E-tailers have a lot to learn from traditional retailers. It seems that well-known eCommerce sites get away with atrocious usability mistakes simply because the internet as a shopping medium is growing so fast. Web managers may think that because sales numbers are up they must be doing everything right. For many online stores, nothing is further from the truth. Below I’ve listed what I consider to be the worst practices of eCommerce sites these days.

1. Requiring Login to Order: I would agree with Get Elastic’s Linda Bustos that this is one of many e-tailers’ favorite usability mistakes. Requiring registration is very obnoxious, especially when you have yet to establish any relationship with a retailer, and you have not idea if you’ll ever purchase again.
2. Not Showing Shipping Prices Upfront: I’ve abandoned dozens of online orders because of this. Sure, asking for the customers address may ensure a more accurate shipping cost for you, but its not worth losing a customer over. In my opinion, the best practice is to simply base your shipping costs on the merchandise total. It might not be the most accurate way, but if you average it out, it works great.
3. Vague, Hard to Find Return Policies: For me, returning products to an online retailer is right up there with getting my teeth drilled. Don’t make the process worse by hiding your return policy deep within your site or requiring your customers to jump through hoops to complete the process. Rarely do e-tailers make their return policy a selling point or competitive advantage. Wherever I can, I like to use the words “No-Hassle Return Policy” to reassure the customer that the process is quick and easy.
4. Poor SEO: Build it, and they will not come, unless your eCommerce site is on good terms with Google. Retailers tend to forget that search engines are the highways and byways of the internet. An eCommerce site not optimized for search is equivalent to a brick and mortar store conveniently located underground.
5. Poor Product Descriptions: Your product descriptions are the closest thing you have to an face to face salesperson. Make them work for you. Improving your product descriptions is one of the easiest, yet most neglected ways to improve your online sales. If your product catalog is large enough to justify hiring a copy-writer, than do it. If not, hire someone on the side to write your copy.
6. Lack of Filtering & Sorting: Imagine yourself walking unto a used car lot. What do you ask the salesperson in order to narrow down your options? You’ll likely say something like “show me all the vehicles this color, with this amount of mileage, or this make and model.” The same principle should be applied to your product department pages. Don’t overwhelm your audience with too many options. Let them filter down by criteria such as colors, sizes, or brand. Also, let them sort the listings by price, newness, popularity, etc.
7. Hard to Find Checkout Button: Imagine not being able to find the checkout lane at a grocery store. Many online stores assume shoppers know that the shopping cart is the first step of the checkout process. To prevent confusion of your customers, always have a clear “checkout” button visible on every page.
8. Poor Merchandising: If you owned a brick and mortar store, I’m going to bet you would walk your aisles every day to ensure your products are merchandised properly. Yet I think website owners expect their online stores to run themselves, and rarely take time for this important audit. Once a day, try to shop your store as if you were going to buy something. I’ll bet you’ll find one or two things out of place.
9. Getting too Personal: Do you really need your customer’s date of birth to complete an order? Even asking for information such as email or telephone number may arouse suspicion in your customers. Ask yourself an important question for each additional form field you add, “Is this worth losing a sale over?”
10. No Calls to Action: Don’t just assume your visitors will click on your image maps or “Click Here” links. Make your call to action buttons big, bold, and unmistakably clear. Every page of the conversion funnel (landing page to department page to product page to checkout) should clearly define the next step in the process.
11. No Error Reporting: From a technical point of view, it’s very simple to setup error notifications when certain unexpected events occur on your website. Montastic offers a completely free website monitoring service. In addition, ask your webmaster to setup email alerts for every time a 500 (internal server) error or 404 (page not found) error occurs.
12. Inaccurate Cross Sells: Embarrassing cross-sells can sometimes lead to more than just more than just missed opportunities. If your system for suggesting add-ons, cross sells, or up-sells doesn’t work, you’re probably better off not using it.
13. Unreachable Customer Service: Online retailers are typically not famous for their customer service. Phone numbers and emails should be listed prominently on every page. Responses to customer requests should be prompt and courteous. In a previous post, I outlined 25 tips for improving your online customer service.

I’m sure I didn’t mention everything, so be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts or experiences. 

