First Step Marketing

Surprise Them with Shipping Costs

Shoppers don’t like surprises. Before you put your customers through your order taking process, let them know what the actual shipped price of their order will be.

You can do this in one of two ways. First, present the customer with the full amount of his order before you ask for his credit card. If you can’t have offer that calculation, then have complete shipping and handling charges listed on your Web store—and make that list easy to find. This is even more critical for your international customers.

If you want to sell to international customers, then you have to let them know it. Give them the international shipping costs before they reach your order form.

Manual Order Forms

Speaking of order forms, here’s a way to stop a customer’s order dead in its tracks. The customer searched for, found, and is about to order your product. He reaches the order entry screen and it asks him to fill in the product name, code, description, and price of the product! Now the customer has to navigate back to the product page—or forbid, multiple product pages—to retrieve and record the information.

So, invest in a shopping cart software program that keeps track of what the customer is going to purchase and fills in the product information for him. These programs can be bought easily on the Web, and some are even free. If you’re not technically adept at installing it on your Web store, hire a programmer for a few hours to do it. But do it!

Make Them Wait

The WWW stands for the World Wide Web—not the World Wide Wait. Shopping sites are a challenge to design. You want to keep page-download times low while at the same time customers want to see what they are getting. Don’t use bells and whistles just because you can. People don’t want to have to download anything to view your site. But if you must use plug-ins, tell them where to get them. Be sure to include links to the software necessary for a full appreciation of your site. If you say your site uses RealAudio, then be sure it links to a download page for RealAudio.

As bandwidth increases, this issue will become less relevant; but until then, heavy use of graphics, video, and audio programs is time-consuming for the user.

Next, keep in mind that people want simplicity over cool graphics. Faster loading is better than eye candy. So keep your graphics small. Small is better where images are concerned. Try and keep them less than 10 kilobytes each and your download time will speed up. If heavy graphics are necessary to display your offerings, at least be sensitive to customers with older systems. Offer a text-only option for viewing your site.

Finally, remember the three-click rule. It should take no more than three clicks to access the information they need. That means three clicks to a buy button.

Neglect to Address Privacy

You want to keep your personal information private, right? So do your customers. Privacy concerns are a big thing these days and shoppers are worried about how their personal information will be used when they give it to a merchant. So create and state your privacy policy and have a link to it from your home page where shoppers can easily find it.

Keep Security a Secret

Don’t skimp on security. These days, there’s no way to hide that your site doesn’t sit on a secure server. Both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator tell the consumer when they are on a secure page of a site—and when they’re not.

The words “secure server” can have a very calming effect on shoppers. Use a secure server for all your transactions—and tell your customers this when they use their credit card at your site. Put this information in your FAQs and even a separate page on your Web site. Explain to them that their credit card transaction is secure.

SPAM Your Customers

Finally, after you have a customer, you don’t want to lose him. Keeping in touch with previous customers and prospects through emails and newsletters will keep your Web store in front of their mind. But you can overdo it.

Never Spam your own customers. Offer your customers the option of receiving notifications of sales or new products, but be sure you have permission before sending anything. Unsolicited email is more likely to generate more annoyance than sales.

As for frequency, try not to contact customer more than once a month, unless they have opted-in to a more frequent promotional program with you first.

There you are. Avoid these 10 all-to-common pitfalls, and you have a good chance of making that sale and retaining your customers. After all, isn’t that what you went online for?

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Pitfalls of Shopping Website, enough to scare your Customers away continued

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 1:01 am and is filed under Advertising, Ecommerce, Marketing. 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.