Internet Marketing Blog

Confessions of a Frustrated Web Site Shopper

October 29, 2007 – 3:07 pm

What your customers are thinking as they get off your site

I used to love shopping on the internet, but a recent, frustrating online shopping experience (for data plans) has totally changed that. The sites I visited were complicated to navigate, employed poor site search engine optimization, and tucked the products I was interested in into the virtual back corners. To add to my frustration, the virtual sales person I talked to on instant sales chat was spectacularly unhelpful, repeating information from the site rather than offering me something new. After a couple of hours of frustrated navigation, I finally gave up and left.

Internet retailing is the most competitive of all retail venues. There are absolutely no impediments for customers to waltz off your site and onto the site of your competitors. They don’t have to drive, walk, or even hang up the phone. As the testimonial above shows, frustrated customers will never tell you. They’ll just leave.

So how do you stop this from happening? Of course the design, architecture, and language of the ideal site will, and should, vary wildly depending on the product offering. The cell phone services industry, in all fairness, faces exceptional complexities because of the different layers to its offering, including phones, plans, additional services, add-on gadgets, and discounts at every turn, all of which need to be wrapped up in a single package at the check-out. However, there are rules that apply across the board for creating a site your customer will actually enjoy visiting.

The Home Page:

We know it’s obvious and you’ve heard it before, but so many people consistently underestimate the Home Page. It has the potential to sell your site, but too often unwittingly slams the door in customers’ faces instead. Don’t make this page any more complicated than it has to be: forget Flash introductions, pop-ups, and long letters in favor of strong visuals, short and sweet copy with a call to action, and easily navigated links.

Key Pages and Navigation:

Those “easily navigated links” should take customers to the pages they are looking for: contact form/info, an “about us” page, FAQs, and the broadest possible categories of products, services, and areas of interest (news, blog, events, etc). Do research on this: employe web analytics tools (i.e. ClickTracks) that display user behavior data including funnel reports, time on site, exit pages, etc. Think like a buyer, not a seller. You already know what you have to offer, your customers don’t. Make sure the key pages and navigation links are consistent and appear on every page.

Content:

Consistent, clear, and even repetitive are the golden rules here. Unlike articles or books, customers will not read your site through page by page. Make sure there are multiple paths to the same information, and that the same information is available on multiple pages. Is something confusing or potentially confusing? Create a link and small pop-up with an explanation. For example, some customers might not understand what “10MB BlackBerry email and Wireless Web access ($0.01 for each KB of usage over 10MB)” (www.sprint.com) means, even if they are in the market for a data plan from a wireless server. Give the customer a little less credit and explain your terms.

Link, Link, Link:

Linking is the easiest possible method for making your web site interactive and fluid. Add links to the text everywhere. If someone is confused or interested in something, it should take them a mere 1-2 seconds to access it from right where they are reading about it.

Typography and Performance:

The type should reflect the design of your site while simultaneously being easy to read and consistent in all web browsers. Images and pages should be optimized for speed, and load as rapidly as possible. The days when people waited 3 or 4 minutes for a web page to load have gone the way of Windows 95 and 3” thick laptops.

BONUS Thought:

Does your web site have optional formatting for visitors using a cell phone? In this web-dominated world people want their information to go with them wherever they go. As data plans drop in price and internet cell usage rises, cutting edge businesses, like Cosmopolitan and others, are starting to take notice. Think about it…not many sites have taken this step yet, and doing so would establish you as cutting edge.

Internet Marketing is intensely important to the survival of business in a web-dominated world. As more business is done on the web, your digital store front will increasingly matter. Don’t play the fool, and don’t let your customers go because you couldn’t generate a top-of-the-line site.

Special thanks to www.dmnews.com and the recent article, “Is It time to Treat Your Web Site As a Necessary Asset?“