Posts tagged ‘user experience’

Allow the customer to find the product - GameStation.co.uk

January 24th 2008 by Andrew Banks in E-Commerce, Websites1 Comment »

Surely one of the most fundamental tasks a customer undertakes when trying to purchase, be it online or offline, is finding the product in the first place. In an online purchasing experience this boils down to one of two things - simple navigation, or more often than not, the search box.

Whilst looking online for a new XBOX game today I landed upon GameStation where I conducted a quick search for Assasin’s Creed (one of the best selling XBOX 360 games at the moment). Suprisingly, GameStation didn’t even sell the game (or so the search results told me). Having been into one of there many retail outlets I know they stock the game - so why wasn’t it on the website?

The problem is with GameStation’s broken search feature not accepting the ‘ character. I’m guessing for security reasons (SQL Injection) they’re stripping certain characters before sending the search into the database. There’s much better ways of protecting from SQL Injection that don’t impact on a customer purchasing experience as much as this approach does, if at all. To see this for yourself simply go to www.gamestation.co.uk and search for “assassin’s creed”. You’ll notice that no search results are returned and your search phrase has been cut down to “assassin” in the search box.

Regardless of the cause of this, the crux is that this will have lost GameStation a certain number of sale, especially over the Christmas period. The search works on Play, Amazon and Game - three of GameStation’s biggest competitors.

I’d be interested to know if the guys at GameStation actually know about this. My suspicion  is that they don’t, but they will be wondering why Amazon, Play and Game outsold them at Christmas.