|
Most E-Commerce sites are finding it tough just now. Every customer has to be fought for - but many sites appear to be intent on chasing customers away. If you want to join them, here's ten tried and tested ways to lose sales
Many sites try to collect customer information during the checkout process. Bad mistake. The checkout process should be as quick and clean as possible to minimize the chances of the customer abandoning the transaction. There are other opportunities to ask things like "Where did you first hear about us?" The main objective at this stage is to get the user to click on that confirm order button.
There are many shopping carts and Web store services out there. Some are better than others. Some, from a user's point of view, are simply unusable. A poorly designed or confusing checkout procedure will inevitably lead to abandoned transactions. Get a few non-technical users to try out your site and make a few test purchases. If you haven't done this before the results may surprise (and depress) you.
Yes, your Web site may look great on your 21" monitor using IE5.5 - but your potential customers could be using Netscape, WebTV or running at 640 * 480 resolution. Better check how your site looks to these users
Nothing puts off users more than pages that take forever to load. Once a user has made the decision to buy, it is vital to get that confirm order button clicked as quickly as possible. A user sitting waiting minutes for your checkout pages to load has plenty time to reconsider or maybe just abandon out of boredom.
The guiding principle of selling on the Web is to keep your customers on-site as long as possible (to maximize the chances of making a purchase) and then minimize the time between the decision to buy and the completion of the transaction. A well-designed and efficient checkout process takes care of the second part. The first part requires "stickiness." There are various techniques for keeping customers interested and on-site, and these are explained in The Flypaper Principle
If your customers know exactly what they want to buy, then selling online is straightforward. If they're not sure that an item is exactly what they need, they probably won't take the risk of purchasing. It's always better to give the customer too much information rather than not enough. It's often possible to arrange to have a "more information" button in a catalogue which brings up a more detailed page.
A site that appears neglected or out of date will (rightly) be treated with suspicion. Would you place an order with a site that has "Last Updated 17th Jan. 1999" on it? Even just placing the current date somewhere on the home page makes the site look "alive".
Customers will feel more comfortable placing an order with you if they feel they know you. Contact details on a site are essential. If you can put names and faces along with them, it's even better. And of course, an "About Us" page with the history of the company and site, mission statement, press coverage and customer testimonials all adds to customer confidence
Avoiding these mistakes won't bring traffic to your site, but you will certainly increase the chances of converting a visitor into a paying customer.
Unless you're selling high value products, then you need to accept credit cardsNearly all B2C sites have come to this conclusion; however, it's surprising how many sites only accept the most popular cards and exclude Amex and debit cards. The more payment options you offer a customer, the more chance of making a sale. It might cost more to offer a wider range of payment options, but can you afford to lose potential customers? (By the way, don't forget that there may be customers who may want to pay by check, PayPal or the new-style payment cards.)
|
