The top 5 reasons I’m clicking away from your online storefront

You’ve all been there and most of us have done it. Have you put something on your website that you absolutely hate just to see if you can get an extra sale or two per month out of it? You know what I mean, you’re afraid that even the most naive customers might walk away but hey let’s try it anyway? Well today I wanted to post what I see as the top 5 reasons e-commerce sites majorly screw up and piss customers off during the search or checkout process.

1. Don’t pop a want to chat bubble in my face.

If you want to use this type of tool there is a right way and a very wrong way to do it. Adding live chat functionality to your website can mean a very high percentage boost in conversion rate in your shopping cart especially if you are selling a technical product or one that promotes a lot of questions from potential buyers. However, going about it the wrong way can spell disaster and grow your bounce rate in turn driving up your cost per acquisition (CPA). If you are going to add this functionality to your website take into consideration the following points:

• Keep it on all pages but in a place tucked to the side on a left or right column. Nobody wants a window popping in their face asking to chat and way too many people (even HP) are bombarding customers with these. If a customer has a question they are going to find a way to ask. Make it convenient, don’t force it.
• Man it for goodness sake. If you don’t have a staff that can actually answer questions during normal business hours you are simply aggravating your potential customers or portraying an image that you are a VERY small company.
• Even worse, chat bots. Come on, do you think your customers are that stupid that a chat bot will actually suffice for real questions. If your product is that simple then you don’t need a chat option anyway.

2. I don’t need to see a miniature person talking to me at the bottom of your website.

• Oh my god! I hate it when you hit the home page of a website and after the load pops up a man, woman, robot, or whatever telling you about their website. Hello, I’m already here and since I chose the web as my media I probably don’t want to listen to babble. HTML is hyper TEXT not hyper small person giving me a sales pitch at full obnoxious volume. Does anybody remember the paperclip in Windows? Nuff said.

3. AdSense on your eCommerce site… really?

• This is a sour topic for me. I hate shopping cart websites that have ads smeared all over the page. Not only does it make for a very complicated read it eliminates any and all optimization you can offer a page. How are people supposed to find and purchase your product if they are bombarded by competitive product links?
• There is an argument that you can augment the bounce rate with AdSense but the reality is that you should be trying to eliminate your bounce rate with e-commerce optimization. If your product makes so little margin that you want to subsidize it with ad-words then maybe you shouldn’t be selling the product to begin with.

4. Fake reviews are for fake products

• Consumer reports is dead. Most people are more intelligent then you seem to think. Popping up 5-10 review sites and rating your product 5 of 5 and competitive products 2-3 of 5 is bogus and while there may be some short term strategy there are an equal amount of other products employing the same strategy. Rather than blowing time building out a lavish review website perhaps spend some more time optimizing your e-commerce site, finding legit review companies to test your product and review it, spend some money and have video demonstrations filmed, or just improve your product. These sites are quickly being recognized as spam and you should be steering towards the next strategy if you haven’t already.

5. Simple E-Commerce please! Optimize my checkout page

• Why do I need to create an account, verify my email, and choose to subscribe to your spam just to buy a product? Oh, I don’t I just go buy it somewhere else. The faster you can get somebody through your shopping cart and checkout page the higher the conversion rate you will recognize. If you have multiple pages in your checkout, feel it’s clunky looking, or cannot edit for performance you need to find another eCommerce provider.
• Give me a solid confirmation and don’t ask me things you don’t absolutely need to know. Why do I need to choose if it’s a Visa or MasterCard. If you cannot write a snippet of code to auto determine simply from the numbers I enter you need to talk to a developer or find a better hosted shopping cart platform.

Well that’s my rant today. I really think it’s sad to see somebody spend blood, sweat, tears, and most importantly money to get their website up, product advertised, and e-commerce storefront ready to go only to have customers visit and walk away to find another reseller or vendor. Do yourself a favor and buy some of your own products. See how it feels to go through the process. If you are new to this business find an eCommerce consultant who can walk you through some things and guide you to better profits. Happy Selling!

This entry was posted on September 05th, 2010 and is filed under Development, E-Commerce, Features, Platform, SEO, Uncategorized. 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.