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The market is ready for Mobile Commerce
Mobile shopping
Consumers are eager to discover mobile shopping possibilities. Independent research sponsored by ATG unveals how and why customers shop with their mobile devices (m-commerce).
The research shows that 14% of consumers already tried to shop online with their mobile phone. However, most of them (11%) found this to be hard. ATG concludes that retailers and manufacturers need to address the bottlenecks in the mobile shopping process in order to boost mobile shopping.
Packshot photography
A packshot (or product photograph) is a still or moving image of a product, used to portray the product’s reputation in advertising or other media. It is an important stimulus to sales, with the goal of triggering in-store, on-shelf product recognition. With the rapid growth of e-commerce, packshot photographs have become the digital shelf themselves.
Standard packshot photographs have a neutral white background and ground surface. For most products the front view is the most important and thus the standard. This is especially true with products were user interface or size is important like for example consumer electronics. 3D views and perspective are applied more with decorative products and clothing.
Here are three examples, click them to see their true size:
Women take the lead in online shopping
Research by Blauw Research for webshop Bol.com has shown that nowadays women account for 51 percent of online buyers where in 1998 nine out of ten online shoppers were male. This shift in gender also influences buying behavior. Internet used to be a male concern, but women have different demands when it comes to e-commerce. Women tend to focus more on product and price orientation. Inspiration and experiences are more important here. The males however, want to choose quicker and therefore require a well-organized shopping process.
The combination of focal points of the different genders is key for today’s webshop development. Special attention for the female approach requires more focus on inspiration and ‘the experience’ during product visualization.
Adobe Actual Size for design professionals
A very interesting feature in the Adobe suite is ‘Actual Size’. This function shows the designed material in actual size just like True size does with product images. This is a very useful feature for evaluation of a design. Questions like ‘is the font easy to read?’ or ‘what does the end product look like?’ can be answered without pushing the print button. This is another example of how digital images in true size can improve the experience and ability to value a product (or design).
Online shoppers are uniquely loyal
Consumers tend to stick to what they are familiar with when it comes to online shopping. According to the global online shopping report by Nielsen, 60 percent of online shoppers say they buy mostly from the same site, proving that online shoppers are uniquely loyal.
Personal recommendation
According to the report, over one third of online shoppers use a search engine to find an online shop. Also interesting is that one in four relies on word of mouth.
Open-source webshop application popularity
What are the most popular shopping cart systems used by webshops? Nowadays, a lot of open-source shopping cart applications are available. We compared the five largest open-source online shopping applications and found some surprising trends.
The graph below shows the systems and their average worldwide traffic (search volume index, scale relative to average Magento figures) according to Google Trends. It’s no hard science, but the outcomes show great shifts over time.
What strikes is the rapid growth of Magento overtaking osCommerce as the largest player. Both systems today account for 26% of the traffic in this research, followed by Interchange (18%), VirtueMart (15%) and Zen cart (15%). It can be assumed that the increase in popularity of Magento will continue, making Magento by far the most used online shopping cart system in the near future.
Size comparison using references
Viewing products in true size is a great good. This is one of the main reasons why consumers tend to go to physical shops. A common thought is that size determination is only possible by holding, viewing or touching real, existing products.
However, there are examples of size determination in architecture and product photography. As illustrated above, product photographers use other common products like coins, rulers or pencils to give the viewer an idea of the product’s size.
Architects use scaled models, maquettes or renderings to visualize and test shapes and ideas. In architecture, size comparison is often achieved by placing models of people or cars next to buildings and structures. The above image shows a rendering of The bird’s nest (Beijing, China) designed by Herzog & de Meuron with people as references.
Using references is a simple way to let viewers determine the size of products. An important thing to remember is to always use common reference objects like coins, credit cards and people.
The illustration above shows a rubber ducky without any reference in the first image. The second and third image show how a person as a reference can influence the perception of the size of a product.
