T
The Byre
- Original Poster
- #1
I spent far too much time yesterday, trying to buy stuff on-line and it dawned on me that the people who design and maintain on-line shopping websites probably don't realise some of the massive mistakes they are making.
We buy nearly all our ancillary items on-line. We are building at the moment, so installation cables, light-fittings, IT fittings and all that kind of guff gets bought on-line. If you add herbs and some other supplies for the canteen and some items of capital expenditure, we are talking about £2k per month. Not the world, not a great deal, I'll admit, but worth having. Yesterday, I was after about £300 worth of light fittings.
Product Name - I wanted (amongst other things) a batch of 20 GU10 LED lamp-holder - those 'swively' things that you can screw into the ceiling or the walls and shove a GU10 LED 5W bulb into. The words lamp holder hardly registered with any on-line shops, even less so with GU10 lamp holder. No doubt these things have some magic trade name, but I am not a walking thesaurus for building trades names. I (along with most people) call things by what they do. A temporary builder's support is exactly that. You may call it an acro-prop if that floats your boat, but to most folks, it's a support.
So when you are setting up the search tags, write-in what the damn thing does. I learned this stuff in Germany and so I write in what it does, not what you think it aught to be called. Most of your on-line customers are not tradesmen (they go to their dedicated local supplier that gives them an account) but DIY people and/or foreign trades people. Words like 'snips' 'lintels' 'acro-props' and 'moleys' mean nothing to them!
Basket! - So I filled my basket with about £300 worth of lamps and wire and left it for a while. After checking and double-checking that I had included everything, I returned to the website, only to discover that my basket had been deleted. WTF? All that work for nothing! If I shop at Amazon, the basket stays for weeks, if not months - it's a virtual basket, leaving it up there costs you nothing! I may want to create a basket with your shop over a period of several weeks or even longer - don't you want my trade?
Logging-in! One on-line shop I visited absolutely refused to let me buy anything until I had logged in and become a registered customer, complete with filling in some idiotic form, on-line questionnaire and supplying an email address, etc., etc. And every time I left something absurd out, it made me go back again and fill in the missing boxes - it did this often enough for me to give up and go elsewhere! How about just taking my money and asking for a delivery name and address?
Stock. Have you got it or haven't you got it? One site listed things I needed, so I clicked the basket and 'delivery' buttons, only to be told that it was not available for delivery, but could only be picked up from a B&M shop. Fine - we have someone who is visiting her mother in that area, I'll call her and get her to pick it up. The 'Click-n-Collect' button told me that it was only available on delivery. But they had it (so the site told me!) in stock!
So is your stock control linked directly to the website database - do you REALLY have the damn thing in stock?
Pop-ups, pull-downs and other annoying things! Please try to navigate your site using a phone, laptop-pad or other less-than-optimal device. Do pop-ups obscure what the customer is trying to reach? Do the pull-downs actually work if the customer's pointer (or clumsy thumb) wanders off the precise path of the pull-down? Do all those pull-downs, pop-ups and menus even scale to different sized screens?
Tech Specs. You can never know which technical specification is important to any one customer - so include ALL of them, especially sizes. For example extractor fans - precise dimensions are vital, but also, so are things like power usage, air-flow rates, voltages and of course noise levels in dBA.
Detailed reviews and explanations. If you were running a conventional B&M shop and I toddled in asking about some expensive item, like a video camera or a TV set, I am sure that you or a member of staff would take the time out to explain the quirks and features, the ins and outs and the pluses and minuses of the item in question. And if it is a car, well, boy will you bust a gut to take me on a test drive and show me all the good things about some ghastly gin-palace on wheels. The fun part is that you have to do that for each and every punter that comes into your shop. Your salesman will do that several times a day and each time, he or she will say exactly the same things and point out the same features and go through the same explanations.
Most on-line shops seem to think that no real explanations are required. "There it is - go find your explanations somewhere else! Look on YouTube! Try the various review sites! Maybe there's something there about that device. We just pile 'em high and flog 'em cheap."
____________________________
And that, dear on-line shop owners, is pretty much all of you! From giant corporations who aught to know better, down to small one-man operations with a WordPress site, you nearly all make some of the above mistakes and a select few even manage to make all of the above mistakes.
And if you think that it is OK to make those mistakes, because hey! Everybody else is making the same mistakes, let me tell you that neither Amazon, nor eBay are.
And then there are the on-line shops that get it right. All sorts of idiotic attempts have been made to sell musical instruments and electronics on-line, but in Europe, that market is dominated by just one player and in the US it is dominated by another single player. Those two companies (Thomann and Sweetwater respectively) have been crushing the competition in nearly all segments.
