For
some industries it might cost five dollars to acquire one customer.
For others it might cost one hundred dollars.
With these figures, could you afford to lose one sale a day? How
about ten?
There
are a lot of companies who pretend to know what's best for your
company. In many cases they are only interested in your money.
These companies are the silent killers of e-commerce.
Imagine
if the following true story happened to you:
You
are an expert computer programmer. You are putting the final
touches on a beta version of your product and you are in a hurry
to sell it online. You hire someone to do your web hosting.
You choose a cheap hosting company because you think they're
all the same. Your merchant account provider issued you a credit
card gateway to run your credit card customers through. You
hire someone to write the checkout process (shopping cart) for
you because you are too busy working on your software.
You
get your product online and run a few test credit card transactions
through. Everything seems to be working okay. You pay your hired
programmer. You spend fifty thousand dollars on Internet marketing
in your first year. At the end of the year you barely break
even and are bordering on bankruptcy.
What
happened?
Your
friends tell you: "You didn't have a chance. The Internet
is a waste of money. Look at all the multi-million dollar companies
who went out of business." Someone else pats you on the
back and says: "Nice try." You are now wondering if
your product wasn't as good as you thought it was.
Where
did you go wrong?
Unfortunately
what you didn't know was hurting you. Listen to what
we found out when we performed a forensic analysis on this customer's
site. This is one isolated case but these are not isolated problems.
This expert computer programmer relied on the knowledge of the
people he hired to get the job done. The company who wrote his
checkout process and his previous web host are still in business
today. Until we came along he was clueless why he was failing.
Could the people you hire be guilty of making any of the following
mistakes? Would you know it if they did?
Note:
We did not find all of these errors on our own. The customer
found some before he contacted us. We left them in for completeness.
1) The
cheap and highly recommended web host was up and down sporadically
throughout the day and night. Sometimes at around 3:00am it
would be down for hours. Sometimes it was accessible to some
visitors but not to others due to not having multiple Internet
backbones. This poor merchant (who was paying for every visitor
who came to his site) was also paying for the ones who weren't.
One night for no reason the programmer noticed the website was
gone. For how long had it been gone and where did it go? He
did not know. About twenty-four hours after emailing technical
support someone informed him he would have to upload his entire
site again. It was completely lost. Good thing the programmer
kept a backup!
2) When
we monitored the programmer's website for a few days we noticed
the gatway who processes each credit card transaction was up
and down sporadically. When customers tried to enter their credit
card information they would get a "server not found"
error or it would simply stop responding for hours. They were
then forced to leave or re-enter all their personal and credit
card information. When this was finally discovered the gateway
company insisted it was a problem on the Merchant's end. They
were very adamant that there was nothing wrong with their gateway
and the merchant (and our company too) clearly had a lot to
learn about the Internet. Thorough testing from different computers
and from different locations throughout the day and night proved
beyond a doubt that the gateway provider's service was clearly
to blame. But they would not admit to it. This programmer paid
for his Gateway by the month (like most merchants.) The Gateway
made the merchant jump through hoops to leave the company. They
told him to download a cancellation form from their website
(which was often down) and send it to them as a fax (their fax
machine was out of service.) It took him over a month to cancel.
They charged his credit card for service they were not performing
until he had been milked for all they could get from him. Sadly,
they are still one of the top gateway providers around.
3) The
person the programmer hired to write his checkout process made
many small bugs that were never caught until it was much too
late. Are you sure that your website is not guilty of any of
the following?
a) The
links to the secure order form were changed from secure https://
links to insecure http:// links. Customers who found themselves
on an unsecure order form would sometimes refuse to enter their
credit card information. They never alerted the site owner of
their worries. They simply went somewhere else.
b) Anyone
whose valid credit card expired at the end of the present month was
silently "Declined" and told they had insufficient
funds in their account. In effect a small typo in the checkout
process caused about 1/20th of valid credit cards to be silently
declined.
c) An
error in the credit card verification mechanism caused some
American Express numbers to not be accepted at all. The customer
was informed that he was using a credit card that was unacceptable
to the merchant. The credit card verification mechanism was
unnecessary anyway because the Gateway provider also performed
verification.
d) Making
any mistakes while filling out the order form caused the "Submit"
button to disappear on the resulting error page. If even one
mistake was made the customer no longer had a method of completing
his order. Keep this in mind while you read about the following
bugs that always would trigger this snafu.
e) If
the customer put a period in the state field (ex., Mich.
or CA.) the form returned an error and the customer had to fill
out the form again from scratch.
f) The
dropdown list of states on the form contained all of the United
States. There was no field for Province or Country. Anyone in
Canada who wanted to buy products from this merchant could not
do so. The Canadian customers simply assumed they were not welcome
and did business elsewhere.
g) E-mail
addresses longer than 20 characters were rejected. The email
address was also a required field.
h) Telephone
numbers longer than 10 characters were rejected. A customer
adding a 1 to the beginning of his telephone number or even
parentheses was rejected.
Of course
in all of these situations the Submit button was removed from
the order form (see bug D) making it impossible for the customer
to complete his purchase. But what if this weren't the case?
What if the customer was able to make as many mistakes as he
wanted?
Do you
know how many times a customer will submit your order form once
something goes wrong? The average is 1.5 tries. If he is forced
to fill in all the information again from scratch that average
then goes down to one. Ditto if it isn't clear why he made a
mistake or if he made no mistake at all.
This
was by no means a comprehensive list of all the mistakes this
incompetent programmer made. This was only the tip of the iceberg.
Many of the errors were nearly impossible to track down because
every day sales were still coming in. There was never any indication
to the merchant that something was wrong with the forms. He
just assumed he didn't know enough about internet marketing
and/or customers weren't very interested in his products.
This
stuff happens more often than not. Most business owners are
not programmers and they expect the job will be done right.
In the
competitive world of online marketing you can't afford to
lose one customer because of the errors of an incompetent
web host or web designer.
Just
one hour of downtime a week can cost you a fortune.
A small mistake in your checkout process can cost
you an arm and a leg.
Add these together and your fantastic product could be history
in a few short months. Study this site carefully to save
yourself months or years of frustration in the world of online
commerce.
Contact
us if you suspect something might be wrong with your ordering
process or you just want a professional opinion.
RareHost.com
Web Design is a team of Web Designers that understands Search
Engine Optimization and the psychology of Selling Online. Consider
consulting with RareHost.com
before you create or redesign your next web project.
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