Online Selling: Minimizing Lost Sales
By Yisroel (Izzy) Goodman
May 19, 2002

I recently discovered two things that were creating roadblocks to getting completed orders on my Web site. Hopefully you can learn from these lessons. The first was not having the ability to accept credit cards on my site.

While I did have customers tell me that they would only do business with me if I accepted credit cards directly, these were rare (or at least I thought they were rare). I should have realized that for every person who contacted me, there were a dozen more who just left my site without saying a word. My recent experience has proven to me that accepting credit cards definitely increases sales.

The second roadblock on my site was a "usability" issue. Customers were abandoning the checkout process if they encountered problems. But my site only emailed me the valid orders. When a customer took the time to email me about a difficulty he was having, I realized that I should be monitoring the orders that my site was rejecting as invalid. So I changed the code to email me the invalid orders as well, along with the reason for rejection.

I discovered that there were some common errors that customers were making that were invalidating potentially good orders. For example, after the credit card number, I asked for the phone number of the bank. I do this so in case I have a question about the validity of a card, I can call the issuing bank. Many customers left that blank, and the program considered that an invalid order. (Sometimes it was just a typo. The program checked that the phone number contained ten digits. If the customer entered 1 before the area code, it was considered invalid. Since the only message shown was "the phone number is invalid," the customer would often give up without placing the order.)

Now that I knew what the problems were, I could correct them. I started replying to these customers and explaining the problem if I could. I discovered that the customers thought I wanted to know the phone number of the bank where they kept their checking account. Since they didn't understand why I needed that information (and most folks probably don't walk around with their bank's phone number handy anyway), they just gave up.

I changed the text on the online form to read: "Enter the phone number of the issuing bank, which appears on the back of the card." Not only did more orders start coming in, but the customers who had placed "invalid orders" and had given up, came back and completed their purchases in response to my email.

Another example of a usability problem was the way I confirmed orders. The policy on my site was that buyers would need to confirm orders before I would process them. By reviewing and confirming every order this way, I was able to prevent people from ordering the wrong item. Also, since I also give discounts on repeat orders and orders of multiple items, I assumed that people would like to know the total they would be charged before the order was processed. But this means that someone on the West Coast who placed an order after I had gone to bed wouldn't get a response until the next day. Some folks knew exactly what they wanted and didn’t care to wait. So, some customers never responded to the confirmation email.

Now my shopping cart shows my standard pricing, along with the notation that additional applicable discounts will be applied when the order is processed. I have two buttons on my credit card order form. One states "hold order for my confirmation" and the second says "process order immediately." The first option is the default. So far every one has chosen the second option. No one complains if they are charged LESS than the total they were originally shown! Now I have to wonder how many orders I lost because I forced customers to follow MY rules for “their” benefit.

To summarize the lessons I learned:

1) Get your own credit card merchant account if you plan on doing any volume of business.

2) Order validation is good, but if you are going to have your site reject orders, make sure you know why.

3) It's nice to implement clever touches that may enhance your customers' experience, but not everyone wants these "conveniences," so give them a choice of opting out.