Checkout Checkup

This is a guest post by Mike Eckler, writer for the small business blog, eCommerceAngles.com. Thanks Mike!

You’ve done your research, checked the prices, read the reviews.  Your shopping cart is loaded and you are ready to pay. You click the proceed to checkout button and start to pull out your credit card. All of a sudden – BOOM! Arghhh!!! The dreaded forced registration.

Yet another abandoned shopping cart, the victim of an atrocious policy of requiring buyers to register before they pay.  Nothing kills conversions like forced registration.

In this article, I’d like to discuss why forced registration is so detrimental to your checkout flow, and I’ll share with you the real problem with forced checkout registration.

Forced Registration and Clogged Toilets – They Both Stink

As a buyer, I’ve invested time and effort coming to your store and adding items to my shopping cart.  When I’m ready to pay, I’ll click the checkout button, and that means that – I’m ready to pay.  Why would you want to upset me by adding another hurdle?  Haven’t I done enough already?

As a merchant, as soon as the buyer clicks your checkout button, you want one thing and one thing only – the buyer’s credit card number.  When you turn your checkout flow into an obstacle course, you’re only giving the buyer a wonderful opportunity to think twice, to become flustered, to reconsider, and to look elsewhere, in short – to abandon.  Shame on you.

Pre-Checkout Registration is Unnecessary

I can understand why merchants want their buyers to register.  Merchants can use the information, along with specialized cookies and databases, to track and analyze buyers’ behaviour.  Merchants can target registered buyers with highly relevant emails and advertising campaigns. Cart recovery emails are also possible for registered users.

While these are all legitimate and useful marketing tactics, it is not necessary to stop the checkout flow before the critical payment stage. Why not ask the buyer to opt-in to your mailing list, or “rewards club” immediately after accepting the credit card? At this stage, the buyer is in a state of euphoria (or at least my wife is). Successfully completing a checkout is a task completed, a job well done, satisfaction. Your buyers are feeling happy. Now is the time to ask them to opt-in and register. Since  you’ve already collected their name, address, and email, opting-in should be a simple, effortless click.

Even if the buyer does not opt-in at this stage, you can always try again in your order confirmation and package shipped emails.

Is Forced Registration Safe?

Your buyers are probably asking themselves this very question as they are forced to supply personal information before they supply their credit card number.  Even if your checkout flow is SSL protected, and all the security seals are proudly displayed, why give the buyer a reason to doubt your integrity?

Here It Is: The Real Problem with Forced Checkout Registration

The real reason that pre-checkout registration sucks is that I get nothing in return! When I pay you, I receive products in return. When I register, I’m giving you my valuable time and personal data so that you can track my online behaviour and target me with emails. In exchange, I get absolutely nothing. Don’t tell me that SPAM and a yearly birthday greeting is something because it’s NOT.  And don’t tell me that you can store my order history if I register. You’re going to do that anyway regardless of my opting-in or not.

To reiterate, my problem with forced registration is that the merchant gains a lot, while the buyer gets nothing – except the eerie suspicion that they are being followed and are about to be spammed.

The Win-Win Solution

Ask me if I would like to register – after I have paid you, and give me something in exchange: a free gift, a 3% discount, or a coupon for my next order. If I know that you appreciate the fact that I’m allowing you to collect and use my private data, I’ll surely consider your offer and most likely click your opt-in button.

Now that you have a happily opted-in buyer, you can begin to recoup your investment by planting cookies, analyzing the data, creating highly targeted email campaigns, and initiating a cart-recovery notification system.  It’s truly a win-win solution.

Mike’s blog offers advice for smaller e-commerce merchants and anyone considering starting their own online business.  Take a look at eCommerceAngles.com.

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Great news for Israeli eCommerce: PayPal users in Israel can now* manage their account completely in Hebrew.

They can also:

• Check out from any site (worldwide) that supports PayPal in their native Hebrew
  • The language option may need be changed in the course of the transaction
  • Israeli merchants may default users to Hebrew, or allow the user’s default browser/account settings to select the language
• For some time now, they can also pay in Shekels. This is especially important for local sellers that will surely want to add PayPal as a payment option, as it means that neither the buyer nor seller needs to pay currency exchange fees
• Another feature that has been around for a while is that PayPal users with an Israeli account (meaning that the address they have registered in their PayPal profile is an Israeli one) can withdraw funds to an Israeli bank account without any fees (for withdrawals of 1000 ILS or more)
• PayPal has been available in Hebrew for a while now via the PayPal iPhone App. Finally, eCommerce is coming to the phone in a real way.

