Printer Friendliness

Printer Friendliness - More than just for Order Confirmation #’s!

Several of our e-commerce customers encourage visitors to print the order confirmation on their site and in some cases even provide a printer friendly option on the page. However, what we have found is that it’s not always just about formatting the order confirmation page to be printer friendly. It might surprise you that in some e-commerce customers over half the pages printed by visitors were not the order confirmation page but rather product detail pages. This is due to the fact that 71% of e-commerce visitors are there to gather product information. They print product pages so they can save what they have found. When reviewing the results from two of our e-commerce customers, here is what we learned.

For one of our e-commerce customers, of visitors that printed a page during their site visit 58% printed a product page. When reviewing the site we discovered that a printer friendly version of a product details page was not available and that even the shortest product detail page printed on a minimum of two sheets of paper. From the results of a second customer we learned that 46% of visitors who printed a page during their visit did so with a product detail page. In a review of the customer’s site we discovered that a link was not provided to access a printer friendly version of the product details. We also learned that the product details are displayed across three tabs within the page thus requiring a visitor to print each tab individually.

Our advice:

In addition to order confirmation pages, provide visitors to your site with an easy and quick method of viewing a printer friendly product page. This issue will become increasingly more important as the population of consumers that utilize the Internet to research products and then purchase at a store grows.