From the Archive: Are you ‘Spooking’ Away Your Website Vistiors?
Oct 30, 2009
(This is from the Solid Cactus blog archives from a past Halloween. The information is still pertinent today.)
This is my favorite time of year. I love crunchy leaves under my boots. (Oh, I love boots, too.) I love orange. I love pumpkins. I love apple cider. I love Halloween. And, I love, love, love to be scared!
But you know what? As an online consumer, I do not want to be scared away from an eCommerce website. Here’s a look at spooky e-commerce practices.
Scary eCommerce Practice #1: Your Contact Information is The Invisible Man
No toll-free number in the header. A P.O. Box as the address. These are tell-tale signs that you are hiding from your customers– or it at least appears that way. Customers are the life-blood of your business. Why would you want to make it a hassle to reach you? Having your contact information prominently displayed creates peace of mind.
Scary eCommerce Practice #2: Your Site is Frankenstein’ed together
A stitch here. A stitch there. A bolt over here. Online consumers can tell if a site is piece-mealed together. If a site looks uniform in some aspects, but then there are big boxes of text here, cheesy clip are over there, etc. things can really look cluttered. That’s a turn-off to me. Branding is important to build trust and customer confidence and really make for an enjoyable online shopping experience. If your homepage is busy and looks like an undone jigsaw (Saw reference right there, kids!) puzzle it could spook online shoppers away.
Scary eCommerce Practice #3: Wrong Turn and The Descent– Where are people going?
Navigation. I get lost every time I go to New Jersey. I can’t really follow the Garden State highway signs too well. They just aren’t clear. Same can be said about eCommerce website design and navigation. I don’t like when I land on a site that has menus here, menus there, menus, menus everywhere.
People can make a wrong turn, get lost, get frustrated and leave. Worse yet, I’ve been on eCommerce sites that have so many subcategories that it takes five to six clicks just to get to an item page– like you are making a descent deep into a scary, scary cave. This is a highly confusing process that makes me want to shout, “Just take me to where I can BUY something!” Ease of navigation is crucial to a good online shopping experience.
Scary eCommerce Practice #4: The Shining
Animated GIFs. There’s a memory. I remember my first Geocities page- I had the banjo-playing frog, an e-mail graphic of a letter turning into an envelope, and plopping in a mailbox and I even had a blinking “welcome” message. None of this is eCcommerce friendly. Some flash is okay- that’s professional and tasteful. However, those animated GIFs look amateur and definitely look out of place on an eCommerce site. This is my biggest pet peeve so I had to add it to my scary list.
There are more things that give me the eCommerce heebie jeebies, but these four are a good start. Take a look at your own eCommerce website design. Is there anything that would spook you away? Scare you from shopping? October is a fun month- lots of scary things out there- haunted houses, great horror flicks and talk of all those superstitions– but don’t make the scares last yearround on your eCommerce site. Leave that to the Cravens and the Carpenters of the world!
