What online stores can learn from the real world
I went shopping this afternoon, something I really hate doing. Whenever I can I shop online, I’m not particularly price sensitive, especially for small purchases and prefer ease of purchase instead.
So it really makes me insane when shops are so bad at serving their customers. And one of my real peeves is when I’m standing in a queue, money ready and with shop staff buggering around talking to their friends instead of taking my money off me.
This happens so often that I’d say I only complete 50% of the purchases I’m ready to make. I have even left an entire supermarket conveyer full of my stuff because the service was so slow.
The other thing I hate, particularly in supermarkets is they have too many options. They have so many types of specialist product - think cheese for example, where you can get dozens of variety of chedder; low fat; vegetarian; New Zealand; Irish; mature; medium; bland; dyed orange; traditional; low salt (and that’s just from a memory of a UK supermarket I used to go to 6 years ago) - that sometimes it’s impossible to find the product that I actually want, or I pick up the wrong product by mistake. Both of those piss me off.
So rememeber that when you’re designing an online store. Don’t make it too confusing for customers so they can’t find what they want - more isn’t always better, sometimes it’s just more for the sake of it; and if they want to give you their money the clock is ticking; make it easy to pay and take it from them.