Hitwise recently reported that 30% of upstream traffic to a travel website is from another travel website. Meaning: your customers are comparison shopping. Another reason why if you are in a saturated market you must figure out how to differentiate yourself by more than just having cheaper prices than everyone else (because this will never ALWAYS be the case).

What can you do?

Have a website that is simple and efficient. Try the “Google approach”. Make your function unit prominent and cut out all the frills. (This should also make your site faster).

Have a website that is hard to leave. No, don’t take the “porn approach” and have multiple pages pop up upon closing the browser, but rather make your customer feel special. Make them feel like your site is their site. Personalize it, incentivize it, and make it feel like grandma’s warm apple pie.

These are two very different examples of ways you can differentiate your website in a saturated market. We go in depth into each of these scenarios along with other ideas and scenarios in our book: User Driven Change.

However, the question you must answer first is which solution should you choose. Our stance is that you should base this off of what your user data tells you. In each of our scenarios we give you specific analysis examples that could indicate why and what changes you should make to your website and then describe supporting allowances for what changes you should make.