Done In By Design — Why Beauty Is Not Always An Online Merchant’s Friend

While most things are up for debate, beauty on merits usually is not one of them. John Keats famously wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and it is one of those propositions that is fundamentally hard to argue with for all but the most jaded.

Unless one is trying to build an eCommerce website, in which case, the debate actually gets a little bit more complex as there are two competing schools of thought on this subject. School One says that beauty websites — well-designed, sleek and generally aesthetically appealing — sell to consumers because they speak to professionalism, which bolsters consumer trust. A website that looks like it was designed by a high-school student in the late 1990s — this school of thought tends to preach — inspires consumers to worry that the merchant they are dealing with isn’t exactly up to digital snuff, and that sort of feeling can rather quickly dissuade a potential customer from offering up their payment information.

“Many online shopping carts are abandoned because the shopper, at some point, begins to distrust the merchant. Fraud is a concern for any relatively informed shopper, and most have no qualms about abandoning their shopping cart should they question the legitimacy of the site,” ACI noted in a study released earlier this year, which highlighted that straight consumer distrust was a leading reason that, as of 2015, merchants worldwide were leaving $168 billion on the table in missed conversions.

It’s a simple and intuitive argument but a controversial one, since there is a counteracting school of thought that believes that, when it comes to some cases, ugly websites convert better than pretty websites. Beautiful websites, School Two notes, can be very engaging for customers — and may even draw more clicks — but the mark of success for an eCommerce site is actually how many of those clicks turn into conversions. And beauty presents some challenges to that — namely, that it tends to be distracting, it can move customers away from the goal of buying something and it can be technologically more complex to offer, meaning there are more ways it can go wrong.

So, how to settle the debate?

 

When Beauty Breaks Bad (And Ugly Shines Through) 

The web, of course, abounds with ugly — but otherwise successful — sites. Wikipedia has one of the least visually interesting interfaces in human history, and Craigslist — the grandmaster of ugly sites that yield high-conversion looks — appears like it was designed as an afterthought in a computer programming class in 1997. It looks especially dated when stacked up against Facebook’s new marketplace, Craigslist’s latest up-and-coming competitor.

And there are questions as to whether Facebook’s shinier, sleeker answer to Craigslist will win out — despite the fact that most people agree it will be more robust and ultimately easier to search and screen.

Because Facebook has a problem that Craigslist doesn’t have. It is the endemic problem of pretty — it is distracting. A Craigslist user is there for an apartment, couch, toaster or car. There is little else for them to do on the site than clicking links until they find what they are looking for, and while it may not be a wholly rewarding experience, it is actually pretty seamlessly straightforward and has the benefit of keeping the user focused on the task at hand.

Facebook, on the other hand, had the problem of also being full of pictures, videos, opinions and a news feed. The marketplace may keep people clicking on the site, which is Facebook’s overall goal, but will it rack up conversions? The atmosphere might actually be so right that it won’t.

Beauty also has one other small issue: Bigger displays, videos and high-definition images use up much more data and, on a slow 3G connection, can take a long time to load. What’s pretty on a desktop may be far from ideal for mobile, and with consumers shopping and borrowing on their phones to an ever-increasing degree, all that high design can create clutter that does the opposite of what it’s intended to.

 

The Wrong Type Of Ugly 

Which isn’t to say that merchants should immediately tear down what they have and do their best work to imitate eBay’s look at the turn of the century.

Craigslist is successful. There are about zero other eCommerce sites like Craigslist that are successful, and it is worth noting that no one has to trust Craigslist to secure or process a payment. Craigslist just provides a digital meeting place; all other transactions are arranged externally.

Retailers looking for in-house click-to-converts in their digital shops have to consider design, because, at some point, not keeping up with the virtual Joneses is going to cost customers.

And the wrong type of ugly is the kind that wastes the customer’s time — with hard-to-find information, no images of products, no way to compare or search. Not having these elements simplifies a site, but it doesn’t simplify a user’s experience of a site. Simple is only simple if the customer doesn’t have to work too hard for it.

So, do merchants need a beautiful site to create conversion?

No, they need an attractive site that’s simple to use and requires the customer to do the minimum.