It hasn’t been so long ago that the Internet was just a rumor
Today, shopping on the web is the method of choice for a large percentage of the population. Now, everybody with pair of socks to sell is launching a website. And therein lays the problem. Two scenarios that separates the merchants from the wannabees:
The first scenario is the entrepreneur who gets Publisher or Front page and tries to simulate an Ecommerce site. Most of them spend a lot of time learning how to make a nice looking site with reasonable displays of their product. Now they are ready for business. So, now they have to let the customer select some products for themselves (a shopping cart), and then must be able to pay for them and get them shipped. This is where the amateur misses the Ecommerce bus. I find several of their procedures that either keep me from buying, or insure I don’t come back.
(1) they give you an email address to send your order to after you have cut and pasted the product ID, whatever it is. Then you mail a check.
(2) They sign up for a hosting system that offers a build-it-yourself and a generic shopping cart. Most of these work fine, but the newly christened store owner doesn’t understand all the bells and whistles that come with it, they don’t know they need them, or they can’t make them work. So, a consumer who wants to shop for more items gets lost finding their way back to browse the products, then trying to find and negotiate the shopping cart to either modify, delete or check out.
Somewhere in the development of these sites, these do-it-yourselfers lose sight of “make it easy and a good experience for the consumer” so they want to come back. How many times have you stood in line at a cash register, looking around for a clerk and swearing you will never return to shop there. I usually don’t go back to them either. On many amateur sites I have been on lately, I could put an item in the shopping cart, but never find the cart again to either modify or check out. No links. On one of them that I absolutely had to have their product, I ended up emailing to find our how to do it. Silly me, you just add another product to the cart, then, while you are there, delete it and check out. Now why didn’t I figure that out! On another site, I finally got through the check out process, but there was no notification of shipping and no tracking system - wait and pray! (Read Part 2)
By: Lee Siemon
About the Author:
Lee comes from a family of creative writers with a brother who has a novel on Amazon. His hobbies include writing poetry and short stories. Lee is available for Freelance consulting through the DPS Group. Lee’s specialties are content writing and E-commerce. Contact Lee at Http://www.thedpsgroup.com
