What makes online shoppers tick?
Answering that question has taken on new urgency as the shares of many e-commerce stocks languish near all-time lows. One company hopes to find the answer by asking its own questions. Vividence has signed up 100,000 computer users worldwide who have agreed to click and tell about a host of clients’ sites, including Drugstore.com, Compaq.com and Altavista. In a typical 45-minute Vividence review, about 200 people download an enhanced browser and are guided to a group of sites, usually the client’s site and its competitors. The browser then asks questions along the way and lets testers comment on site design and general impressions. Vividence evaluates the responses and works with the target company based on the results. Despite the Web’s ability to produce lightning-speed data on consumer profiles, preferences and shopping habits, Internet executives still have a hard time understanding what their customers want–and often the data itself. Marketers often feel pinched by the high costs