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About PWM

Justin Palmer offers expert eCommerce consulting and SEO consulting in Orange County, California. Justin also has written an e-Commere e-book entitled The e-Commerce Roadmap.

Why do we hate car salesmen? Simple, we don’t trust them. It’s not that we don’t want the car, we just don’t find the salesman’s claims to be credible. Because of the lack of face to face interaction between you and your website visitors, customers will judge your company based on your website. Your products may be incredible, but if your site isn’t credible, you’ll never close the deal.

Below I’ve listed my top 5 tips for improving your website’s credibility.

1. Clean, Professional Site Design: Nothing says amateur more than an ugly or unprofessional website design. It’s painfully obvious when websites are designs by “techies” rather than graphic designers. While it’s certainly possible to go overboard with graphics, they are none the less important.
2. Personal Contact or About Page: More often than we realize, customers use contact or about pages to determine whether your company is reachable and or credible. Make sure you prominently display contact information on your contact page. In addition, you may want to add a personal touch by showing pictures of your customer service staff with their direct contact info.
3. Trust Logos: Secure logos from your SSL provider, Hacker Safe, or BBBOnline can go a long way to show credibility.
4. Privacy/Security Page: Display your privacy policy (you do have one, right?) for your customers to review. Assure them their information is kept safe and secure. Allow them to validate your SSL with click-through verification (most SSL providers offer this.)
5. Unfiltered Customer Reviews: If your site sells products, I would highly recommend allowing customers to review them. While it’s tempting to remove negative customer reviews from the site, they can be a great way to convince your customers that you are open and transparent about your products.

I hope you found these suggestions useful. Be sure to leave a comment if you have any other ideas.

About

Among other things, the Palmer Web Marketing blog offers SEO Tips for eCommerce sites.  Palmer Web Marketing also offers ethical search engine optimization services and expert ecommerce consulting.

Good website navigation is the quintessential web usability principle. Yet so often it is neglected in favor of more glamorous site improvements. Just as a city cannot function without efficient roads and highways, your site will suffer without a logical, simple, and consistent navigation menu. Below I’ve gathered 10 Do’s and don’ts regarding website navigation.

1. Thou Shalt Use Left-hand or Vertical Menus: Don’t get fancy and put your navigation structure on the right hand side of the site. Since visitors are accustomed to vertical or left navs, this is the equivalent to telling them to drive on the wrong side of the road.
2. Thou Shalt use Breadcrumb Navigation Trails: There is no greater navigation tool than Breadcrumb (aka Cookie crumb) trails. It easily allows visitors to go up or down a level and re-orient themselves when they get lost. Below is an example of a Bread crumb trail:

          Home > Top Category > Middle Category > Lower Category > Page Detail

3. Thou Shalt Not Overwhelm the Visitor with Too Many Options:  Typically, you shouldn’t include more than 7 options on your primary navigation. More than this, and you users will feel overwhelmed.
4. Thou Shalt prioritize Each Menu Item: Make sure your menu items are listed in priority from left to right or from top to bottom. Ask yourself “what action do I want the visitor to take?” Then lead your visitors along this path.
5. Thou Shalt Not Change the Nav on Each Page: Never change anything on your navigation from page to page. This is extremely confusing and unprofessional.
6. Thou Shalt Show the Visitor Where they Are and Where they’ve been: I strongly recommend using some sort of indicator in your primary navigation to show users where they are. For example, if your site uses tabs in the navigation, change the color of the category that is currently being viewed. In addition, be sure to change color of visited text links so the user doesn’t accidentally visit a page he or she has already been to.
7. Thou Shalt Not Rely Solely on Dynamic  Rollover Menus: Remember, not everyone is using the same browser technology as you. Make sure your navigation is useful in all the major browser types. Additionally, ensure that each link is crawl ablea by search engines.
8. Thou Shalt Not Stuff SEO Keywords in Your Navigation: This is both unprofessional and useless from an SEO point of view. Keywords within the universal navigation of a website are rarely considered as a ranking factor.
9. Thou Shalt Not Use Fancy, Unreadable Fonts: Resist the temptation to make your navigation look like a piece of art. While fancy graphics have a very important place in a website, they certainly do not belong in the navigation.
10. Thou Shalt Make the Company Logo Link to the Home Page: This is so basic, yet I run across sites on a daily basis that do not make their company logo (usually located in the upper left corner) clickable.

