Comments on: The 7-11 Milk Experiment: How Does Site Design Affect Revenue?

By: Compelled Shopping Test

Compelled Shopping Test — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 23:30:38 +0000

[...] is UIE’s description of the 7-11 experiment. This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a [...]

By: Missing the point « World of Usability

Missing the point « World of Usability — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:25:39 +0000

[...] to online stores who offer that product and the results are only a 30% buy rate (i.e., the 7-11 milk experiment) , something is desparately wrong and it needs [...]

By: Ellie

Ellie — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 18:56:30 +0000

ae – amen. this is precisely the reason many people refuse to buy from WalMart whether online or off. I don’t know whether labling ‘virulent hatred of a corporate parasite’ as ‘trust issues’ was a political choice on UIE’s behalf, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

By: ae

ae — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 09:36:34 +0000

Christine–
You’ll forgive me, but I’m detecting a bit of political bias. TRUST, as relates to web-based retail shopping, would be expected to be quite high for Wal-Mart, a known name, with numerous hard-world addresses, and demonstrated accountability in terms of quality and delivery. Contrast this to Joe’s Web-Based Shopping dot com, which may not even have his actual hard-world address anywhere on the site.

Really, what do you mean by TRUST? Not “trusting” Wal-Mart because it’s a giant mega-corp that is squeezing small retailers out of the neighborhood everywhere it goes is a very different concept than the sort of “trust” you’re referencing here in terms of market research. Please clarify. This murkiness is affecting how much I trust your observations.

By: Enric Naval

Enric Naval — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 14:41:05 +0000

I believe that the problems that you mention are causing the user trust to be lowered. When the user’s trust is low, they will give up sooner and/or fail more often when buying in your site.

This is not a problem for you, but I’m sure that Wallmart considers that to be a problem

By trust, I meant this sequence of actions:

user enters your site with normal trust
user can’t find a product that very clearly HAS to be there
user lowers his trust on your site
next time,

user has low trust on your site, and decides to go somewhere else, raising its trust in a different site
or, gives up sooner and lowers his trust even more

I have seen that users who trust you will be motivated and forgiving of errors.

So, users that don’t trust wallmart have already gone through this cycle several times. Now, they will even refuse to TEST the site, let alone buy on it.

By: Jared Spool

Jared Spool — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 12:18:43 +0000

The monk.e.boy is correct. 7-Eleven is probably the largest chain of 24-hour convenience stores. Read about 'em here.

By: monk.e.boy

monk.e.boy — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 08:34:30 +0000

I think 7-11 is like 24-7, only it’s open 7 hours a day for 11 days a month. They only sell 7-UP to americans, so don’t worry too much about it.

By: Ano Nymous

Ano Nymous — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 18:30:19 +0000

What is a “7-11”? Some kind of special real word store? Please, explain this to your international users who have never been to the USA.

By: will

will — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 16:33:52 +0000

What about the shirtless gang of boys on their dirtbikes that hang out in front of the 7-11 and drink massive amounts of Dr. Pepper? These kids usually prevented me from going indside, as they intimidated this skinny geek.

Equivalent to people being scared of phishing and other forms of theft perhaps?

By: Christine Perfetti

Christine Perfetti — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:56:47 +0000

Eric: Trust did come into play for some of our users online. For example, one of the sites we asked users to visit was Walmart.com. Many users didn't want to buy from Walmart because of trust issues. Because of this, we actually had to remove Walmart.com from the study. While trust was a factor that caused some users not to purchase, it wasn't one of the major reasons people left sites without buying. The two main reasons why users didn't purchase in our study were that 1) they couldn't find the content because of problems with the site organization and 2) once they found the page with their target content, the site didn't provide enough information for users to make a purchase decision. In these cases, users decided not to purchase because they couldn't decide whether the products were good enough. (Jared has written an article, The Customer Sieve about many of the different problems users encountered during the purchase process.) Antoni: We have read Paco Underhill's book, Why We Buy. It's a great resource that we recommend to clients to help them better understand shopping behavior. But because Paco Underhill's research focused primarily on shopping in the physical world, it's a little light on the topic of online purchase behavior.

By: Enric Naval

Enric Naval — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:59:47 +0000

I have seen lack of trust as the first reason for people to refuse to even read the content in a site.

Specially when they expect a certain way of doing things, and they get a different way. So, if you promise following standards, and then they see that your web relays heavily in table layout, people will bail out of the site without clicking on anything and they will badmouth you on their favourite forum, because they are so pissed off.

Beware of any expectations you may be creating, purposedly or unadvertingly, because if you break those expectations then people will be very angry to you.

Yes, they will be angry to you even if it is not your fault. Sad but true.

By: Antoni Dol

Antoni Dol — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 11:16:59 +0000

I guess you guys have read Paco Underhill’s Why we buy?

By: Eric Scheid

Eric Scheid — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 04:48:15 +0000

What were the other reasons users didn’t purchase? I can think of two: (1) loss of trust in that particular retailer being able to deliver the goods as advertised, and (2) deciding they didn’t actually need the thing they thought they did, once they got their hands on a better description/specs/photo. Were those reasons observed during your tests, and to what extent?

Do you consider appearance of trust and compelling sales copy to be part of the usability problem?