All too often in the rapidly-growing 'virtual world' of electronic commerce, scant attention is paid to the consumer as anything but an abstract, albeit necessary, ingredient to the bottom line. The little block marked 'the customer' is unfortunately also lacking in detail, stuck away at the wrong end of the food chain, and curiously diminished in the scale of the entire process. The customer, therefore, has a small footprint, and a very uniform one at that. In these heady days of e-commerce, however, companies who expect hordes of these little feet to tramp through their portals, may be in for quite a surprise. The real problem may be that they're looking from the inside out.
Organisations tend, quite naturally, to see the world from their own perspective.
Looking at their products and services from the customer's viewpoint may be quite a revealing experience. There is little merit in having a flawless ordering system if the customer can't find sufficient information about the product, or not find the product through all the tricky cross-reference sections altogether. It might be convenient for an organisation to arrange its web site according to an internal structure, but the customer may not understand it and prefer to have it arranged by other criteria. Relying on search mechanisms to assist product identification is not always the solution either, as variations in spelling and erratic keywording procedures can render these less then effective. The customer may also require a great deal of supplementary information first.