When you consider the competitive advantages of an online retailer, customer service is usually not the first thing that comes to mind. Many e-commerce sites, even the large well-known ones, are known for impersonal, mediocre customer service practices. And yet, the few e-tailors that differentiate themselves on serving their customers such as Zappos become well-known case studies in client care. In this post, I’ll share some of the unique best practices I’ve seen over the last few years that serve to differentiate companies in customer service.

1. Assign a Personal Customer Service Rep: Along with the order confirmation receipt that you send to your customers, also automatically assign each customer a personal representative that will field their questions. Send the email from this representative’s name, and include their contact info. Customers will be impressed that they have a “personal” representative assign specifically to them. For more info on this tactic, checkout this post on DermaTechRX.
2. Human Touch: Many online shoppers struggle with trusting an online merchant due to the lack of face to face interaction. Mitigate this weakness by showing pictures of your customer service staff. Christian retailer C28 shows the picture of their customer service manager on the Help page as well as on every order confirmation email. In addition, below the picture is the manager’s direct contact info. Something like this can go a long way to instill trust in your company.
3. Call Customers Who Abandon Orders: When a customer starts an order but doesn’t finish it, follow up with a phone call to find out if there were any problems. Customers appreciate the gesture, and you will likely save many sales in the process.
4. Free Upgraded Shipping: Surprise select customers by upgrading their shipping to 1 or 2 express. If you do this, be sure to send them an email letting them know they have been upgraded. This strategy was pioneered by Zappos.
5. Same Day Shipping: Most websites have a policy of shipping orders 1 or 2 business days after they are placed. If possible, selectively ship some orders the same day. The speedy delivery will be appreciated, though not expected by your customers.
6. Increase # of Reps: It goes without saying that if you have a higher representative to customer ratio, you will have the time to better serve your clients. While not every business can afford this, if you want to differentiate yourself with outstanding customer service, it’s a must.
7. Hand-written thank you on Packing Slip: Most packing slips are dull, impersonal, and useful only if you need to return the merchandise. On rare occasions, I’ve received orders where the packing list featured a hand-written, personalized thank you from a staff member. While this may not be practical for every order, it is a great way to impress select customers. Another idea might be to include the business card with contact info for a manager.
8. Follow Up Surveys: Consider sending a survey email out with every order confirmation. While not every customer will complete it, your customers will know you care enough to ask their opinion.
9. Extensive FAQ Knowledge Base: Surprisingly, one of the easiest ways to improve your customer satisfaction may be to prevent needless customer interactions in the first place. No matter how friendly your call center representative, no customer will be pleased if they have to call you in order to answer a simple question like “how do I return a product?” Prevent situations like this by maintaining a searchable FAQ knowledge base that answers every reasonable question.
10. Live Chat: Many customers dislike the thought of sitting on hold for even a few minutes. Offering a live chat option can be an inexpensive way of answering questions for your visitors, and reducing the call volume for your call center.
11. Improve After Hour Call Center: If your business employs a 3rd party after hour call center that is off-site, make sure you frequently monitor the quality of care they are rendering. Make sure they are empowered to serve your customers as effectively as possible. If your primary call center is 3rd party, seriously consider bringing it in house. While this is not always the most affordable option, it’s necessary if you desire to give your clients your absolute best.
12. Prominent Customer Testimonials: Place customer testimonials on more than just the “testimonial” page. Zappos features them right on their main customer service page. A word of caution applies here though. If you’re going to “brag” so to speak about your service, make sure you follow through!
13. Detailed Product Pages: Answer questions before they are asked by always having thoroughly detailed product pages. Include all the relevant info a customer would want to know about your products. For more ideas on this topic, checkout my previous post on 25 ways to improve your product page.
14. Customer Centric Slogan: Show your dedication to customer care by prominently featuring a customer centered slogan that summarizes your company’s practices. A great example of this would be Zappos’ famous slogan on their home page: “We are a service company that happens to sell shoes.”
15. Free Return Shipping: One of the greatest stumbling blocks to online ordering is the thought of having to return the product. Consider sending customers a pre-paid return shipping label in the case of a product needing to be returned. Because this is rarely done by e-commerce stores, you will certainly set yourself apart in the mind of your customer.
16. Automatic Price Protection: Always honor sale prices of items that were previously purchased by customers. They need to be able to shop with this confidence. Better yet, automatically notify customers when items they have purchased in the past go on sale. Offer to apply the price difference toward a future purchase or just refund the amount. Sound crazy? Maybe, but it’s small cost that can win a customer for life.
17. Lenient Return Policy: Make sure your return policy is not unnecessarily complicated or rigid. How many times have you shopped at a certain retailer because their lenient return policy gave you the confidence you needed to buy? (Think Costco vs. Walmart!)
18. Thank You Calls: Call select customers and thank them for ordering. This personalized gesture will blow them away.
19. Thank You Emails: Email certain customers and thank them for their business. Be sure to include something personalized in the email that will convince them it’s not just something generic sent to everyone.
20. Do More than Fix Your Mistakes: When your business makes a mistake, be sure that you exceed your customer’s expectations when fixing it. If an item was mistakenly left out of a shipment, don’t just a apologize, offer that item for free. Many businesses find their most loyal customers result from a highly satisfying resolution to a problem.
21. Fix Other’s Mistakes: If a shipment is delayed or lost due to the fault of the shipping carrier, don’t just blame UPS, offer a solution. Offer to promptly re-ship the item, or at the very least, offer to take care of the problem with the carrier so the customer doesn’t have to.
22. Guaranteed Email Response Time: Most customers expect an email inquiry to be answered within at most 24 hours. If you can, guarantee a response time faster than this. Also, acknowledge the receipt of an email inquiry by employing an auto responder.
23. Secret Shopping: Used extensively by brick-and-mortar retailers, secret shopping is a great way to identify problems and keep your customer service staff on their toes.
24. Upgrade Your CRM Tools: Proper technology can go a long way to improving customer care. At the very least, ensure that your staff has the ability to view the history of previous interactions with a customer. It’s very frustrating when you have to repeatedly explain the situation to a representative.
25. Personalize Everything: Always great customers by name on the home page, and offer them personalized product recommendations based on previous orders.

