The Power of Subtle Differences

January 2000

It pays to steal from your competitors. Very few original ideas exist on the Web, and the best ones are sitting on your competitors' sites, ripe for the taking.

Because crime pays, we expect Web sites to look increasingly more like one another. All portals look the same because they stole every good idea Yahoo! ever had, and Yahoo! stole all of theirs.

After a review of major computer sales Web sites, I found:

• The differences among the Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and Hewlett- Packard (HP) sites are subtle.

• The principal reason for these differences is whether the manufacturer is a pure direct seller.

• These subtle differences can have a powerful impact on success.

These sites work very similarly. You click on a link identifying what kind of user you are and another identifying what kind of computer you're looking for, and you arrive at a page where you can configure your new computer. Then you make a few selections and execute your purchase. I was startled by how different such similar sites could be.

First Impressions

Some sites look like commerce sites, and some do not. Dell's and Gateway's sites look like ecommerce sites right away; Compaq's and HP's sites seem more corporate. While the reason for this is very good (Compaq and HP are much more diversified businesses), I believe this also makes a difference in how visitors perceive a site.

Recommendation

Make your default URL (www.companyname.com) your commerce site, and link to your corporate information from that page, as Dell and Amazon do, instead of the other way around. People come to your Web site to do business with you not to read your press releases.

Product Lines

Compaq has a challenge. Clearly, it wants to sell its own branded accessories on its site and doesn't want to compete with its channel.

This means that it can't offer a decent selection of accessories. However, Gateway and Dell offer a broad array of accessories and software when you configure your computer. The difference between selling a full line of add-ons could be the difference between a profitable and an unprofitable site.

Finding the Computer

The number of clicks I needed to find the computer I was looking for varied from three to five. That's a very big difference. Also, many of the computers featured on Compaq's Web site cannot be bought online. The company refers you to a local dealer.

Customizing the Computer

We found the fewest problems in this process, probably because idea- stealing is the most rampant here. But there were some problems, especially on the Compaq and HP sites: Not all systems on all sites were configurable, some configurations were unavailable, and I encountered bugs.

Buying the Computer

This is most crucial step of all, and there were big differences between the sites. Our recommendations:

• Check for errors in input, but don't make the user click the "Back" button. Redisplay the input page with the errors marked at the appropriate locations.

• Minimize the number of pages the user must fill out to complete the order; tell the user how many pages there will be and which page the user is on.

• Don't format-check information that you can verify by other means. Do you care whether the customer punctuates his telephone and credit card numbers with hyphens, periods, spaces, or whatever?

• Here's a hot idea: We found the following on the user name and address page of Gateway's site: "Complete your order online now and we will deduct $50 from the configured price shown here!" This seems like a great way to lower the number of abandoned shopping carts.

Conclusion

A subtle, but vast, gulf exists between the sites of direct sellers (Dell and Gateway) and manufacturers with mixed channels (HP and Compaq). Unless HP and Compaq can bridge this gulf, I don't believe they can beat the direct sellers on the Web.