Run of negative posts recently but some things send me nuts. Below is a screenshot of Virgin Money’s login screen. This error message would be all well and good, except for the fact that all the characters I entered were valid, it was just the wrong password! Talk about a confusing error message.
Back in the day when Webfusion weren’t owned by Pipex, they were pretty good. Good customer service, competitive prices and good technical support. Times, indeed, have changed. Since Pipex took over their technical support in particular but also their general service has become one giant failure.
Yesterday, at Blueleaf, we wanted to cancel one of our services with them that had been accidentally renewed. It has been billed for the entire year and so I asked whether we would get any money back. As we hadn’t even entered the next year’s service yet – I would of though this would of been possible. Not a penny back. Even car tax discs give you money back if they aren’t need for heaven’s sake.
Now the most annoying part. Their cancellation process. This is a technological company selling website hosting. So how do you have to cancel? Get emailed a cancellation form, fill it in, and fax or post it back. a paper process for an electronic company. Also, it takes 30 days to process this cancellation, so if you’re on a monthly plan, you will always pay another month. Sneaky, greedy, shockingly slow.
On calling saying I wished to cancel, I was transferred to their cancellation department (it has it’s own department?) the lady on the end of the phone asked what domain name it was for said she would send a form by email. Before I could even say thank you, good bye, ask a question or anything, she had hung up and cut me off. Amazingly rude.
But here’s the crux – at Blueleaf we still have a few minor accounts with them (most of them, thank heavens, are on a great hosts platform now with amazing customer service) – what do I think now – do I feel like a valued customer after that?
Do I heck. Webfusion Fail.
This is the first in a series of quick and dirty posts that will just give snippets of tips on Ecommerce to help online retailers and any agencies helping them.
Today, privacy. A recent survey that I heard about on Ecom Experts podcast said that people were as concerned about privacy as security. Many websites go over the top with their security badges and messages to convince the user where they are ordering from is secure, but not enough is normally said about privacy.
Consumers need to be given the confidence that their details will be stored securely, not sold on to third parties and it needs to be clear what they are opting in or out of in terms of communications via email, phone and SMS.
A simple statement under where they add their personal details saying:
“Our privacy guarantee: Your information will never be used or sold to 3rd parties” or similar, with a lin to a privacy policy.
Make sure marketing communication checkboxes are easy to understand!
“Tick this box if you want to receive our monthly email with all the latest offers and new products”
Simple. None of this “please untick this box if you don’t want to not receive” stuff. Finally have a more detailed privacy policy people can read further on and get more detail on the data you collect, what it’s for and how you use, store and maintain that data.
It’s one of the most common mistakes made by ecommerce builds and systems the world over. Forcing people to register for an account to buy.
“But we need to get their information to market to them!”
You’ll get it anyway with an order
“But how will we link up repeat purchases without an account registration”
If they don’t purchase to begin with, then there will be no repeats!
If you’ve done everything right on your ecommerce site – great copy, engaging media (images and video) and have a good price point, then the checkout is the all important last step. The checkout is that point where the customer has now decided and just needs to complete the transaction. It’s the boring part, the part that should go as fast as possible with as little barriers as possible because you have already done all the hard work!
I’m not saying that account information isn’t important for a good view of the customer, of course it is, but you, as the retailer, need to give choice.
Our Laura Ashley site, I believe, does this well. There are three choices. Login, register or just checkout. Registration includes the form they need to fill in, with the reasons to do so. So they know how much they need to fill in and why. Not just an obscure ‘Register’ link with no idea what to expect.
There is always a balance. Business needs are important, they can’t just be discounted for best practice. Compromise is the way forwards. Think like your customer first, and your business second.
So, please, help your customers out. Give them choice and make it easy.
On friday night (the 13th I might add), Blueleaf were nominated for our work with Laura Ashley for the best ecommerce site at the DADI awards. The DADIs are digital indutry awards and so highly focused on websites as a whole. I’m please to say that we won!
It was a great evening – me and Adrian were say next to a few of the Drum girls and also a few of the guys from Fudge so it was good to have a chat to them about how things are going and the direction of the market. And also to observe the crowd shall we say. The place was chocker with great digital agencies: Fudge, MadeByPi, Code ComputerLove, Fuse8 to name but a few of the award winners. It’s great to be even nominated let alone a winner in that kind of crowd and shows how quickly Blueleaf is really shooting forwards. Mega proud that’s for sure. They haven’t put up any results or photos yet however when they do I’ll update this post!