I once heard it said that “the enemy of good is not bad, it’s mediocre.” Too many online retailers struggle with mediocre customer service. Many businesses fail to realize their customer base is also powerful marketing machine. If treated right, they can become to most effective viral marketing campaign imaginable. Treated poorly, and they can become a PR disaster.

If you enjoyed this post, please also checkout 25 ways to improve your shopping cart and 25 ways to improve your checkout.

Imagine walking into a busy, high traffic grocery store. Despite the large number of customers in the store, you notice abandoned shopping carts strewn about the aisles and checkout lanes.  For many online businesses, this example illustrates perfectly the predicament many online retailers find themselves in. Why? For one, I believe many online retailers rarely actually test their own checkouts from the user’s perspective. If they had, they would have identified stumbling blocks. Below I’ve compiled a fairly comprehensive list of ideas on improving the checkout process.

1. Eliminate pages, eliminate scrolling: Many usability experts decry the benefits of shortening the checkout to as few pages as possible. While in theory this works, sometimes the real world provides other factors that must be considered. For example, suppose you combine your whole checkout into 1 page. Sounds great, unless the page is a mile tall and requires excessive vertical scrolling. In my opinion, the basic rule of thumb should be to condense the checkout into as few pages as possible requiring little to no vertical scrolling.
2. Hide the Navigation: Hide both your top and side navigation once the customer has initiated the checkout in order to prevent distractions. At this point, your goal should be to finalize the order as soon as possible before the visitor loses interest.
3. Hacker Safe Logos: Services from HackerSafe or Control Scan can be a great way to boost confidence during checkout. For more info on Hacker Safe, check this post.
4. Secure Certificate Logos: Most likely, your Payment Gateway and Secure Certificate provider offer a clickable security logo that you can install in your checkout pages. This provides an external way of validating the authenticity of your site.
5. Progress Indicator Bar: Always show shoppers where they are in the process. Everyone likes to know there is light at the end of the tunnel.
6. Prominent 1-800 Number: If you offer a live help line, make sure the number is highly visible everywhere in the checkout screens.
7. Live Chat: For those not wanting to call a 1-800 and wait on hold, Live chat is an excellent customer service feature. I’ve found it to be very effective for businesses with high value items such as jewelry.
8. No Default Credit Card Type: Typically, before or after you enter your credit card you are asked to select what type of card it is. DO NOT default this option to one of credit card types as many people will not notice it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve neglected to change the default option, and tried to use a MasterCard with the Visa option selected. Customers then become confused when they received an error telling them their credit card it invalid.
9. Auto-Detect Credit Card Type: Many card processors, including Authorize.net don’t even require you to have a credit card type drop down box since the first 4 numbers of the card determine that. Paypal does a nice job of automatically detecting and showing the credit card type with AJAX.
10. Don’t Up-Sell or Cross-Sell: Resist the temptation to up sell or cross sell during checkout. Remember, this is not like a supermarket checkout aisle. Users get distracted and are free to abandon their shopping carts at any time for any reason.
11. Gift Receipt / Gift Wrap Option: Customers have begun to expect this, especially during the holidays. No one wants to send a gift with an invoice showing what they paid. At the very least, offer a gift receipt with the prices not showing. Even better, include an option for a gift message.
