Dan has been complaining I haven't been ranting enough lately. I have been waiting for the Scottish elections to sort themselves out, because thats a nice mess and easily due some ranting. However, given the need for a placeholder, I wrote this little moan on the subject of internet shopping.
Everyone knows that the future of shopping is online. Every year, more money is spent online. Christmas last year was marked by getting a few parcels a day from amazon. However, I find it fraught with all things of annoying problems. Over the last few days, I have attempted to buy a t-shirt and a bottle of whisky online, while buying a pair of sandals and a book offline. While the wo aren't the same, it was still instructive as to the problems of internet shopping.
Taking money from shoppers. To actually take money from people has to be the most important part of running any sort of shop. However, it is someone hard for me, the shopper, to give websites my money. Consider the example of Geekz Shop. To pay them, it appears I need to have a paypal account[0]. On examining the paypal signup page, I see references to the FSA. While its good that Paypal are actually registered and regulated these days, it does strongly suggest that they are a bank, and as such opening a account with them is the same as opening a bank account with HSBC or someone. In other words, I need to open a new bank account just to buy a t-shirt. Thats a lot of hoops to jump though.
In their defense, they did offer a collection of other ways to pay when emailed about it, but its still a lot more work than walking into a shop and giving them cash. In more general terms, as a shop, its important to make it as easy as possible for your customers to give you money. Its common to outsource this to someone else, but any general solution serving lots of sites will suck[2]. Of course, doing it yourself means you are stuck dealing with credit cards - which is a pain, or BACS which is a joke. Oh well.
The next issue you have is giving people their goods. In a real shop, you hand them their goods and they carry it away (massive generalization). Unless you are selling somthing completely electronic, for example domains, then you have to get the goods to the person. Once again, running your own service is hard - far harder than your own online payment system. However, it and your website is the thing people see of your shop. The classic problem is late delivery. You have to make some sort of claim as to when goods will arrive, but getting it wrong will result in arguments. My best example of this is a christmas present bought off amazon last year - it arrived in January, despite amazon's claim of having it to me before christmas day. The other classic example of getting it wrong is the apple store. It doesn't quote a delivery time - instead it quotes a "ready to ship" time. This is the time needed for apple to put your purchase in a box and stick a label on it. The problem with this is that your poor customer thinks that his new mac is going to show up in a couple of days. It doesn't, so he is massively disapointed. You've disapointed the guy before your product has left your warehouse. Thats one step aay from employing a bouncer to beat your customers when they leave your store.
Having thought that delivery problems are an issue, consider people returning stuff. If its hard, they just moan at their credit card company. If your support and sales folk are in a call centre and can't be reached, then they spend the next week explaining to their mates about how dire you are and why they would sooner deal with the devil than you. Oh, and neither email nor rt is a way to deal with this.
The final problem with most online shops is usability. Usability is hard - full stop. Its harder to sell something when the customer can't pick it up and feel it. While some shops are quite good, the number that force me to think when filling out the checkout forms or looking for products is amazing. Its like they don't want my custom.
From this, I have claimed that a good online store needs a good way to take money off customers, a good way to get goods to customers, a sane way to deal with problems and a usable website (Next week, I'm going to blog about how water is wet). However, lots of sites, including big ones, fail at this. I don't think internet shopping is going away, but I do think that the shops that fail to take money off folk, that have sites that can't be navigated, that give goods to couriers who "lose" them, will go out of business. I hope that most shops steadily improve on these areas, just so I spend less time being pissed off at them
BTW: this post was inspired by my mother's attempts to buy photos of my graduation online (no - it hasn't happened yet). The site in question was apparently so confusing that she has given up and has asked me to buy them. Sorry for ranting.
posted at: 09:05 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry