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?