The pioneer times are over. It's time to get it right!
We buy nearly all our ancillary items on-line. We are building at the moment, so installation cables, light-fittings, IT fittings and all that kind of guff gets bought on-line. If you add herbs and some other supplies for the canteen and some items of capital expenditure, we are talking about £2k per month. Not the world, not a great deal, I'll admit, but worth having. Yesterday, I was after about £300 worth of light fittings.
Product Name - I wanted (amongst other things) a batch of 20 GU10 LED lamp-holder - those 'swively' things that you can screw into the ceiling or the walls and shove a GU10 LED 5W bulb into. The words lamp holder hardly registered with any on-line shops, even less so with GU10 lamp holder. No doubt these things have some magic trade name, but I am not a walking thesaurus for building trades names. I (along with most people) call things by what they do. A temporary builder's support is exactly that. You may call it an acro-prop if that floats your boat, but to most folks, it's a support.
So when you are setting up the search tags, write-in what the damn thing does. I learned this stuff in Germany and so I write in what it does, not what you think it aught to be called. Most of your on-line customers are not tradesmen (they go to their dedicated local supplier that gives them an account) but DIY people and/or foreign trades people. Words like 'snips' 'lintels' 'acro-props' and 'moleys' mean nothing to them!
Basket! - So I filled my basket with about £300 worth of lamps and wire and left it for a while. After checking and double-checking that I had included everything, I returned to the website, only to discover that my basket had been deleted. WTF? All that work for nothing! If I shop at Amazon, the basket stays for weeks, if not months - it's a virtual basket, leaving it up there costs you nothing! I may want to create a basket with your shop over a period of several weeks or even longer - don't you want my trade?
Logging-in! One on-line shop I visited absolutely refused to let me buy anything until I had logged in and become a registered customer, complete with filling in some idiotic form, on-line questionnaire and supplying an email address, etc., etc. And every time I left something absurd out, it made me go back again and fill in the missing boxes - it did this often enough for me to give up and go elsewhere! How about just taking my money and asking for a delivery name and address?
Stock. Have you got it or haven't you got it? One site listed things I needed, so I clicked the basket and 'delivery' buttons, only to be told that it was not available for delivery, but could only be picked up from a B&M shop. Fine - we have someone who is visiting her mother in that area, I'll call her and get her to pick it up. The 'Click-n-Collect' button told me that it was only available on delivery. But they had it (so the site told me!) in stock!
So is your stock control linked directly to the website database - do you REALLY have the damn thing in stock?
Pop-ups, pull-downs and other annoying things! Please try to navigate your site using a phone, laptop-pad or other less-than-optimal device. Do pop-ups obscure what the customer is trying to reach? Do the pull-downs actually work if the customer's pointer (or clumsy thumb) wanders off the precise path of the pull-down? Do all those pull-downs, pop-ups and menus even scale to different sized screens?
Tech Specs. You can never know which technical specification is important to any one customer - so include ALL of them, especially sizes. For example extractor fans - precise dimensions are vital, but also, so are things like power usage, air-flow rates, voltages and of course noise levels in dBA.
Detailed reviews and explanations. If you were running a conventional B&M shop and I toddled in asking about some expensive item, like a video camera or a TV set, I am sure that you or a member of staff would take the time out to explain the quirks and features, the ins and outs and the pluses and minuses of the item in question. And if it is a car, well, boy will you bust a gut to take me on a test drive and show me all the good things about some ghastly gin-palace on wheels. The fun part is that you have to do that for each and every punter that comes into your shop. Your salesman will do that several times a day and each time, he or she will say exactly the same things and point out the same features and go through the same explanations.
Most on-line shops seem to think that no real explanations are required. "There it is - go find your explanations somewhere else! Look on YouTube! Try the various review sites! Maybe there's something there about that device. We just pile 'em high and flog 'em cheap."
____________________________
And that, dear on-line shop owners, is pretty much all of you! From giant corporations who aught to know better, down to small one-man operations with a WordPress site, you nearly all make some of the above mistakes and a select few even manage to make all of the above mistakes.
And if you think that it is OK to make those mistakes, because hey! Everybody else is making the same mistakes, let me tell you that neither Amazon, nor eBay are.
And then there are the on-line shops that get it right. All sorts of idiotic attempts have been made to sell musical instruments and electronics on-line, but in Europe, that market is dominated by just one player and in the US it is dominated by another single player. Those two companies (Thomann and Sweetwater respectively) have been crushing the competition in nearly all segments.
The pioneer times are over. It's time to get it right!
