I just had a very bad online shopping experience.  I wanted to by an accessory for my phone.  I was surfing around looking for it and found one at an online store.  I added it to my shopping cart and then starting looking around to see if there was anything else I wanted.

I found nothing, the item was fairly expensive, so one time is enough for this purchase.  I then proceeded to spend the next 5 minutes looking for my shopping cart!  Finally, I added another one of the same item to the cart so I would end up back in the cart.  I then delete the extra one.  However, by this point, I was fairly upset that the website was so hard to use, so I starting looking else where.

Keep in mind that I shop on line all of the time and I help design shopping carts for people, so I’m about as much of an expert at online shopping as there can be.  If I can’t figure out how to buy something from an online store, it totally sucks.

After spending another 20 minutes looking for this item elsewhere, I finally went back to the original store and put a third one in my cart, so I could see the cart.  Apparently, they had the best deal by far, so I HAD to buy from them.  They offered me at least 8 payment options, PayPal, Google, CC.. every payment method I could think of.  Nice in that they put a lot of work into their store, but totally neglected that someone might want to know what is actually IN their cart…

I wouldn’t have purchased the item from them, but they had a mini-monopoly, so I was sort of stuck.  As they say, no matter what you do, you’ll get 1/3 of the sales…  so true in this case.

If you look down a few articles, there is a post I made about online shoppers taking 2 days to make purchases.  I’m not one of those two days people.  When it is time to buy, I buy.  I do shop around and if I don’t think I’m getting a deal, I’ll not purchase it at that time, but I don’t wait to pull the trigger… anyone else have a different style?

I’m still getting a lot of questions about landing pages.  I just want to make it clear that a landing page is used to provide your customer proof that they have arrived in the right place when they arrive from a search engine or PPC site.  This is helpful in that most customers will only spend a few seconds looking at a page to determine if it merits sticking around or going to the next site.  Often times, a poor landing will result in the customer leaving.  In other words, if they land on your home page and they are expecting to see a list of products, they might not stick around.

Landing pages can solve this problem by telling your customer, “You are in the right place, look around a bit”.  It is that simple.

One thing that makes life difficult for web users is when people post information in emails and on web pages in a giant graphic, rather than in text.   I just got an email from a company wanting me to sign up for a seminar.  I went to the link to find the cost and it was only $30.  Seemed very reasonable.  However, the whole description, address and all was on a web page in a giant graphic.   That means that I can’t cut and paste the address into my calendar, I can’t get any information into my calendar without retyping it, to make things worse, I’d have to switch back and forth between my calendar and the web page.  Then there is always the risk of a typo.

So, I decided that the event wasn’t worth the effort, they lose out on the $30 and whatever chance they had to get me to buy whatever it was they were pitching.

If it can’t be cut and pasted, it shouldn’t be on the web page.  The web is text, not stupid hard to read blurry and tiny graphical text.  Basically, if you want to waste people’s time, don’t bother emailing it out to everyone.

Sometime, things happen, things that are really expensive mistakes.

A client just called me to verify his domain name for his new website.  He was getting some advertising setup and wanted to make sure his new website URL was correct.  Easily done.

However, a few years ago, a client didn’t bother to call me and had $2000.00 worth of brochures printed with the wrong URL on them!   A major mistake that could have been avoided with a quick phone call to verify the URL (Website address).    What makes it worse is that the brochures were mailed out before they noticed the issue!

Tragic as that could have been, there was a simple solution that cost $13.50.  We purchased a new domain name to match the domain that was incorrectly used on the brochures.  The new domain was active in a few minutes and the problem was solved.  So, remember, don’t make mistakes and if you do, don’t panic!

Tracking?

Also, if you use a different domain on an advertising piece, the hits can be tracked separately from your main website hits.

There is a great article on EcommerceNotes by Armondo Roggio today about shopping habits.  It is well worth reading.   Here is the link.

As the title says, it indicates that shoppers come to a website and look at an item, then spend two days thinking and researching the merchant before they buy, they term that “Digital Window Shopping”, which is a cool term.

The article brings up three points that seem important.  Shoppers did not complete online purchases because shipping charges where too high, they had safety concerns about the website and because they could not find a payment method they liked.

Shipping charges

I agree, when I shop, there is a limit to how much I will pay in shipping charges for an item.  As someone who deals closely with online sales, I understand that shipping costs are often very high.  I also love free shipping, but know that is really a double edged sword because the merchant has to charge more for each item in order to make up that shipping costs.  The more items I buy, the more profit they make, trying to make up for the shipping cost of the shopper who might buy only one item.

So, when I shop, I look at the total cost of the purchase.  For example, last night I needed another bottle of Raspberry Chiplote Sauce.  (not kidding).  I went to Amazon.com and found a bottle for $8.00, plus $7.99 shipping.  So, $15.00 a bottle.  Worth it, but still expensive.  After doing some shopping, I found a store that offered it for 50% less.  Much better!  I had to shop for a few minutes before I could find it, but it is on its way.

Conclusion, shipping costs need to be as low as possible, even when that means a slightly higher product price.

Safety Concerns

Safety concerns are important to an online store.    There are a few things that can be done cheaply to insure your customers think you are safe.

• Authorize.net offers a FREE logo if you are a customer
• Free Trust Seal offers FREE trust logos.  These logos look good.  FreeTrustSeal
• Your SSL certificate has a logo, use it.
• If you have ‘forced’ PCI scanning from your merchant vendor, make sure you use that trust seal, you’ve already paid for it!

Having a nice looking site with a few trust seals will reassure most customers.  Customers who “know” about trust, SSL certificates and such aren’t going to be be bothered by the ‘free’ seals because they understand the whole thing and realize that having a secure website isn’t as important has having a secure business, which simply isn’t the same thing.  Often the best way to get those customers is to use a high assurance SSL certificate, or if you can afford one, an EV certificate.

Payment Method

Payment method is a tough one.  The survey was done by PayPal, so I suspect that had something to do with it, but one would think that if Visa and Mastercard were available and the shop and buyer were in the USA, that would about cover it.   There might be some B2B concerns if AMEX wasn’t available, but other than that, what else would be need?

Conclusion

So read the article if you think it is interesting and make a comment below if you think this is interesting or have a different opinion.