Luxury jewellery company Autore has a visually appealing website
Jewellers should invest in ‘pretty’ websites
Posted July 19, 2011 | By Sonia Nair
Savvy jewellery retailers should heed the advice a new study published by the University of Melbourne which found that online consumers are more likely to trust a visually pleasing website.
The study’s author, Dr. Brent Coker of University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Business and Economics said online consumers behaviours’ are intrinsically linked to their “offline” behaviour.
“As aesthetically orientated humans, we’re psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites. Our offline behaviour and inclinations translate to our online existence,” Coker said.
“With websites becoming increasingly attractive and including more trimmings, this creates a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in online consumers,” Coker added.
Apart from visual appearance, online purchasing amongst consumers is also affected by trustworthiness; ease of use; search quality; information quality; information relevancy and load speed.
“The biggest source of frustration is the inability to find relevant information on a website. The best way to stop defection to other websites, and to increase loyalty, is to be interesting. Being pretty, but with nothing to say, is not enough,” Coker said.
Unsurprisingly, the study found that consumers are more likely to use an alternate website if a website has poor navigation, a lack of information or a slow load-up time that is perceived to be more than two seconds.
The finding coincides with a statistic in the report that says that online consumers are 20 per cent more trusting of websites than they were five years ago.
“People are developing relationships with the internet the same way we develop relationships with people. Compared to five years ago, we are more trusting of attractive websites, less tolerant of websites that have irrelevant information and more likely to introduce ourselves to websites that are new,” Coker concluded.
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