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I met Dan Brister more than 20 years ago. We’ve been friends for a long time now and we often like to talk about our business adventures. We also talk about his health at great length. Dan is a very lucky cancer survior. Not surprisingly, he’s been interested in health and fitness since his dark days. He’s been doing research for several years now. I listen closely when he updates me on the latest medical news.

A little bit less than a year ago Dan started Vitamin Depot Online, which is an online store offering vitamins, herbs, and supplements. I’ve been watching his business grow steadily. Of course, we’ve talked about the usability and design of the site several times. To capture some of Dan’s thoughts, I whipped up some interview questions. His answers are below. Enjoy!

What is the purpose of Vitamin Deport Online? What is your focus?

The purpose of Vitamin Depot Online is to offer customers the highest quality health products and vitamins to further prolong their life. We have focused on medical driven companies that have years of research on their products and keep coming up with cutting edge formulas.

I know that you spent a lot of time picking Vitamin Deport Online as the name of your company and web site. Explain how you actually did it. How did you spend your time? What kind of research did you do exactly?

A meeting took place with the company executives to draw up a list of possible names. The list went to our research participants. We literally stood on the street corner and asked people to rate the names we picked out. We did this several times with our families as well as strangers. We were looking for a name that was both unique but familiar and I think we succeeded.

How did you choose your web hosting provider? How about your ecommerce platform and shopping cart?

Our web hosting provider was chosen because it offered our company an all-in-one package solution. Our web hosting package includes the ecommerce platform and shopping cart, which was the main reason we chose the company. This enabled us to have an all-in-one package solution, which reduced our problems.

What was the single hardest thing about setting up Vitamin Depot Online?

The single hardest thing about setting up Vitamin Depot Online was adding products. The company that we purchase our products from did not have a database of all of their products available. Because of this, we had to manually add over 1000 products by hand.

I know that you decided to launch the site and then update it over time versus building a perfect site then launching. Why did you take this approach?

We know that Vitamin Depot Online will never be a perfect site. We’ll always have new promotions and therefore new design elements. Vitamin Depot Online is constantly adding, deleting, and revising products. We do this on a daily basis. Therefore, launching the site and updating it over time seemed to be the logical decision. Finally, many of the search engines look at the length a web company has been around, which also influenced our decision on launching the site right away.

We’ve talked about your shopping cart a few times. Explain the technical challenges and constraints you face.

Vitamin Depot Online.com has to handle multiple manufacturers, fluctuating shipping costs, and shopping cart usability. Handing multiple manufacturers becomes quite difficult especially when dealing with shipping and handling fees. Every manufacturer is different, which make it very difficult to properly price your products. The company is always trying to find new ways to tweak the shopping cart to diminish the number of abandoned carts.

Speaking of the Vitamin Deport Online shopping cart, talk about how tweaking it improved your sales. Talk about the usability improvements you’ve made.

The company tweaked the shopping cart in many ways including shortening the checkout process, adding credit card logos, and obtaining our own secure server certification. We noticed a slight increase in sales because of these improvements. The key usability improvements would have to include the shortening of the shopping cart process and doing away with unnecessary usernames and passwords. That is, our company felt that many people did not want to create an account that included a password. We noticed that once the customer read, “Click here to sign up for an account,” they left.

Regarding usability, keep in mind that we went with an all-in-one solution. The good news is that everything is under one umbrella. The bad news is that we’re stuck with a certain shopping cart that isn’t completely flexible. We’re certain that these are just the kind of tradeoffs that a lot of other companies face. You can’t always get the usability you want, even if you know what you want to do.

What do you have planned next for Vitamin Depot Online?

In 2006 we plan to carry a full new line of products in addition to our existing products to further extend our sales platform. We are going to warehouse select products and focus on marketed them, versus depending on drop shippers for everything. We’re going to increase control over the sales process, which will also give us an opportunity to improve the experience for customers.

Anything else that you’d like to share? Any interesting lessons learned? Any advice?

Business is difficult but we enjoy the struggle. We could not have made it where we are today without special help from our long time friends, helping us overcome really tough problems. Even if you aren’t interested in vitamins and health products, I encourage you to visit Vitamin Depot Online and poke around. It’ll give you a chance to think about the interview and the answers I’ve provided.

And finally, thanks for the usability advice and thanks for WebWord. We visit all the time to get that special edge.

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I want to make a few quick editorial comments.

First, I’ve learned from Dan that you can’t always get the usability you want because technology gets in the way. There are tradeoffs. Sometimes the technology chooses you because it is part of a larger, bundled package. Other times the cost is too high to make the changes you’d like to make.

Second, you can be successful without perfect usability or a perfect customer experience. At the same time, it is encouraging that small changes can make a big difference. For example, reducing the number of steps in the Vitamin Depot Online checkout process was a great change. And, eliminating the need for account creation was a winner too. Do what you can, when you can.

Finally, you can’t ignore business when you talk about usability. Put another way, you can’t offer customers something if something doesn’t exist. There’s a balance between the business and the customers. You can’t ignore one or the other and you can’t (usually) weigh one more than the other as you plow ahead.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006 at 8:28 am and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.