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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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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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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