I’m in the process of developing my website so people can buy stuff from it. I’m using a combination of a blog platform (Wordpress) and PayPal.
Just now I went to another website running on Wordpress with the intention of buying four items from it. The seller had given each item a Buy Now button which means each one had to be bought as a separate transaction. There was no option to buy them as a job lot, or to buy three of them. The site had been set up to cater for those who wanted to buy single items only.
As such I haven’t bothered to make the purchase. Maybe I don’t really want them items, maybe I’m terribly lazy (I must admit to feeling a bit guilty now I’m writing this and probably will make the effort later) but my intention to give this person some money was thwarted by a barrier.
This isn’t an easy one to get right. PayPal buttons are fairly flexible but covering all bases can result in your site being covered in far too many buttons, which can be another off putting barrier.
I’d suggest (and will be implementing) using the shopping cart rather the Buy Now option. This lets people add as few or as many items as they’d like and also gives you a few options for making postage fairer for larger orders.
But all in all the old retail rules still apply. You can learn a lot from your sales patterns but the real lessons come from looking at lost sales and figuring out why people didn’t buy that thing they liked. Then make it easier for them.
And all this applies to any sort of website. Online people have infinite choice. If you can’t give them easy access to what they want they’ll give up and go somewhere else. Of course if you stumble upon something people need that’s a different matter, but if you’ve got that you probably won’t be hacking Wordpress blogs and PayPal buttons together.
The shopping basket concept mimics that of a real shop and also gives control over what is finally bought – many’s the time I have looked at the total and decided to delete one or more items. But that is good in the long run as it means the shopper is in more control and is likely to come back for repeat business.
The most successful sites seem to have adopted the one-click method. Amazon and iTunes both do this and their success is partly due to making the buyer experience very easy.
We just switched from Tesco online to Sainsbury because Tesco had forced us to call their hotline on several occasions for no apparent reason after we had entered in an entire “you shop, we drop” order. We didn’t shop, they were dropped.
Some train operating companies have no idea when it comes to tackling credit card acceptance – imagine travel companies not taking foreign credit cards over the web! To be fair, the banks are probably at fault on this one.
Buying over the web isn’t really that different from buying over the counter – to encourage repeat business the vendor must make the experience pleasant enough to justify taking our hard earned currency.