E-commerce Insights: 19 Ways to Suppress Online Sales

Following are a few tactics that can torpedo your online conversion rate and impede your Web sales in 2006.

(P.S.: If you’re not heeding the following advice, congratulations!)

1. Make customers work to purchase. Be sure users have to learn how to use your site. This is the best way to get them to concentrate and forget about competitors who are just a click away. Ignore the accepted conventions of industry leaders and frequently change layouts throughout your site to increase “shopping suspense.”

2. Design by committee. Let a group of senior executives design your homepage — or you can let your CEO do it. What’s important is never to test it or solicit input from your customers or front line, contact center personnel.

3. Ditch the style book. To increase interest, use a lot of bright, contrasting colors, multiple palettes and at least four font families. Use animated GIFs. If they seem out of place, set them off with frames.

4. Don’t enable your site to load too quickly. Rapid response from the browser can confuse and bewilder your visitors. Ignore complaints from those using dial-up service — they typically represent only 40 percent of potential sales anyway.

5. Use all the bytes you need to create the image you want. Anemic homepages coming in at less than 50KB will underwhelm your users. Your brand deserves and demands more space — consider 1/4MB or 1/2MB homepages.

6. Embrace jargon. “Labeling” is an important concept in Web site usability. For key product descriptors on your site, simply repurpose the language found on your receiving department’s invoices. Manufacturer model numbers, such as MA107LLA, are precise and unambiguous. Consumer slang such as “black iPod nano” could mean just about anything. So why bother trying to match it?

7. Don’t suggest, and don’t guess. When your site search function fails to find matching results, make sure it offers a nice dead-end page. If you think this page must contain copy, be sure it’s written by the programmers responsible for search. Your customers appreciate straight talk from the people who can tell them why they failed. Don’t correct mistakes in spelling, punctuation or pluralization. Inferring what a customer might have wanted is overbearing and rude.

8. Hide the “buy” button. On product detail pages, make sure “add to cart” is given equal weight with every other call to action on the page. In particular, ensure it doesn’t overshadow other buttons like “add to wish list,” “e-mail this page” or “click for warranty info.”

9. Provide a big button that says “empty cart” — and put it near “continue to checkout.”

10. If a user leaves your site, empty the cart for her. This avoids cluttering her next visit with reminders of things she considered but didn’t buy.

11. Make customers take the scenic route. Be sure your checkout consists of at least seven pages. Ask for plenty of personal data without explanation (your marketing department may find it interesting one day). Extra tip for seeding repeat purchases: Automatically opt in your user for every e-mail list you offer. This is much cheaper than creating a meaningful loyalty program.

12. Force log in. Eliminate guest checkout; require registration. This will separate those “on the fence” prospects from those who really are serious about placing an order.

13. Forget everything your user tells you. If a user makes a mistake during checkout, erase all the information she’s entered. It’s probably error-ridden anyway, and users appreciate the opportunity to start over with a clean slate. If you feel you must offer helpful error messages, these are best crafted by your IT department.

14. Offer plenty of exits. Keep every link available on every page, particularly during cart and checkout. Halfway through your checkout process, users may want to consult your corporate history link or read about a high-ticket item they have no intention of buying.

15. Ignore code standards. What the heck is the World Wide Web Consortium, anyway? Standards compliance is a costly distraction. If your site renders in the latest version of Internet Explorer (IE), your HTML is fine. In fact, try to use HTML tags that render only in IE. And spice up your pages with plenty of JavaScript, particularly in key sections such as the shopping cart and checkout, again favoring functions that run only in IE. Firefox is a passing fad; by November 2005, it had only 100 million downloads.

16. Forget about your catalog. Supporting catalog quick-order numbers isn’t worth the effort. It’s not like some user is sitting in front of a computer with your latest mailing, ready to type a SKU into your cart to make a purchase.

17. Forget about your contact center. Don’t clutter every page on your site with your 800 number. If a user can’t find the information she needs on your Web site, she probably wasn’t serious about placing an order anyway. Focus on your Web site’s conversion ratio, not more total sales for your company.

18. Ignore data. Buy an expensive analytics package, but don’t invest in the expertise to understand what it tells you. (Note: This alone actually won’t lower conversion, but at least it’ll ensure you won’t raise it.)

19. Never shop your site as your customer would. Instead rely on third-party research only.

Conclusion

Of course, if you want to improve sales from your online channel, you’ll do none of the steps outlined here. For books and online resources that can help you improve your site, there’s a list of our favorites at www.rimmkaufman.com/cs-usability. May you have great success making your site the best it can be.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Ph.D., leads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, a service and consulting firm specializing in search marketing and Web usability. Larry Becker directs the firm’s Web usability consulting practice. They can be reached online at www.rimmkaufman.com.