12. User Friendly Credit Card Errors: I rarely have seen this done, yet it can make worlds of a difference. In the complex world of online credit card processing, it’s crucial to simplify any potential problems for the end user. If their credit card is declined due to an address mismatch, give them a list of possible solutions. For example, maybe they have moved recently and the processor or bank still has the old address on file? Or maybe they don’t know where to find the 3 digit security code on the back of the card.
13. Don’t Require Phone or Email: Though most e-tailors would like to have this information, you must ask yourself if it is important enough to risk losing the sale. Many privacy sensitive customers don’t like to give out this information.
14. Email List Opt-Out: Validate Email Address: Always allow people to opt-out. Though technically this is not required since they are making a purchase, it is a best practice required by most ISPs in order to be considered for white listing.
15. Copy Billing Info to Shipping Info: Most sites have this feature, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Nothing is worse than having to type the same information twice for the billing and shipping.
16. Don’t Require Login: Again, certain people will prefer not to create an account, so don’t risk losing the sale over this. Provide a “checkout without account” option.
17. Prominent “First time signup” Link: If you’re like most businesses, you probably get a significant amount of online business from first time shoppers. For this reason, there should always be a prominent “first time signup” link in the checkout when you ask someone to sign in.
18. Offer Paypal: While I have doubts about certain online payment methods such as Google Checkout and Bill Me Later, I strongly believe adding Paypal will help conversion, especially for international customers or those without credit cards.
19. Offer E-Check Payments: Another common payment method is by an e-check. Many customers who pay this way have checking accounts, but no credit or debit cards.
20. Security Code Explanation: Always provide a clear explanation of what this credit card security code is and why you need it. While most sites provide an image of where to find it, rarely do they answer the question of why they need it. Many shoppers are wary about giving this out, so provide an explanation of why it’s necessary for an online purchase.
21. Disable “Finalize Order” button On Click: A lot is going on technically speaking when the user clicks the “Finalize Order” button. Many users are impatient, and will click this button again and again until something happens. Depending on how your checkout is programmed, this can cause serious problems such as double billing or duplicate orders. Prevent this confusion by disabling the button after it’s clicked.
22. Show Estimated Processing Time: In addition to the above, show something to the nature of ”please allow up to 60 seconds to process your order.” after the shopper clicks the finalize order button.
23. Bookmark able Receipt Page: Make sure your receipt page is not the same page that processes the order via a form post. Shoppers tend to bookmark receipt pages, but if it’s not available later they will be very confused.
24. Shipping Time Estimates: Usually, the first question on a customers mind after submitting an order is “when will I get it?” Prevent needless customer service interactions by providing an estimate of both when the order will ship and when it will arrive.
25. Eliminate Insecure Page Errors: A customer should never have to see a “this page contains insecure items” error right before they enter their credit card. Usually, this is just a case of the webmaster not using relative links properly with images (http:// vs. https://).

I hope you found something here useful for your online business. This is actually the 4th post in my “25 Ways to” series, so please checkout the other posts as well.