[From NYT] Online shopper: When familiarity breeds temptation

Ipride myself on being tenacious when it comes to shopping for food. The time I heard that a fish market two towns away had the tiny clams I needed for a sauce, I did not hesitate. And I once drove for 20 minutes to check out a rumored shipment of collard greens.

So I was embarrassed to admit to my friend Jean the other day that I had never visited the fancy new supermarket that opened less than a mile from my house more than a year ago.

"That`s not like you," she said. "It has all of those overpriced organic fruits you like."

But every time I left the house with a grocery list, I somehow ended up instead at the usual place, a familiar neighborhood store where I know the layout of the aisles so well that a trip to buy a week`s worth of food for five people takes less than 25 minutes, door to door.

In fact, I think it would be fair to say that my regular store has trained me to believe that the seltzer should be on the shelf across from the bread and that the mango juice should be partly hidden behind the left shoulder of the checkout clerk.

The whole idea of familiarity hit me last week as I looked at some sample pages for a new design that the Babies "R" Us shopping site (www.babiesrus.com) is scheduled to adopt as early as next week. The retailer`s current site has an uninspiring pink-and-purple home page with a picture of a stork and a few merchandise photos (including a "travel system" that looked suspiciously like a stroller to me).

The new Babies "R" Us site will look subtly different, but in a way that will feel very familiar. On the sample pages, there is white space. The search box on the left side of the home page is clearly labeled with the word "search." The shopping cart icon has moved to the top right-hand corner. All these changes will make the site look slightly more like Amazon.com.

That, of course, is no accident since Babies "R" Us has joined the ranks of shopping sites that have become partners with Amazon. In a deal similar to the agreement reached by its sibling, Toys "R" Us, Babies "R" Us will sell its inventory of thousands of baby products on a site operated by Amazon.com. Amazon will have responsibility for filling orders and accepting returns and is adding features like a one-click purchasing tool.

As a shopper, the financial underpinnings of shopping sites don`t really interest me. But I was surprised by how much the new Amazonian touches on Babies "R" Us softened my attitude toward the merchandise. As someone who lost both the interest and the reason for purchasing diaper pails and crib mobiles some years ago, I expected to be bored silly as I dutifully browsed among inventory that included items like two- way nursery monitors, a "little lambs" wallpaper border and a Winnie the Pooh lamp with a base shaped like a "hunny" pot.

But weirdly, the same merchandise that had left me cold on the old Babies "R" Us site now seemed intriguing. In fact, after about 15 minutes of studying the new design I had a disturbing thought: I wondered if I should replace my 3-year-old`s stained and dingy stroller with a new travel system in a snappy plaid.

The logical answer was no. Soon my daughter will be too big for a stroller. And yet, I wanted one. Badly.

It occurred to me that just as my local store had trained me to look for the brie in the refrigerated case with the ham hocks, Amazon.com had trained me to expect a certain layout in an online store. And not just at Amazon.com.

It turns out that in the Web design business, my reaction is known as the McDonald`s effect. "The reason you go into a McDonald`s when you are in a foreign country," said Kelly Goto, creative director at the consulting firm Idea Integration, "is you know what you are going to get, and you know how the french fries are going to taste. The reason you like a store to look like Amazon is because then you know how to navigate it comfortably."

It`s clear that Ms. Goto has never ordered McDonald`s french fries in Italy or enjoyed a Big Mac with a supersize beer stein in Munich. But she does make the point that it is less important that the new Babies "R" Us site design is more aesthetic. What matters is that it reminds shoppers of something familiar.

"The Amazon design is like the qwerty keyboard — it`s been around longer and it`s a standard, so people`s habits adapt to it," said Dr. Peter Fader, a marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

No wonder shoppers are more likely to buy things at Amazon.com than at many other sites.

Amazon`s conversion rate — the percentage of site browsers who become buyers — is "astonishingly high," Professor Fader said, "especially when you consider there are a lot of people who use the site as card catalog to look up things."

"The conversion rate for the industry in general is 3 to 5 percent," he said. "For Amazon, it`s close to 15 percent."

That could become dangerous. If Amazon.com takes over the operation of more and more retail sites, my household budget may be in real trouble. Already, discussions have been reported between Amazon and retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy, a chain of electronics stores. I fear a future when Amazon makes it too easy for impulse buyers like me to buy everything from boomboxes to light bulbs.

The people running Amazon have done a lot of experimentation to figure out what makes people want to buy things, said Dr. Eric Johnson, a Columbia University professor who studies consumers` shopping habits. "They learn from their customers," he said, "and then they customize a shopper`s experience and offer recommendations based on what the shopper likes."

As a result, Amazon has developed a search function that will probably find what a shopper wants even if the shopper misses a letter or two in typing in the request. And it decided to put the search and navigational menu on the left side of the page, where it naturally catches a shopper`s eye, and to create an effortless checkout process.

If these features make shopping much easier, they also make me feel a little like a hapless wildebeest crashing noisily through underbrush on the first day of hunting season. So to avoid being snared by such lures, I turned off my one-click-shopping feature. The last thing I needed was a faster way to make impulse buys.

I wondered if Babies "R" Us sold a lap blanket in a fabric to coordinate with the plaid stroller, but I fought the impulse to check.

Instead, I left the house with my grocery list and drove to the new store. And yes, Jean, I was impressed by the fact that the mango juice was in the juice aisle and that the selection of granola blends was unusually wide.

But it still took me twice as long to shop. Next time I`m going back to my regular store.