On the high street, retailers spend enormous amounts of money getting their customer experience right. But, this doesn’t necessarily translate to the web, for large and small online retailers. Here’s three big problems highlighted this week…

Failing To Provide Contact Details

In a recent survey by E-Consultancy:

• 60% of UK online retailers provided no telephone number on their website
• 43% displayed no business address
• 39% had no contact email address
• 30% of sites profiled provided no telephone number or email address

To reinforce the importance of these failings, they highlight a recent UK survey suggesting that 50% of shoppers wouldn’t buy online without contact details.

No Delivery Options

Highlighting the same survey on Retail Bulletin, 11% of online retailers provided a free postage or delivery service while 15% mentioned offering a next day or Special Delivery service. Of the delivery companies named on the websites Royal Mail services (including Special Delivery) was identified in 17% of cases.

One of the big problems with have with our online shop is deliveries. The costs to us as a retailer are quite high and because of the unreliability of the postal service we moved over to registered post at an additional cost. Because we offer free delivery on orders over £30, we need to make sure it gets there. But, it is amazing how many customers do not take responsibility for the delivery at all.

We have had customers contact us that they have not received the parcel leaving us to chase it, only to find out that they weren’t there to sign for it and a note had been left by Royal Mail. This sometimes results in having returned post, only for us to have to pay again to re-deliver the products.

The new version of Boomerang from The Escape should allow us to explore different carriers, but as Jacqui mentions on The Escape Blog, some carriers are becoming more inflexible in terms of their services.

I Can’t Find The Checkout

You’d be surprised how obvious (or not) a problem this is, especially with third party tools and payment systems. I was sent to a shop last week and didn’t know where to start even looking for products.

[it’s actually funny because as I write this article, I just zipped back and there is anchor text in the main body but last time I just couldn’t see it. I wonder how many customers they loose through that?]

Bob Chieffo has some ideas how you could improve this.