A lasting Impression

First impressions of the site are that it is crisp, modern and merchandised in a manner that targets its market effectively.

The home page is easy to navigate from choosing your country to your department. The drop down simply directs you to Women or Men. Once in this drop down there is an array of places to go, from style, trends, brand names to item by name. It’s very intuitive and easy to navigate – having such a vast amount of items for sale this is very important.

All these attributes contribute to the overall user experience and encourages you to come back to the site to use it again.

A picture is worth a thousand words, a video’s worth millions

The product pages certainly aren’t short on detail. It’s important to appeal to the customers that would prefer to shop in store as much as possible. ASOS does a great job of bridging the cyber-divide by providing extensive product details including photographs of every single item of clothing on live models, and if that wasn’t enough, catwalk-style videos of the model actually moving in the clothing encouraging shoppers to make that ever important decision to send to the basket.

People want to see what they’re getting. The grandfather of boosting eCommerce conversion rates is having high quality photos and videos of your product. The more detail the better.

Upsell Upsell Upsell!

ASOS successfully promotes further selling by including a “complete the look” and “what others bought” functions.

How many times have you gone in to your local supermarket looking for bread and came out buying half the store? The bread is strategically placed towards the back to encourage you to view more products that may interest you along the way. In the same way, recommending other products to a customer may just tickle their interest and is one of the most effective ways to increase your online sales.

I’m also a big fan of the saved items section, where you can save items you’re interested in for up to a month in case you want to come back to an item when its payday! It is clear, user-friendly and you’ll even get a reminder if an item is low in stock or out of stock.

Basket Case

The checkout summary page is the last opportunity to review your order – and in my opinion ASOS tick all the boxes. They clearly display the important order details like colour, size and price, along with an image and delivery information. It’s important to remember if there are errors in the size or colour of the delivered goods the customer will blame you, not themselves!

ASOS even include Olympic delivery updates where you can find out if you order will be affected by any delivery disruptions. The key to their success is always being ahead of the game, in this case they are letting customers know in advance that there may be delays and where. And still on delivery there are a variety of options to choose from depending on your urgency and not overpriced either. Returns are free and in my experience extremely efficient. Including this information on the final page will improve your return rate and customer satisfaction as well as decreasing your costs on customer service from all your annoyed customers and returns.

Summary

So why are ASOS doing so well at the moment?  “It is very simple” according to Rob Bready, product and trading director at ASOS, when asked what he thinks the key to the company’s success is, “the site is beautiful, it’s easy to use, and delivery is free”. And I couldn’t put it better myself.It is evident that ASOS has revolutionised the future of the online shopper in a way that not many fashion companies can. As someone who regularly analyses websites from a usability point of view, I would have to agree, ASOS are definitely getting a great deal right.

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