Study: "Click-Here Commerce".

On Thursday, Internet market watcher Shelley Taylor Associates plans to release a study listing the best and the worst online shopping sites, Newsbytes has learned. The report will argue that online stores have failed to learn basic lessons their retail physical counterparts learned the hard way many years ago. The study itself will be released at a breakfast briefing scheduled for Palo Alto, Calif., on Thursday, market researcher and study author Shelley Taylor told Newsbytes. Shopping techniques may look different online, says the report, but the way people make buying decisions has not. Taylor says "Web site sizzle," as she calls it, just complicates matters and actually keeps many people out of online stores that might otherwise appeal to them. In the study, titled "Click-Here Commerce," Taylor applied a set of 175 evaluation criteria to 50 consumer e-commerce Internet sites. The sites were elected as a cross-industry sample of technology, entertainment, books, music, apparel, sports goods, travel and leisure retail outlets. She continued, "Online shopping is a very new medium, but shopping is not a new human activity." One roadblock that online stores present to many potential shoppers is a need for the latest browser versions, plug-ins, screen sizes or resolution, fast modem speeds and lots of memory. Many laptop users, people with older systems and novice users sometimes cannot even get in through the front door, much less take a look at what goodies the site offers for sale. The study contents that only two out of the 50 sites surveyed offered a reduced bandwidth or text-only option. The study found that 24 percent of the 50 sites, or about 12 sites, did not have an easy way for customers to move between major sections. Only eight percent, or four sites, had any form of "contextual navigation," the Internet equivalent of "you are here" signs on mall directories.