R E L A T E D C O N T E N T

HP to revamp e-commerce site

More multimedia to wash away the manufacturer image

Matt Chapman in New York, vnunet.com 01 Jun 2007

HP has unveiled a number of changes to its e-commerce website as it looks to ditch its manufacturer image and make the site easier to use.

Sam Taylor, senior vice president of online sales at HP, believed that the original website was not sufficiently user-friendly to make it accessible to all customers.

"If people are not so tech-savvy the list view can be a little bit daunting, " Taylor told delegates at HP's Print 2.0 conference in New York.

"So later this year there will be two options: a list view that we are enhancing; and a step-by-step process which will be simplified."

Taylor added that, along with changes to the layout and interaction, the site would be much more visual in an effort to ditch its manufacturer image.

"If you look at the product pages today what you see is a lot of information, a lot of text and that is not as consumer friendly as it needs to be," he said.

"We are trying to make this shift from a manufacturer site look and feel, to more of a retail look and feel."

As part of the redesign, changes later this year will include breaking text into more bite-sized pieces, and tools such as enhanced zoom on images and 360-degree rotation.

"We already have some zoom capability but not to the level we need, so we are enhancing these types of rich media on the website," Taylor said. "We have multiple product views but it is not quite the same."

HP is also adding a customer configuration tool for PC web sales that saves the details for later or sends them to a friend so that they can advise on the purchase.

"The number one reason why consumers go to a manufacturer website is to customise, they want to configure it to order," Taylor said. "It is the whole issue about confidence."

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