A couple of poor shots below taken on my iPhone’s ropey camera – I’m sure there will be some pro ones soon.
I was watching a presentation about Amazon on Get Elastic (well worth watching by the way) and a lot of it was great insight into what they do well and why. The bit that struck me the most though was their business model in terms of inventory and suppliers. It’s worth listening to the explanation but see below the image I snapped out the presentation.
I think it’s just so simple yet brilliant. It means that for Amazon, cash flow isn’t a problem. It has the products and sells them before it has to pay it’s suppliers!
It’s always important to think about the business side of your ecommerce site as well as the site itself – how can you make your business run smoother?
Not sure if it’s been around for a while and I have just noticed it but in Google maps just now a new little button appeared, see to the right the blue dot. On clicking it Firefox asked me if I wanted Google to be allowed to see my location, which is found by IP address. On doing so it pretty much got me dead on accurate – I was impressed.
IP based location services have always been a little off in my experience (Blueleaf’s IP being listed as London for example) but maybe things have moved on well and is much more useful.
It’s just another example of how location based services and overall the context of your situation are shaping how we use services including customisation by location, device and task.
EDIT: Seems like it’s been around a few months since Firefox 3.5 was released in June time. Not sure why I haven’t spotted it until now
So, for the past five years, mobile has year on yeat been heralded as the next big thing and each year it has failed to deliver on those promises. I remember programming a WAP site for a company I was freelancing for at the time in 2001. It was exciting – a new platform that even my old Nokia 3210 could use and browse. It worked and was a good database driven site.
Problem was, no one used it. Not a sausage.
Fast forward ot the present day, and things truly are different. The statistics are for once, backing things up. Thanks to new devices (most notably the iPhone) we have a rapid march of smart phone adoption and a real and present possibility that mobile will finally repay it’s promises.
Recently, as an Insider event hosted opposite Manchester’s rapidly growing Media City development, 2ergo predicted that within 18 months, smart phone adoption would reach the critical mass needed for mobile applications to become commercially viable. I think they are right. ChangeWave has conducted some recent research on smart phone adoption:
It’s moving up fast. Add to the fact that 11.6% of others ar planning on buying a smartphone in the next 90 days and you can see where this is going. Of course it will slow down. The iPhone and other smart phones are still generally too expensive right now to knock out the true mass market mobile phones. Therefore there’s the gap in the market for, in effect, an iPhone Lite. Which of course has already been rumoured about.
The point here is that true, useful mobile marketing is around the corner, and the statistics actually show it this time. Start planning your organisations mobile strategy now, and be prepared for the opening up of a while new channel that location and context aware.
This is unashamedly inspired by Sam Barne’s 7 deadly sins of web project management. While Sam wrote his post from the position of being a project manager on the agency side (as you would expect), this post is concentrating on being a help for the client side. It is aimed at providing a guide to 7 things to avoid when planning and executing a new web project.
The first of the deadly sins, Gluttony, appears in the form of over specifying a website project. This could be the big chance to produce something that is forward thinking, innovative and solves all the issues your organisation may have.
While the first two parts of the above sentence should apply to every new project where possible, the last can easily be any new project’s downfall. This is due to the time it takes to execute such a complex project, and the time taken to organise it. Once all that time has been taken and the project is launched, a lot of the thoughts and things asked for are no longer needed, or possibly out of date.
The solution to this is centered around phasing a project and not worrying about the specific, finite details of future phases that are in the medium to long term future. Concentrate hard on the current phase while keeping in mind your long term goals. Launch phases of the project in quick iterations, taking feedback and improving as you go.
The most important thing to remember is that your users will tell you the direction to go in terms of their feedback both send to you, and through your analytics. Even the best and most insightful thought leaders and managers cannot predict with any great accuracy what your users will do. You could specify 20 different features for your web project. Out of those 20, users may regularly use 3, and ignore the rest that you spent 80% of your effort on building.
Think about the long term, plan the short to medium term and launch often and gather feedback.
Although it sounds very similar to gluttony, greed takes a different form when beginning a web project, in the form of content planning. Whether it’s how many pages of copy to describe your services, or how many products to add to your website, do not add too much.
It’s very easy to think when planning your site that everything should be on it to the nth degree. Every product, service and detail of what you do. This is untrue. Too much detail can easily put your users off more than help them.
