Companies That Suck At E-Commerce

Online sales for 2007 were estimated to be around US $259 billion. Most of the world’s leading retail brands have online presences and nearly all of those allow you to shop online.

Online sales is a lucrative market for a big brand to get into. Many people like the convenience of shopping from home and being able to compare prices before the make a purchase. You would think that these companies would put a huge amount of effort into making the shopping experience as comfortable and straightforward as possible. Well, you would be wrong. Sometimes the only conclusion you can draw on some of these websites is that they don’t want your money.

In this article I have illustrated some of the stupid things that e-commerce websites do that turns visitors off.

Don’t Spend Money On Marketing If You Are Going To Neglect The Basics

Online retailers pay tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars on content managament and product catalogue software. Why splash out on all this money if it can’t do the basic properly? Why spend money on pay-per-click marketing if you are going to neglect the SEO basics.

Take Waterstones, the online book seller, as an example. While each page contains a meta keyword and description tag, the title on every category page is the same. It simply reads Welcome to Waterstones.com. If that was the title you were presented with on a search result page, would you click on it? No, thought not.

Another basic SEO failing on many e-commerce sites are poor URL choices. Many online retailers (particularly in the UK it seems) use the same catalogue software and the following are all the homepage URLs from a few of them.

• http://www.missselfridge.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?storeId=12554&catalogId=20555
• http://www.homedepot.ca/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Home?storeId=10051&catalogId=10051&langId=-15
• http://www.homebase.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/StoreCatalogDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=20001

Compare these two URLs. They are both from major UK electrical retailers and both point to that company’s page for vacuum cleaners. Which would you rather click in a search engine result?

1. http://www.currys.co.uk/martprd/store/cur_page.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@0129255136.1222344286@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccekadeffffejdjcflgceggdhhmdgmi.0&page=Category&category_oid=-30615&fm=4&sm=7&tm=undefined
2. http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/subhub/80/Vacuum-Cleaners

Don’t Make Me Register Before Checkout

It is one thing asking a customer if they wish to register with your site so their information can be saved, but it should never be a requirement. If I wish to enter my details and my credit card information every time I visit, that’s up to me. This is a crime perpetrated by both Woolworths and Currys in the UK

Don’t make me register before I can use the site

Using Asda as an example again, on the home shopping section of their website you are required to put in your postal code to check if they can deliver to your area. This is a fair requirement - there is no point in doing shopping if they can’t deliver to you. The problem is that after you have checked your postal code, you can’t even start shopping until you have fully registered, which includes the frustratingly inane question that you seem to get everywhere - “where did you hear about us.” You can browse the shop but you get an error message when you try to add something to your basket.

Show Me Alternative Products, Not Error Pages

Thomas Cook and First Choice are two of the most popular holiday travel agents in the UK. Let’s compare how their websites handle when they cannot find what we have searched for. The first screenshot shows the Thomas Cook website.

Where is the first place you are going to click after this? Most likely to another website. Compare how First Choice handles this error below.

One Website - One Registration

ASDA, the UKs second largest supermarket (owned by Walmart) has a website that allows you to do your grocery shopping online but also buy large electrical items, CDs and DVDs, flowers and even mobile phones. Sounds great, but what’s the drawback? You have to register separately for each section of the website. This is absolute lunacy!

Even more annoyingly, say you add some flowers to your shopping cart and go and browse the DVDs, when you return to the flower section your shopping cart is empty. We are using Asda as an example quite a lot, but they seem to do so much wrong.

Don’t Distract Me At The Checkout

The object of an e-commerce site is to get people to buy things. When they have added a product to their basket and are at the checkout, this is what they are trying to do. Enable them to complete their transaction and distract them as little as possible. The checkout is not the place to list the latest special offers or allow the visitor to browse categories. A link back to the homepage is OK, but the only clicks they should be able to make are ones that take them forward in the buying process. Don’t make it too easy for them to abandon their order.

Amazon’s checkout is the perfect example of how to build a good checkout system.

Tell Me The Real Price From The Start

For this example we will look at two UK airlines - Ryanair and Easyjet. Both are very popular low-cost airlines and they both take online bookings. Let’s look at how the prices change through the booking process.

A search on Ryanair gives a price of £39.84. When we proceed to the next stage we get to “extras” page. The only way you can get that price is to remove the insurance, take no hold-baggage, remove the priority boarding and to check-in online.

With Easyjet our flight cost is £28.99. They give us the option of adding priority boarding, but this is not added by default. Again however, they charge for a checked on bag and they automatically add one on to your booking unless you ask to remove it. Unfortunately, also like Ryainair, they add insurance by default too, which you have to double confirm to remove to get the price you were originally quoted.

While it may be true that the quoted price is for the flight, people want to know what price they have to pay up front. I don’t know the statistics of how many people need to check in bags on a flight, but I expect that it is quite high. The two companies might argue that it is not very high, but if so, why do Easyjet add it to your booking by default?

A post from e-consultancy in 2007 told us that 93% of UK online shoppers were “annoyed” by hidden charges such as these. Ryanair has previous history of mis-advertising its prices stretching back for years.

In Summary

This article just goes to show that there are still so many companies that can’t get things right. There are just a few outlined above, but there are countless more out there all over the Internet. Companies need to spend more time focusing on their customers’ needs rather than the needs of their management.

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