1. “Please Register to Checkout” – Here I am, happy online shopper, going to visit www.tiffany.com to look for a nice piece of jewelry for my wife.  I find a piece I like, add it to my basket, and then I arrive at the dreaded “Sign In” page:

Ugh.  There it is . . . “If this is your first Tiffany.com purchase, you need to create an account.”   Lets analyze that sentence from a couple of angles:

“Need” – I NEED to create an account to complete my purchase?  Why do I NEED to create an account?  I would certainly think an organization as big as Tiffany has the ability to ship and bill my transaction with only the information I would supply during a traditional (non-registered) checkout experience.  In fact, most of the mainstream merchants I shop with online have given up on requiring the creation of an account in order to complete a transaction.

“Account” – What benefits of said “account” will I receive?  I’m supplying you Mr. Online Merchant with all of my billing / shipping data, as well as sensitive credit card information for you to fulfil my order – nothing more, nothing less.  I may shop at Tiffany.com once a year – what in the world do I need an account for?  On sites like Amazon it makes sense to have an account – I purchase from there almost weekly – at least a few times a month.  But Tiffany.com??

Bottom line Mr. Online Merchant – is it really so hard to streamline my shopping experience (i.e. me handing you my money) so that I can buy your goods without creating an account?  I urge Tiffany.com to try an option to checkout without registering and monitor how their cart abandonment rates are affected.  I’ve been in their shoes in the past, and have found forced registration to be a major cart abandonment issue.

2. Inadequate Search Tools – So many people are used to using online search.  Gone are the days of the phone books, department store catalogs, and newspapers to get up to date information.  Internet shoppers in particular are using on-site search to get to the content THEY want to see in a HOPEFULLY faster manner.  Unfortunately, this is not always the case.  Let’s say I want to see all mens shirts, by typing “mens shirts” into the search box at the top of the page.

I click the “Go” button, and a results page is returned:

Whoa Nelly – NO SEARCH RESULTS FOUND?  For Mens shirts???  But I’ve purchased mens shirts from A|X before.  Something is definitely wrong here.  It looks as though “Top Sellers” for both Men and Women is the default landing page when no search results are found.  That’s one approach a retailer can take, but a better one would be to invest in a better search tool, invest the man hours to map queries to landing pages, and do search right.  With those tactics in place, I can find what I’m looking for easily, instead of shaking my head a “No Search Results Found” message (that barely stands out).

You might argue that I simply could have clicked “Mens” from the top nav, and then “Shirts” in the left nav.  The problem I have with that is the navigation route is 2x the clicks that my search query was – and they should lead to the same results (and obviously don’t).  Time to invest some additional funds into on-site search Mr. Armani. ;)

3. No Shipping Costs Until Checkout – I fell in love with a brand / web site this year – www.kidrobot.com.  They have really well designed and extremely limited collectible vinyl toys and apparel (yes, even the clothes are numbered).  I find the site easy to browse, easy to locate new product, product availability information, and for the most part, a positive overall shopping experience.  Until we get to shipping charges that is . . .

I’m on a product page, I’ve found something I like, and I’ve decided I want to purchase it.  Then the question pops into my head – “how much is shipping going to cost me?”  As you can clearly see on the product page, there are no links to shipping information, nor are any shipping charges as they relate to this item.

Since that’s the only item I want to purchase, I add it to my cart, and I just know that shipping information will be on the cart page.  Oh no, I’m still left guessing!

I still really want to product, but I am frustrated that I’m now 5 clicks into the site, 2 clicks into the purchase cycle, and I have ZERO idea of how much shipping will cost.  Certainly the Checkout page will have shipping options for me . . . (this is what I get for assuming too much).

At this point, I am happy that I can check out without creating an account, but I’m now 6 clicks into the site, and 3 clicks into the purchase cycle, and I’m still left guessing as to what the shipping charges may be.  Let’s move forward one step to checking out without registering an account – expecting the worst, hoping for the best when it comes to shipping charges.

At this point in my shopping experience, I am literally blown away that I am SEVEN clicks into the site, FOUR clicks into the purchase cycle and I STILL have no idea what shipping is going to cost me.  This is getting ridiculous.  I enter my shipping data, and click the “Proceed to Payment” button.

Lo and behold!  A shipping options page is up next!  So, EIGHT clicks into the site, FIVE clicks into the purchase cycle, and I’ve finally found information about shipping rates.  The funny thing is - the charges for shipping are very competitive compared to many other online merchants!  KidRobot needs to move a shipping rate table to the product page template, as well as potentially it’s own item listed on the footer of the page.  In my experience, the closer you place the shipping costs to the product, the lower the shopping cart abandonment phase.  I know many other online retailers will agree.

Shipping costs are one of the top decision making factors when it comes to online purchases.  Please Mr. Online Retailer, make it easy for all consumers to find your shipping rates – oh, and make sure they’re FAIR! ;)

4. No Clear Shipping Timetable – When making an online purchase, I want to know how long it will take for my order to be processed, what my shipping options are, and what anticipated time in transit will be.  Many online retailers have made digestible table-driven shipping information, easy to read, and easy to digest.  Some retailers, some top-tier retailers just still don’t get it.  Case in point, www.toysrus.com:

On first glance, the shipping page illustrated above looks simple to navigate, and covering all my needs.  That my friend is where the devil is in the details.  The page above is literally 5 “pages” long on my monitor, at a resolution of 1280x1024.  FIVE PAGES LONG.  Imagine the horror when parents are doing holiday shopping, have a question about shipping, and then arrive at this page.

Online shoppers do so much of the time for the sake of convenience.  I could literally drive from my house to my local Toys R Us as fast (if not faster) than I can read this entire the page – and digest all of the information.  Online retailers have the information we need as Internet consumers – they just need to focus more time into providing it to us in a way that’s useful to the end user, and not simply a data-dump on a web page.

5. Content Not Applicable To All Consumers – I often visit my favorite online shopping sites weekly to see what’s new.  Many retailers do a great job of providing a little something for everyone – a general lifestyle photograph that myself or my wife can relate to from an emotional level, but more importantly providing me with a brief overview of new products that might lure me in for a closer look.  One thing that really bothers me however are homepage features, especially that take up the entire homepage, that have NOTHING to do with my interests.  Case in point – the lovely handbag feature on the home page of Fossil.com:

As far as handbags goes, I guess these are very nice (note to self – ask the wife) – but there is no benefit to me as a customer to see these handbags unless I happen to be shopping for my wife, which I’m not.  Let’s take a closer look at the entire homepage for a second.  On the left nav, “Women” lead the hyperlinked elements, so I’m going to assume that the women’s’ business is a higher priority for Fossil – but my gut tells me not by a large percentage.  The Men’s navigation has the same exact number of categories as Women, reinforcing my assumption that men are important to Fossil’s business.  But all I’m really focusing on while opening this page for the first time in a few weeks is the handbags.  Not a fit for me, nothing new to see here – move along.  And then I left the site completely.

It’s 2008.  How hard is it to drop a cookie on my browser, note my click habits (in this case Mens Fossil products, every category), and then serve up an applicable home page feature for my return to this site?  I realize this will double the production time as far as creative goes, but it should also greatly reduce homepage abandonment significantly.

By Matthew Brown, MarketNet