Consumer Roles in Online Decision Making

When designing for an e-commerce website, or even analysing one (e.g for usability), it’s really important to understand the basic roles of online visitors when they engage with your site.

If you think about it carefully, there’s a significant difference between the needs of a visitor who is looking at your site looking for ideas than someone who knows precisely what they are looking for. This is one of the basic problems with generic user testing which aims to analyse a site based on a ‘typical’ shopper who rarely exist in practice.

In order to effectively analyse or design for e-commerce websites, you need to understand the basic roles that visitors to your site may have at any point in time and look at how well your site helps them achieve their goals when in each of these role states.

So let’s look at the roles.

The Explorer

Explorers are people who are browsing the web looking for ideas. For example, it’s my wife’s birthday coming up soon and I’m looking for a gift that’s going to really make her day. Explorers have a range of possible needs and many uncertainties they need to resolve before they could commit to any purchase.

The key here is that explorers are not looking for a specific product, they are looking for something that allows them to narrow their search and help them decide. Taking my mother’s birthday as an example, I may look at some nice flower bouquets or maybe something for her embroidery hobby. What’s your site got that’s going to help explorers decide?

The Hunter

Hunters are people who have identified the ‘kind’ of product that they are looking for and are now hunting for the best options for this product type. At the end of the ‘hunt’ they will have identified the exact product/service they want, i.e. a specific model number. Using the case of my mothers birthday, I’ve discovered some cool software that allows you to convert a photo into an embroidery pattern, she’d love that! Now, as a hunter, I’m now looking to narrow my search down to a specific product choice. Hunters need assistance and guidance to help them reach a decision.

The key here is that your site design should make it as easy as possible for hunters to make that decision. What would be the key questions that a hunter at your site would need answered in order to choose your product or service easily?

The Tracker

Trackers are people who know the specific product they are looking to purchase and are now looking for the best deal for them. They want very specific information that would help them make a purchasing decision including price, availability, returns policy, delivery charges and so on.

E-commerce sites that allow trackers to evaluate this information fully and easily without any ambiguity or feeling that there’s something hidden upstream will have a far higher chance of a transaction occurring.

Finally, the Transactor

As the name implies, transactors are people who have made a decision to purchase and are now looking to get it over and done with as easily as possible. Unfortunately, this is the point where many e-commerce sites fail and the most likely place for people to abandon.

Transactors are like gold. They’ve already moved through one or more of the above evaluation phases and may have even visited your site a number of times and competitor sites in between. There still may be an unconscious ‘pull’ towards another competing product at another site (see our article on anticipated regret). So treat these people with cotton gloves!

A word of caution, people who have put product into your shopping cart may not necessarily be transactors. Explorers and hunters will often use shopping carts as a holding pen or ‘wish list’ as they evaluate various options.

For measurement purposes, only people who have started your checkout process can genuinely be considered transactors. Making the checkout process as pain free as possible will pay large dividends.

Keep in mind that individual shoppers may not necessarily be a tracker, hunter or explorer. These are sub-conscious behavioural strategies that the same person may adopt on separate occasions. Some explorers who identify the right product, are happy with the price and have trust for the vendor, may immediately change into a transactor and purchase from you. But the classifications are important to help you design and analyse effectively for the different kinds of shopper.

One of the major points you must take from this is that you should expect that people will rarely transact on their first visit. Unless of course you can attract more visitors who are a little further along the product location cycle and ready to transact. How can you do that? One method is to adopt long tail search strategies which are discussed in this article.