It seems that the only major feature left for PayPal Israel to add is to allow buyers to fund transactions directly from their bank account (or to fund their PayPal account via their bank). No, I don’t have an inside scoop on when that will happen, but I also don’t believe it is in the best interest of users to have that feature, since most users like the added delay of having purchases appear in their bank balance. I know I do.

All in all, Israeli eCommerce sellers and even occasional users in Israel should be the greatest beneficiaries of the new PayPal language version. If you deal with Israeli merchants, adding PayPal to their site may be a nice way for them to boost sales, with very little new investment, but you may want to make sure the integration is done right. PayPal has great marketing (usually free) campaigns which promote merchants that have a good integration with their payment service. So, do it right, and contact your local office to make sure they know about your site, and hopefully invite you to join their next campaign.

*DISCLAIMER

• As of press time, the Hebrew enabled portions of the PayPal site seem to be disabled. This page seems to be working best right now, in case you want to get an early peek. This may be a glitch in the early days of the launch, but since PayPal does not seem to have made any news about it themselves, we may have just seen the site launch before it is totally live. Stay tuned.

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• גרסה עברית הושקה לאתר התשלומים המקוונים פייפאל (TheMarker – Leading Israeli business news site)
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• PayPal Beats Google Checkout To The Local Payments Market But Will It Work? (TCTV) (techcrunch.com)
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Small and Medium sized eCommerce merchants may want to check out what PreCharge Connect is going to be releasing or introducing into the marketplace.

PreCharge allows merchants to accept transactions that they might otherwise reject for fear of fraud. I believe they actually take the risk on for transactions that they approve, but you should confirm this with them. In any case, they are cooking up something new, and I just got this notification from them, which may be of interest to eCommerce merchants that want to tweak a thing or two before the big shopping season kicks into full swing:

In a message from Alex Corral VP, Operations of PreCharge, he announced:

In less than two weeks, preCharge will be rolling out one of the most aggressive community outreach programs ever offered online. We call this program “preCharge Connect”, and it will be geared towards small and medium-sized merchants helping each other on a regular basis.

Please take a moment to download this short yet informative PDF and feel free to distribute it to your community!

If you give it a try, please comment back here to let us know how it worked out. If not, why not?

Happy Selling.

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It almost seems like a setup. I have been itching to write about how international buyers are mistreated by so many US eCommerce sites, and then I went shopping for some telephone equipment and ended up having to jump through all knds of hoops in order to buy product.

I understand that there is a fear of fraud from international buyers, but rather than putting buyers through such a painful process, surely there must be a better way. Well, there used to be a much better way: FraudSciences. Yes, that is the startup that I used to work for, that was eventually bought by PayPal. Back in the days of FraudSciences, we helped sellers with international transactions. For some sellers, they had a policy that they simply never sold outside the US. Others had put in place a stringent set of rules for verifying the identity of a buyer overseas, or even in neighboring Canada.

The smartest of these sellers set a threshold over which they would manually verify transactions that posed undue risk. The less aggressive sellers simply closed their doors to anyone outside the US of A.

Now, I am not suggesting that sellers should take on undue risk just to enable me and my fellow ‘foreigners” to be able to partake in the great American passtime of shopping. What I am saying is that there is likely a lot of room for improvement in how sellers can find ways to enable selling cross border rather than just putting more and more senseless hurdles in the way for good buyers to be able to buy, from wherever they are.

Do you agree? Got any great verification tips for sellers that can help them enable more international sales without making international buyers use a local friend of family member as a drop-shipping warehouse?

Here are a few examples that come to mind:

• When a buyer’s billing address and/or shipping address are a good match to their geolocation, then consider that this may be a good indication that you are dealing with the real card owner. To match the user’s IP address to the shipping or billing address, you may want to look at a company called Maxmind.
• Another company that did something similar to what FraudSciences offered, was a company called PreCharge. Different in some ways, but essentially, they offered a guarantee to the seller that a verified transaction would be their responsibility. Thereby making it sellers more inclined to sell cross border.
• Naturally, there is PayPal. There is lots of misinformation out there about PayPal and their ability to help you sell cross border, safely and effectively. With over 200 million accounts of which almost 100 million of them are active, you just can’t ignore the power of this payments machine. Moreover, their accounts are litterally all over the world. Have you tested them for cross border sales lately? If not, let me suggest that you test selling without requiring a local PayPal address. What a pain it is to jump through that hoop.

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Just a few notes about the online radio broadcast from last week on Rusty Mike Radio.

