Recently Cameron Chapman touched on some crucial mistakes that can be made in E-Commerce Design. What I can’t stress enough is the importance of getting your e-commerce right. It is not enough to just have a store online to sell your products and services. Users need to have the best possible shopping experience and customer service online, just as is required if they were to shop in a mall.

Web site usability has become an important element of successful Web sites. Web sites must be easy to use. Hard-to-use sites frustrate customers, forfeit revenue to on-line retailers, and erode the image of the company’s brand.

Once you have succeeded in attracting a consumer to your site and have induced them to look into buying an item from your E-commerce store, the last thing you want is to frustrate the customer enough into forcing them to leave. It is so easy to do. Care must be used when designing your E-commerce store.

I have split Chapman’s 15 mistakes into three critical areas:

• Ease Of Use
• Product information
• Customer Service

Ease of use is the most important issue, because if the store is too hard to use the potential customer will be lost before they find what they are looking for. So we will start here.

1. While receiving customer information is great, but making it a requirement that the customer must have an account with you just makes the whole shopping experience less enjoyable. Consumers hate filling out forms. Promote the benefits of the customer making an account with you, but don’t make it a requirement, It will turn customers off.

2. Confusing navigation can really peeve a shopper off. They won’t be able to get back to home easily and really find what they are looking for. The easy solution is to carefully categorize the products, make sure there are no categories that have no products in them or very few, what’s the point.

3. Oh the shopping carts. This is the one that has definitely turned me away quickly from a website, like it does too many others. Get it right guys, the shopping cart is where the money is made and needs to be super easy to use. Add a product to the list, move easily back to shopping, add a few more things, take those socks off the cart. It should be as simple as that!

4. Finished shopping? Time to head to that dreaded checkout. Is it going to be a sprint to the finish or shall we add a marathon on the end of it? Ideally we want to make it a sprint, make it easy for the customer to part with their money as soon as possible. Limit the number of steps and turn that last hurdle into a Sunday stroll.

Let them know what they are getting with the product information. Obviously online the customer cannot physically hold the product and try it out so the next best thing is to make sure they get to view your product from every angle, put your product in the best light possible, make decision easier and take the doubt out of the equation.

1. Lack of detailed product information is a killer. Make the shopping experience as close to the real thing as possible. Add all the details you can. Sizes, materials, weight, dimensions, and all the details that is specific to that product.

2. In the same line of thought, get rid of those ridiculously small product images; show the detail in the product. Nobody is going buy a product they can hardly see.

3. Give the customer every angle of the product. Zoom in on detail. Use multiple images. One image is not going to cut it. You need to show your product in the best light possible in order to stop the customer getting frustrated and looking elsewhere at the competitors more detailed images.

4. Increase the chance of a sale, or more sales. Use a platform that uses a related product list, so that you are giving shopper alternatives on your site, instead of looking for others on your competitor’s site.

Let the customer know what you provide and make it easy for the shopper to contact you. Make quality customer service an option online.

1. How much is it going to cost them to ship that wonderful new product to their doorstep? They should be able to get that piece of information right at the point of sale in the checkout.

2. Before the customer wants to ship their new item to their front door they are going to want to know about your shipping policies, return policies, and other store rules. So let them know. Make an easily accessible policies or FAQ page that gives them the reassurance they need.

3. Some customers will still want to be able to contact you, the company and find out they are dealing with humans. Provide a customer service link and make your contact details available. They may want to contact you before passing over their credit card details.

4. Options, options, options. Customers love them and need them when it comes to paying. You need to be able to give the customer the option of using which ever credit they please or have. Otherwise they will have no option at all, but to walk away from the purchase.

Tags: E-commerce

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 12:40 am and is filed under E-commerce, Internet. 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.