More On Not Shooting Yourself in The Foot
A day or two ago I expanded on my "Frustrated Teacher" comments by explaining how foolish I think it is to hold up customers trying to buy something by asking them all kinds of sign-up information. It seems that many sites, even those whose sole purpose in life is to allow customers to place an order get confused and think they are elementary school teachers who need to "challenge" their students. They won’t let them pass (place their birder) until every i is dotted and every ‘t’ is crossed. If you want to correct people’s grammar and written expression, so be it, but if you want to make a sale, how about pulling your head out and taking a look at what your site is doing to people, rather than for them.
Just today I signed up to be an affiliate for a company who seems to be doing well and who will be a good ‘fit’ with another one of my sites. Unless they read this post, they will never know how close I came to leaving their site with an incomplete sign-up. Actually, the more I think about it the more I think I will drop them, because if they treated me that stupidly, what chance is there they will treat anyone coming to order from them any better?
The first part of the stupidity was the name and address routine. Heaven only knows why they need this, they won’t be conducting business with me there, and their program isn’t limited to any particular country. So why write the code, waste the server time and frustrate the potential customer?
After I had the address typed in I clicked for the next screen, only to get rudely bounced back to the beginning because they didn’t know what country I was in. The drop-down ‘country’ selection filed had somehow gone back to ’select’. Hmm. Is this trip necessary? How many countries do you believe Pueblo, Colorado, 81004 could be in? I really think someone from almost any country would know that was in the US, much less a US firm. But, just like my old penmanship teacher, I didn’t get the answer ‘right’ to her satisfaction and she surely wasn’t going to help. She was going to make me do it over and over again until I got it right.
Is your site more concerned with making your customers ‘get it right’, or with helping them reach a goal?
This particular problem, regarding the country and postal codes is a pet peeve of mine. So many otherwise smart people can’t figure out how to use the power of Zip (Postal) codes. Why? How about this:
- It makes it easy for your customers
- Reaching their goal easily enables your customers to out money in your pocket
- It makes your customers think you care more about their ego than yours
- It saves you server cycles. How many times to i hear an eCommerce person complain that they have to buy a bigger server because the site is slowing down. Hello? You are slowing it down yourself.
- It keeps the process simple. Suppose you don’t sell to some country. Wouldn’t it make more sense to ask the country first? (careful, this is real rocket science here). Then, if the person was from, say, Zimbabwe, and you weren’t doing business with Zimbabwe, you could drop out of the whole,process at the begriming and move on to the next customer. QED.
- Last, and potentially most important, it keeps you data clean. How many ways can someone type "Colorado Springs" for example … especially if the type like I do? Do you want one, and only one, correct spelling in your database? Just get their country (since postal codes are identical in some countries) and then their Zip. presto … the correct spelling entered in 1% of the time it takes a user to laboriously type it in … and you’re making a sale
Steven Covey, the author of the famous "Seven Habits" series made many quotable statements, but one of his ultimate "bests" was, "begin with the end in mind". before you set up that registration or sales page, ask yourself what in the world you even want some of that information for … and when you have settled that issue, ask yourself how few keystrokes you can ask your customers for.
Crucial.com understands this principle. They are one in a million it seems.
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Right on!
Plus, the minute they ask for my phone number, I’m gone! I made the mistake of giving it one a couple of sites and, can your guess?, yep, they phoned. Never again!
Jim DeSantis
fellow BIP’er and Retiree!