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Shopping Cart / Checkout Glitches To Avoid

By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog | November 29, 2006

I made an online purchase from a major retailer yesterday and was shocked to receive an email from them that night notifying me that my credit card on file with them had expired. 

The shocking part about it is their software could have easily notified me of that while I was placing the order and I could have updated it on the spot… but instead, I had to CALL their customer support line to update my credit card (when they could have had me do it on the spot when ordering).

The easily could have lost the sale at that point - And they also had to pay someone to take the phone call to update the credit card info. There are lots of dumb ways merchants discourage sales… NEVER UNDERESTIMATE how easy it is for someone to abandon their online shopping cart if they run into a problem during checkout.

Here are examples of “little” things that can kill sales:

1) Websites that require you to register an account with them before you can complete your order. If it’s a website the customer may never order from again, the extra time/trouble of that extra step could cause them to just leave and get it somewhere else.

2) Order processing software that doesn’t accomodate all forms of input… IE, the customer enters their credit card number as XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX, and instead of the script simply auto-deleting the dashes, it gives the customer an error message “please do not use dashes in your credit card number field”.  (Sure, YOU think it’s easy to understand, but somebody’s going to think their credit card was declined or not understand what happened.)

3) Order error message screens that don’t specifically tell you what’s wrong. You click “Submit Order” and get, “Not all fields were filled out correctly, please click the ‘back’ button to correct your order”.  Hint: You can use javascript to give instant popup warning messages instead, like “Please Enter Phone Number” instead of taking them to a second page.

There are a lot more ways to confuse potential customers and discourage sales… If even one person contacts you with a problem they had ordering, you can assume many, many others have the same problem.  Make it easy for customer to purchase from you!!

Topics: Marketing, Oops (Bad Move) | Trackback URL

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