Small Business Web Design Thought
How to Lose Customers Really Quickly
Last week I posted a piece about something that made me angry and involved a local web design company. You can find the story here.
The same site and the same company continue to give me something to talk about here. The site that the original screen grab came from is a small retailer here in town and what the company provided was a major ecommerce site that allows people from just about anywhere in Australia to buy what this shop sells.
The only problem with that is that it’s faster and probably more convenient for almost everyone to buy locally - and off line - what this shop is trying to sell online.
Apart from that there are two problems in this site that really do stand out. The first one is that the shopping cart is not easy to complete and large numbers of potential customers tend to abandon their shopping cars if the the checkout process is not quick and simple.
The second problem is that to even get to the shopping cart you have to register and to register you have to complete a form that requires a considerable amount of information. The problem with forms is that more people abandon forms than abandon shopping carts and some research puts the figure as high as 90% abandonment rate.
I guess this design company has yet to learn how important simple shopping carts and simple forms are for the success of an ecommerce website.