Imagine you’re planning a ecommerce website. 20% of your products generate 80% of your revenue (not an uncommon situation). You put all of your products on the site. This means that your users find it harder to get to the products they want (the 80%) and so decreases your sales. Of course there are ways to organise and categorise your products to help this situation, but that’s not the point.
When it comes to both product and content, add your most important items in your first phase and launch with them. Ensure you’re getting those right before adding the others. When you do add the others, measure to ensure you haven’t had an adverse effect on the main products or content.
The bottom line is to make sure you add to your project what makes the biggest different to your bottom line first. Then look to the more fringe products in future phases.
It might feel like it. You’re planning a project that needs to be ready for 9 months time for instance. Seems so far away right now. This leads us to sloth. A sense of urgency is needed at the very start of the project, and milestones set very early on.
If you lose a day every month in a 9 month project you’ll be two working weeks over timescales by the end. And three weeks from the end is too late to add more resource or try and bring the project in on time.
The solution is to have the same rhythm and pace through the project and ensure you’re hitting your milestones; measure often and adjust quickly if there are issues.
As human beings, we’re all guilty of this sin in various ways. When planning a website project, it can be very easy to plan it from your point of view, at the detriment of others. Your lense on the world and this project varies wildly from that of others in your organisation, your users, suppliers, etc.
It’s important therefore to plan with an all inclusive perspective, and not let your own aspirations and thoughts as to what is and is not important cloud the overall direction of the project.
One possible solution is to engage the services of an outside organisation who has no bias towards any one department. They can bring the perspective needed to plan a fair project to achieve the organisation’s goals.
Possibly the easiest sin for someone beginning a web project to fall foul of. You have been assigned the task of planning and executing this project – it’s easy to think that you should have all the answers. In reality, you don’t! No one does. Not even me.
The solution is to ensure you bring in the help you need. Get other perspectives, seek expert opinions, ask the questions you don’t think you should have to ask, and more. Make sure you are comfortable with what you are doing and not pretending you know more than you do. Generally, other people are very happy to help if you only ask.
This is easy to do. Your competition adds a new feature you hadn’t thought of yet or something you already have in the next phase. They might have done it slightly different or in your belief better. It’s easy to just ask someone to copy it. Don’t do it!
In all probability, your site has a slightly different customer profile, different needs and different priorities. Copying something else might not be appropriate. The more dangerous aspect is that the more you do this, the more your site will become a hotch potch of mixed execution styles, user interfaces and this all ultimately leads to confusion for the user.
The solution is to be inspired by your competition, appreciate what they do well, but not copy it.
The final sin in this list, wrath can poision a project so quickly and is hard to recover from. If you have a blame culture within your project, everyone will be scared about being blamed for issues, and so no one will make a decision or take responsibility for anything. Delegation becomes exceptionally difficult.
When assembling your project team and planning it all out, make sure that you instill a culture of responsibility and honest reporting. No one will be blamed, issues need to be raised quickly and will be dealt with proactively.
Had a bit of a bizarre experience when trying to buy this camera – I imagine it gets all the more difficult when you don’t even know what camera you want! Having spoke to a few photography friends, Ben and Martin among them, the 1000D seemed like a perfect first DSLR. If I hadn’t spoke to them I probably would have been lost at sea altogether – so many thanks to them.
Having decided on the model though, it was quite a frustrating little search that then ensued. There are plenty of internet retailers out there with the camera for sales at reasonably attractive prices. On delving a little deeper however – there was a lot of talk on review sites about their poor customer service, goods shipped from Hong Kong with non UK power leads and other such information. This ended up with me steering clear of a great multitude of these e-tailers due to the fear of not getting my camera in time for Japan ion a couple of weeks, and also poor service.
The store I’m about to pop out and get it from turns out to be Argos. I am as amazed as anyone that this is where I’ve ended up. As a lover of the web I would not have imagined going to a bricks and mortar retailer for a piece of electronics. Turns out though that I trust them tonnes more, they have one physically in stock at a store and the price is pretty competitive.
Trust is still a massive factor on the internet and these poor reviews mean that confidence is low in many retailers. They should be working 10x harder to make sure they have a great reputation. They should also be clear about the products contents, where it’s coming from and whether it’s new or refurbished. Obvious easy things to help the sopping experience.
Looking forward to playing with the new toy!