|
Ways to Lose Customers
1. Make your site difficult to navigate
If users can't immediately find what they are looking for on your site, they're gone. If users get lost on your site, they're likely to leave rather than figure out how to get back to your home page.
2. Offer a poor selection of payment options
Unless you're selling high value products, then you need to accept credit cards. The more payment options you offer a customer, the more chance of making a sale. Don't forget that there may be customers who may want to pay by check or PayPal.
3. Ask for too much customer information
Many sites try to collect customer information during the checkout process. Bad mistake.
The checkout process should be as quick and clean as possible to minimize the chances of the customer abandoning the transaction. The main objective at this stage is to get the user to click on that 'confirm order' button.
4. Use second-rate shopping cart software
There are many shopping carts and web store services out there. A poorly designed or confusing checkout procedure will lose the sale.
5. Display messed-up web pages
Yes, your web site may look great on your 21" monitor using Internet Explorer - but your potential customers could be using Netscape, WebTV or running at 640 x 480 resolution.
6. Large, Slow-loading Graphics
Nothing puts off users more than pages that take forever to load. They're gone.
7. Bore your customers
The guiding principle of selling on the Web is to keep your customers on your site as long as possible (to maximize the chances of making a purchase) and then minimize the time between the decision to buy and the completion of the transaction.
8. Provide insufficient product information
If your customers know exactly what they want to buy, then selling online is easy. If they're not sure that an item is exactly what they need, they probably won't take the risk of purchasing.
It's always better to give the customer too much information, rather than not enough.
9. Have a site that looks "dead"
A site that appears neglected or out of date will be treated with suspicion. Even just placing the current date somewhere on the home page makes the site look "alive".
10. Appear anonymous
Customers will feel more comfortable placing an order with you if they feel they know you. Contact details on a site are essential. If you can put names and faces along with them, it's even better.
And of course, an "About Us" page with the history of the company and site, press coverage and customer testimonials all adds to customer confidence.
| 
