Sharper Staples

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June 12, 2000 (Computerworld) -- Staples inc., the $9 billion office supply superstore, is constantly refining its Web site. In its most recent redesign, which launched May 7, the focus was to make it easier for customers to find products online and to help them complete their purchases quickly. To achieve those goals, the Framingham, Mass.-based company added more information to some parts of the site, simplified other parts to speed navigation and designed new tools such as a favorites list to facilitate the purchase process.
Sometimes, a little more context - or information - is all it takes to keep a customer from clicking off your site.
Last September, Staples added a ZIP-code request page to its site. The page appears the first time a customer clicks any link to a product or aisle that's off the home page.
"We were losing customers at that prompt because they thought we were collecting marketing data," says Mike Ragunas, chief technology officer at Staples.com, the retailer's online arm.
The real reason for collecting the information: Staples delivers from local distribution centers, and ZIP codes let its back-end systems determine inventory and delivery times for each customer. But the page originally didn't tell customers that. So in February, Staples launched a reworded page saying, "To view real-time inventory availability, please enter the ZIP code where products will be shipped." Just by changing the text, Staples cut the number of customers who abandoned its site at that point by 75%.
Sometimes more extensive changes are necessary to give users greater context. As the number of products that Staples carries grows, some site tools no longer work as effectively. The search engine, in particular, was returning many inappropriate hits. A search for "Palm Pilot," for instance, returned results not only for handheld computers but also for hundreds of products such as Pilot pens. Site logs showed that users didn't always page through all the results to find what they had originally been looking for.
Given the search tool's popularity, its performance problems equaled a loss of sales. "Search is used a lot on our site," says Ragunas. "People use it as their primary means of navigation, sometimes as a secondary means of navigation," meaning users will browse the site first and then use the search tool.
"They are all coming into search at different stages of the navigation experience," says Colin Hynes, director of usability at Staples.com. So a new search tool would have to work well, regardless of when a customer fired it up.
Staples created a new search engine with improved filters (the software that translates written queries into database searches). After examining actual user queries, Staples

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