Firstly here is the podcast of our segment from the show:

In the interview, Afternoon Schmooze host Nettie Feldman was mostly interested in offering some direction to new entrants into eCommerce on how to get started. To cover such a broad topic properly could easily have taken over Nettie’s full show that day, and only begin to scratch the surface.

As a result, I decided to give first time sellers something they could actually try in order to see if the experience gets them (you?) excited about the possibilities, or even just to test the acceptance of their product in the marketplace.

Established Marketplace vs. Dedicated Site

The very first question to ask yourself is:

How much time and money am I prepared to invest in my new venture (selling online for the first time)?

If you already know what kind of site you want to create, and have the time and budget to hire:

• a web developer
• web designer
• SEO specialist

and you are ready to engage in various form of online marketing which will likely include a mix of

then a dedicated site may be a good option for you to consider. Otherwise, a fully hosted and well established marketplace may be the right place for you to start. Following are a few marketplaces to consider, and few words about each.

Hosted eCommerce Marketplaces

Selling Globally

Image via Wikipedia

eBay

The largest marketplace in terms of total sellers and buyers as well as total sales. Payments are easily integrated with PayPal as well as credit card and other payment options. You can target regional eBay sites too. Sell on ebay.fr or ebay.co.uk if you want to target these markets directly instead. eBay.com is viewed by a global user base in general, but less used by buyers in countries that have their own localized eBay site. At the bottom of the eBay.com home page is a link the list of 30 localized eBay sites. Not all are branded as “eBay,” but that could change over time.

Image by jonobacon via Flickr

Amazon

The fastest growing marketplace and also has a huge amount of traffic. Amazon has their own payment platform integrated called Amazon Payments. Great tool for US based sellers, but Amazon Payments is still not available for international sellers, AFAIK. The site is a textbook in the study of Best Practices for all aspects of eCommerce, but my #1 pet peeve is still violated by the site: new users are forced to create an account before they can buy. Surely, with the amount of traffic they generate they must have a good reason for it, but I don’t believe that smaller sites should emulate this practice.

Sense of Fashion

A great new startup from Israel that is globally focused on letting fashion designers and trendsetters from all over the world meet in a well designed eCommerce environment that includes social media and marketing tools. Once again, payment is integrated with PayPal so that a new seller can get started right away.

Check AuctionBytes for More

Also check AuctionBytes.com for their in depth report: Seller’s Choice: Merchants Rate Ecommerce Marketplaces, where Editor Ina Steiner and more than 1,400 sellers rate the various marketplaces on a wide range of attributes. Interesting findings indeed.

Here are links to the individual reports for each marketplace rated: Amazon • Atomic Mall • Blujay • Bonanzle • CQout • Craigslist • eBay • Ebid.net • eCrater • Etsy • GoAntiques • iOffer • Onlineauction.com • Rubylane • TIAS.com

Selling to the local Israeli Market

Auction Israel Home Page

AuctionIsrael.com

An eBay-style marketplace with the option to list items for auction and immediate sale. The site is targeted at the growing Anglo community in Israel, and has recently been given a complete facelift. The navigation is very similar to eBay and it has even integrated PayPal for local payment by credit cards and PayPal balance. I have not made a purchase on the site since it was revamped to test the integration, so I am interested to hear how the integration goes for anyone out there that has purchased on the site recently. Sellers can list for free, or pay to have their listing featured on the home page (20 NIS) and/or featured on the category page (2 NIS). To my knowledge, there are no fees on the buyer. Sellers can list in any of these four currencies: NIS, USD, EUR, GBP.  Fact is that PayPal will allow the seller to collect in any of their 23 support currencies (see list here).

Anything in Israel is a Classified Ads webspace

AnythngInIsrael.com

A site that makes it easy to list items in the classic format of a classified ad. There is no fee for listing a personal item with a single or no picture, and extra pictures are just 5 NIS. The site is also English and therefore only focused on the growing but smaller Anglo community in Israel. Fees do apply for companies listing items. For example: an auto dealer selling cars on the site can pay a monthly or per sale fee, whereas an individual can list their car for free.

craigslist Israel home page

craigslist

The web’s answer to the way we used to list things in the local newspaper in the Classified Section. According to the Fact Sheet in the About section: craigslist is a “Local classifieds and forums – community moderated, and largely free” which is even better than it was in the newspaper. The site epitomizes the adage that less is more, being minimalistic to a tee. Hardly any graphics, besides the few images that users post for their items. For Israeli sellers, the site has three regions: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa. All in English.

