Archive for January, 2006

I’m working on the content plans for my new site Web Site Advice, that I am carefully tooling for full scale launch sometime in Feb 2006. This site will be driven entirely by the website clinic / critique part of the business. It will also reflect my latest design philosophy, contain my newest articles, and hopefully be a great resource for anyone looking to build and market a new site. http://www.websiteadvice.com.

I never thought I’d get a boost in my sense of job security while shopping in Best Buy, but a recent visit boosted my outlook for online shopping growth even more.

In to buy a new USB headset and a new Bluetooth phone earpiece, I forewent the normal Froogle drill-down and got in my car (I need to get out of the office a bit, you know!) I honestly don’t know why I didn’t pop open Amazon and grab the items there. I guess I wanted to see how these items felt in my hand, get some fresh air, and just sortof browse a physical space.

To my suprise, the USB headsets didn’t have the lengths of the cords printed on the box, so I asked the staff, who immediately started reading the box that I had already scrutinized. I said to them… “it’s not on there, can you check your spec database?” … they kept reading, and reluctantly, typed it in their terminal a minute or so later. Nothing.

So I asked if they might enter their password and let me Google for the cord length..”We’re not allowed to do that.” Wha? Are you kidding? Here I am, holding a product and you’re not going to let me get online to learn a basic specification? Needless to say, that item is laying on the shelf at Best Buy.

Three other products, and a few other small questions for Best Buy Service staff. While they all clustered around their terminals chatting presumably about last nights’ party or other gossip, I often waited, surrounded by a sea blue-shirted “don’t know, don’t care” humans that were in no way more useful than a good review website.

I cannot wait until I can easily surf using a mobile device. The new Google button on some Motorola phones is a great first step. In the case where I get such an odd urge to go to an actual store I’ll have my handy assistant with me, and can just walk past these folks and get my own ansers. I’ll be able to get out in the real world and still get real answers to questions.

I left the store empty-handed, past the suspecting eye of the “door watchman” and headed home.

Now… over to Amazon toget the stuff I need.

I know how to save the US economy hundreds of millions of dollars a year. No really.

Have physicians and medical offices post their “medical records update” online as a PDF file that you can fill in at home the night before! You only have to post it ONCE (when it changes) and then it will work for you all year!

Then, when I make a 9:00 appointment, I can come in and hand it to the person behind the counter, all filled in. Then, I will grab my forklift and prepare myself for the large stack of privacy policies that will be handed back.

It’s easy, folks. PDF converters are FREEEEEEEEEEE. Try PDFonline or PrimoPDF.

Then, on your voice mail attendant, and little inserts in your bills, etc. etc, you can remind folks to go grab mydoctoroffice.com/medicalhistory.pdf before my appointment. Hey, how about this, why not give those who use it a little bonus gift?

Top Reasons For Abandonment:

56% - shipping costs too high
41% - item unavailable.
29% - site difficult to use.
21% - order wouldn’t go through.
Source: Yankee Group

Other factors
55% would revisit a site often if free shipping
46% consider shipping costs a major on-line shopping issue.
Source: Ernst & Young

Reducing Abandoned Shopping Carts

1. Shorten the process! Visitors get frustrated easily with a shopping cart system that asks for repeat data entry - like billing and shipping addresses when identical. Cart abandonment has been shown to drop as much as 12% per page eliminated.
2. Make it fast! Slow forms piss people off. Use a tool like the HTML Toolbox tool to be sure your pages are moving quickly. Keep in mind that using SSL (https://) slows all web pages a little bit.
3. Test Test Test. Even the smallest odd behavior benign error message will cause people to bail out. People flee if they even suspect that things are awry.
4. Beg them not to leave. A 25% improvement in sales was shown when a pop-up was added on the shopping cart system that would give them $5.00 off their purchase if they please, please please finish their order. Get creative!
5. Secure personal data. Any perceived security lapse will boost abandonment fast. For example… programmers know that carts shown inside of “frames” are still secure, but the padlock doesn’t appear on most browsers. To your customers, this is an unsafe page and many will not use it. Sometimes you must show the padlock even when it’s really not that important just to pacify jittery shoppers.
6. Answer questions before they are asked… If there is any question about who, what, when, where, why on any field in your cart, explain it with a little pop up they can click on, or better yet, use a “mouse over auto pop up” like the one we use on sitecreations.com in places. A general FAQ should be available without losing the cart flow… that is, make it possible to review frequent questions while leaving your cart in “pause” mode.
7. No 800 number? Get one! Customers like to know they can contact a live person and might not have abandoned their carts if one were available. Online chat tools serve a similar purpose, and are now becoming the tool of choice for multi-tasking customers. 800 numbers are very, very cheap, and can be routed over your standard office line. VOIP providers often provide them even cheaper, but make sure your VOIP works! Customers hate choppy, difficult to understand telephone conversations.
8. Choose shipping amounts carefully, after testing! Many will lower the prices of their products to rate well in comparison shopping engines such as Froogle and shopping.com, and then try to charge more for shipping and handling. This is not always the best idea, unless you’ve tested it to be sure your customers don’t grumble. Always do a slider test. Get your conversion rate at one shipping point, then raise your shipping prices until you notice a change… then back down a notch. Figure out what your market will bear.

So as you build your store, consider these tips as part of your main design constraints, and you can avoid one of the largest problems of any ecommerce store!

This blog entry moved to my articles page.

writing for the web in an age of hummingbirds.

I also finally learned Carp and Grouper XML/Atom translation techniques for dynamic page generation and blog publishing. I took this and created a second tab on my home page that will hold my blog entries. Cool software - it has lit my idea light a bit on how my clients might be able to utilize this capability.

No, I’m not just geeking out here, this has a tremendous application for increased web traffic and marketing. It also demonstrates some ways that clients can syndicate content with a few lines of javascript provided to a publisher.