion Rate:
- Selling Sites = 4.55%
- Hybrid Sites = 6.08%
- Branding Sites = 5.16%
- Average Order Size:
- Selling Sites = $219
- Hybrid Sites = $204
- Branding Sites = $125
- Net Sales per Visitor:
- Selling Sites = $9.96
- Hybrid Sites = $12.40
- Branding Sites = $6.45
- Conversion Rate:
- Selling Sites = 2.86%
- Hybrid Sites = 3.56%
- Branding Sites = 2.34%
- Average Order Size:
- Selling Sites = $178
- Hybrid Sites = $187
- Branding Sites = $120
- Net Sales per Visitor:
- Selling Sites = $5.09
- Hybrid Sites = $6.66
- Branding Sites = $2.81
What Does The Analysis Tell Us?
The analysis clearly indicates that companies employing a "hybrid" strategy have the most productive metrics. In fact, hybrid sites are about twice as productive as branding sites. Branding sites tend to have low average order sizes. Further study needs to be done to understand if the small average order size is due to the merchandise assortment on those sites, or are due to a lack of cross-shopping done by customers due to site usability issues.
It is interesting that "selling" sites have lower conversion rates than hybrid sites. It may be possible that customers are overwhelmed by massive amount of content on selling sites, causing customers to leave before they begin shopping.
It should also be noted that there are numerous examples of each strategy (selling, hybrid and branding) working exceptionally well. There are numerous examples of each strategy delivering poor results. In other words, there are ways to make the branding strategy effective. The data suggest the hybrid strategy is simply more likely to work.
Lastly, I defend the branding sites by saying that most of the big-ticket sites, those selling computers, participate in a selling or hybrid strategy, driving up the average order size. Still, when viewing conversion rates, branding sites lag behind hybrid sites. Conversion rates at selling sites are frequently hurt by large-ticket items like computers.
Given all of the caveats, it is still clear that the design of the homepage influences the productivity of each visitor to a website. It appears likely that a hybrid strategy is most likely to maximize the net sales of each visitor to the website. Selling sites may overwhelm visitors, while branding sites may not present enough merchandise to entice consumers.
How does your website stack up, against these metrics?
posted by Kevin @ 8:04 PM
4 Comments:
Fantastic post, and impressive how much analysis you can come up with from just the Interenet Retailer 500 statistics.
Interesting findings on the branding sites especially, though I'm guessing that many of the people designing those sites might say that actually selling on the web is not necessarily their first goal. Rather, in my experience, a branding site is usually trying to either be a simple "face" of the brand image, or it is trying to drive people towards buying in another channel like a retail store.
Also interesting on the selling websites would be to know which of them drive most of their traffic through things like paid search rather than through people coming to the site simply to shop. For example, I'd guess that people who came to Super Warehouse mostly arrive after a search for something like a specific printer (meaning they arrive at the site somewhere other than the home page). They need to have some home page for people who land there when they come to the site, but if most of their customer arrive some other way, then they may not feel they need to waste the time and space coming up with a way to evoke emotion or a brand image.
Thanks for your comments, I'm glad you enjoyed the discussion.
As you point out, there are many different ways users arrive at a site. On my site, I have two very different audiences. One arrives at specific permalinks via RSS/Atom feeds, the other audience bookmarks the homepage, and visits via their browser. E-Commerce businesses have the same dynamics. In a perfect world, how the homepage is merchandised and creatively executed should be dependent upon the audience visiting the page.
Hi Kevin --
Two observations:
[1] I believe the IR conversion data are self-reported and not audited. I'm familar with a few cases where retailers are on the list due to their own inflation of numbers. Now, to change your result, one would have to argue these 'errors' aren't random -- that selling / branding / hybrid had as a group different proclivities to report to IR acurately. Don't know if that is the case, but I take IR data with a big grain of salt.
[2] Your results depend critically on how you assign retailers to the bins, which could be subjective. I'd give additional hard criteria (eg percentage of above-the-fold homepage pixels devote to branding messages and images, vs. percentage of pixels devote to selling messages) on how you made the B/H/S decision, as well as provide your three lists.
Neat stuff, pulling observations from very thin potentially very noisy data.
Alan
rkgblog
Alan, you couldn't be more correct --- the data is frequently self-reported and errant. I made the assumption that everybody over-states their results at approximately the same rate, regardless of selling/hybrid/branding strategy.
On the second point, I agree with you, I should use facts that are more quantifiable than just my opinion. Doing that work would be worthy of writing an entire book about the topic ... hmmmm!
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home