A number of retailers have retooled their Web sites to provide a more pleasant online shopping experience for their customers in advance of the sometimes maddening, and always hectic, holiday shopping season.

Online shopping is growing, especially among women. According to a study by ShopSmart magazine, published by Consumer Reports National Research Center, 96 percent of American women who have shopped online in the past 12 months have purchased at least one product over the Web. Almost a third of those shoppers — 32 percent —  have called their shopping experience a negative one.

Many retailers are responding by trying to make it easier for their customers to shop online, according to The New York Times.

Some retailers are improving the search function on their sites, so customers can more quickly find what they want. For example, stores such as Barnes & Noble, Inc., allows online shoppers to see the best-matching books to the search's key words, along with other ways to narrow the results, like searching by price range.

For other retailers, such as Brookstone, it's about recreating the real life shopping experience in virtual reality. The hardware and housewares retailer is creating a 3-D version of its stores online, where Web shoppers can walk around and browse, "pause in front of a product, and item description appears, along with a link to a checkout page," the paper reported.

--Kori Kamradt
kkamradt@safnow.org

 

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