Image courtesy of Appshopper.com

Yad2.co.il

Great site for person to person (P2P) selling, but also used extensively by companies to advertise first and second hand items for sale all over Israel. Besides the items for sale through Yad2 (literally translates as second-hand) itself, the site acts as an eCommerce portal. The iPhone App is a wonderful new addition too.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list, but for first time sellers in Israel, it represents a good few places to start. Just for fun, here are a few more local places to sell:

• Walla Shops
• WinWin
• Nana Shops

Have you had any experience with any of the above these sites? Any thoughts on them?

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In the 1970′s, Holiday Inn had a marketing campaign with the tagline of “The Best Surprise is No Surprise.”

Certainly, it is a pleasure to have your expectations surpassed, but there is another side to that coin. For example, if you do a great job of packaging the items you sell, then a dedicated area to promote this special attention to detail would likely convince more people to shop at your site.

On the other hand, a site that sets expectations too high is only setting themselves up for a hard fall. For example, if the item you are selling is second hand, then surely the “Like New” description may need to be qualified with some high resolution images of where it is NOT like new, but indeed displays evidence of previous use.

Although I didn’t find any data to support my intuition at the time of writing this blog entry, my gut tells me that shoppers with negative comments are more likely to write in than shoppers with positive comments. If that is true, then disappointing shoppers will have an exaggerated effect on the positive to negative comments left on your site or about your site on forums and in the social media circles that your shoppers are conversing in.

Overstating your shipping expertise may leave you hung out to dry...

Some better aligned buyer expectations should therefore improve conversion, while others should surely improve customer satisfaction. Here are a few of each to get the discussion going. Feel free to add your thoughts on the subject too.

Improving Conversion through better Buyer Expecations

• Shipping fee included
• Ships same day, if order by 1:00 PM (make it real for them with a real time conversion to the buyer’s time). Even better, how many minutes they need to place the order by, in order to ship today…
• Promotions related to something the buyer can do before the sale:
  • Follow us on Twitter and get x% off
  • Subscribe to our newsletter and get free shipping
  • Purchase just $ x.00 more to get free shipping
  • Cross selling promotion that will not add to shipping costs
• Time sensitive promotions:
  • If you offer a weekend special, make sure you let visitors on the site know only when it is relevant.
  • If you only tell them that they can get another 5% off for buying during the weekend after they are already in the checkout phase, you may be making them very happy indeed, but you have lost the opportunity to convert those that didn’t get this far already.
• Dedicated area that lists why buying from your site is different
  • Video of how you package items
  • Testimonials of unique comments about how you exceeded expectations

Improving Customer Satisfaction through better Buyer Expectations

Holiday Inn had it right. While they did not compete with 5 Star hotels, their campaign reminded travelers that they should know exactly what to expect at a Holiday Inn. As long as expectations can be met, the buyer and seller should be happy to do business now and again.

Do you have any experience with surprises in eCommerce or even in the bricks and mortar world? Any advice for sellers on how they can better set expectations?

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Don’t ask potential buyers for information if it is not required for the sale.

It always stops me dead in my tracks. While shopping online, the merchant asks for information they simply don’t need. Many of the sites doing this seem to be copying checkout flows they have seen in the past on other sites. Things do change however, and if the site they copied it from is still in business, chances are that they have changed their ways.

Even more amazing to me is that there are so many articles written (like this one) advising merchants what they should and should not do in the course of a eCommerce checkout.

For this first blog entry, lets focus on what I believe to be one of the most discussed best practices:

Make registration optional, or Don’t offer it at all.

Despite the many great articles written (including this one from Linda Bustos of GetElastic.com) that clearly disapprove of the practice, so many merchants still insist that their site is different, and that they still need users to register before they can purchase anything.

Consider these points, when reviewing your eCommerce Checkout flow:

• Don’t require buyers to create a username and password for your site.
• If you really want buyers to register, kindly suggest that they save all the information they have provided at the end of the transaction, never at the beginning. At that point, all you need them to do is to create a password.
• Wherever you ask for login credentials, the page must be SSL secured. If you aren’t sure why, then you shouldn’t be asking users to register, as you may be exposing yourselves and your customers to great risk of ID theft, and more.
• When asking for their email address, just ask them to type it once. I am not sure where the “retype your email address” trend started, but chances are that whomever it was that started this trend has stopped with that foolishness a long time ago.

I know, I know. Many web developers and merchants will argue that by creating yet another username and password, and profile of my personal details, that “my next visit will be so much faster.” The truth, however, is that the best way to encourage that visitors come back is to make them a buyer first, and ensure that their purchase is memorable in how easy and friction-free it is to shop on the site.

So now tell me, what are your pet “best practices” that are least practiced?

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