An incident happened a couple of days ago where one of our partner wine merchants decided to switch from The WineWeb's shopping cart system to their own. Now I won't name the merchant, but I know they had spent several months and thousands of dollars integrating this shopping cart system into their website. When I looked at their shopping cart, I noticed numerous issues that will cause potential customers to abandon their orders mid-stream.
Now I don't mean to rant, but I know of many wine merchants that complain that many of their customers don't order online and that this Internet thing is a waste of their time. Maybe it's not the customers, but the merchant's website that is causing customers to go elsewhere. How many of these merchants know, or can even find out, where in the ordering process do the customers bail out? We track these statistics and watch the trend for last month, last week and yesterday, so we know where to focus our efforts in tweaking the shopping cart. The wording of the buttons, the number of links on a page, and the early display of shipping costs all factor into cart abandonment rates. Having a site that requires a customer to register, shows incorrect sales tax and shipping costs, and that doesn't restrict invalid shipping destinations until late in the checkout process are sure to lose orders.
But how do you explain to businesses that their neighbor or brother-in-law who "does websites" may not be the best way to go? More rants on the "brother-in-law" mentality later...
