Most businesses obsess over their sales performances. Nowhere is this taken to more extremes than the retail sector. They increasingly employ ever more sophisticated means to track, cajole, entice, motivate and understand their consumer purchasing behaviour.

One of these mechanisms involves shopper analysis. Online retailers may observe the clickstream and shopping cart behaviour of consumers so that they can provide more targeted offers in the future.

In the offline world, retailers have found that simple colour changes to displays and subtle shifts in labeling can have a dramatic impact on sales performance.

So for online consumers who don’t have the benefit of sampling tangible goods, perhaps the most obvious place to start improving the consumer shopping experience is through good-quality product information. Yet it’s surprising how often retailers get this wrong.

A case in point: My wife has just shown me a list of product “offers” that our online supermarket has “discovered” based on our shopping habits.

There are some very targeted offers, as you would expect, but what detracts from the incentive is the following text:

“Pure - Buy any 2 for £2.50. Order by 1/1/2037”

An offer has to be time-boxed for it to remain an incentive; anything lacking a sense of urgency creates a sense of mistrust. This retailer is basically saying, “this product is not an offer - this is our long-term price."

As consumers shopping online, we look for subtle cues and clues to help us make the right decision. For example, Google has found that even a few milliseconds can impact our online behaviour.

Throwing poor-quality information into the equation only adds friction and delays the buying process. As Google clearly demonstrates for modern online businesses, friction equates to lost sales.