In a market survey we did recently we called customers who shopped on a particular site and asked them about their e-commerce experience and if they encountered any problems. It turned out that the last two customers who purchased on the site both had encountered the same problem. The problem occurred at checkout, when they tried to pay for the product. One of the boxes had a vague description and the customers filled out the wrong information. This was the first error, the second error was that instead of getting an error message that told the customer that they had made an error it came an error message that said that there was a server error. One of the customers thought it was wrong with the site and went in and tried to buy every day for a week before he contacted customer service and got help! Customer number two thought that the purchase had gone through and waited a whole week to get the product delivered. When it never came, he contacted the customer service and only then learned that he had not purchased the product.

What can we learn from this? Usability is extremely important. What you label your form fields may ultimately affect whether you sell your goods or not. Error messages are incredibly important and they should explain what kind of errors that occurs. If we hadn’t talked to the customers the chances are we never would have discovered the problem and there would still been a serious error in checkout. But by doing user testing and talk to the real users have a chance to anticipate and address the errors that would otherwise affect the sales.

Another lesson learned is that there are faithful and loyal customers. They actually do not give up and go to another site to buy their goods. Too bad that these loyal customers are so few.
How do you avoid user problems on your site? Do you talk to your e-commerce customer? Do you test the user experience through user tests?

Björn Schröder and Mikael Jacobsson from Brightstep will present a number of steps that can double your online Christmas sales. The presentation will go through how to measure and evaluate last year’s Christmas sales and then take this forward to a strategy.

This webinar will be in swedish

Webinar takeaways:

• Interaction with multi-channel
• Consumer recruitment
• Conversion and additional sales
• Delivery and completion of orders
• Retention purchase

If you have some questions you what us to cover during the webinar please contact me at Mikael.jacobsson @ Brightstep.se

Webinar details:

Practical tips for doubling your Christmas sales 2009

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 13:00 AM – 14:00 PM CET

Register here
(It is a campaign site in Swedish)

We att Brightstep continuously analyze all major standard platforms for e-commerce. Now we are examining and analysing the new version of Commerce Server 2009. Here are some of the key findings and highlights that we so far have found extra interesting in the Microsoft Commerce Server 2009:

• The ability to manage multiple channels, so that one source of information can be used everywhere.
• An out-of-the-box default site with pre-built features, including browsing, searching, site maps, mini-carts, and check-out.
• Engage and interact with your Customers with built-in product reviews and ratings.
• More than 30 e-commerce Web parts and controls, ready building blocks for constructing your Web site
• WYSIWYG experiences for Merchandisers and Marketers. Manage the presentation with point-and-click per page templates and in-site product information editing
• Commerce server is integrated with Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server, Windows Live^TM Services, Microsoft® BizTalk® Server.
• Multi year roadmap and core part of Microsoft platform.

If you´re not using Share Point Server at present this might be an issue evaluating Commerce Server 2009. It looks like Microsoft´s made a very serious commitment, but at the moment there are few references in Sweden.

Do you know any e-commerce sites that are on Commerce Server 2009?