As a developer trying to make his way in the world, I strive to keep my little patch of the web a clean, tidy, happy place. So it grieves me when I see the things that some retailers are doing that seemingly laugh in the face of an enjoyable user experience. Here’s three things that have been grinding my gears recently, and aren’t difficult to fix.
Customer Surveys
There’s a time and a place for a customer survey… half a second after I hit your homepage is not it. They say it takes seven seconds to form your first impressions about someone you meet. So how on Earth am I suppose to have gleaned any useful insight into how well your site works, in the time it takes to load a few lines of JavaScript. Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that valuable demographic information and feedback can (sometimes) be harvested through a well written survey. In order to do that though you need to catch users when they’re in the right mood to fill a survey in, and when they actually have something of note to say.
In my opinion, the logical place for a survey or feedback form would be after the checkout process, once payment has been taken. It is at that point that a user will have seen the best and worst elements of your basket process, your product page layout and maybe even tried a product search. These are the people you want to hear from.
To come back to my point about catching people in the right mood to fill in a survey, why not incentivise the feedback form a little to sweeten the deal? Incentivising feedback forms is always open to spamming abuse, but by placing the survey after the customer has ordered it won’t be accessible to the majority of spammers, and so you stand a slightly better chance of getting meaningful results from the survey. Don’t over-do the incentive though. Offer a few loyalty points or a small percentage discount code; something that isn’t going to destroy profit margins but will give them a reason to return and order again.
Marketing Email Subject Lines
I actually don’t mind receiving marketing emails from sites that I have purchased from in the past, but there are two things that get on my nerves; both of which are related to the subject line of the email.
Firstly, there is one online retailer from whom I must receive at least two emails a week with a subject line that read something akin to “CLEARANCE FINAL WEEKEND – Hurry, Must End Sunday!”. Then to my surprise (or not anymore as the case may be) when I check my inbox the following Monday morning, I’m greeted with a “PRICE CRASH 3 DAY SALE – Not to be missed, ends midnight Wednesday!”
Hold on, I thought Sunday was the last day of the sale? So I was up all night on Sunday for nothing, scouring the sales pages when I could have been getting some sleep and perusing them at my convenience on Monday evening… fantastic.
There’s a simple solution to all this. Just stop claiming every day is your last, final, ultimate, end of day’s clearance sale. Instead, grab my attention with a general discount amount, a headline product that’s on offer, or the range of item’s that’s being reduced. Don’t tell me the sale ends today, if the same items will be on offer tomorrow under a different guise.
The headline product idea brings me round to my second gripe. Having a headline product can work really well if you’re selling items to a particular sector, like IT and computing equipment for example. Put either a well targeted or universally desirable product in the subject line and you’ll be guaranteed to get some attention. The key point to remember though (if you don’t want to hack-off your otherwise loyal customers) is to put that headline product at the top of the email itself. Don’t bury it right down at the bottom, and think we won’t notice you forcing us to scroll past all the other items you want to sell us. We’re all busy people, and at 9:15am on a Monday morning we haven’t got time to be playing hide and seek with every email in our spam laden inboxes. Just show me what you’ve promised so I can make a decision and move on.
Google Merchant Centre Feeds
For those new to the eCommerce game, Merchant Center is a Google service though which you provide data on your products so that they can appear in shopping search results. If you aren’t using it, I strongly recommend you check it out.
A few days ago, I was looking around on various sites with a view to buying a rucksack that had space for a laptop. I visited some websites directly and then did a shopping search on Google. The search proved quite fruitful an I was presented with a results page of strong contenders to be my new backpack. Little did I know that a few clicks later I would be raging at the screen because two of the most promising results linked through to websites that showed the item as out of stock, or more expensive than the price shown in the search result.
If you’re using Google Merchant Center properly, that’s great. However, if you’re not able to keep your product data up-to-date, just stop, seriously. I say this as much for your benefit as I do for mine (as well as everyone else out there raging at their monitors right now). According to Google’s Shopping Policies and their guidelines on providing high-quality data:
“If your website and the data you provide to us do not match, your items may be suspended from Google Shopping results”
The time of suspension can be a week, month or even indefinitely. So by keeping your availability levels and prices up-to-date you not only do a service to society by not cluttering their results pages with products they can’t buy; but you also stay in Google’s “good books”. And we all know, that if you want to get anywhere in online retail, you don’t want to get anywhere near Google’s “bad books”.
