Reducing Friction Points in Checkout

Your customers want to purchase your wine quickly and easily so they can move on to the next thing they are doing online.

Every hoop a customer has to jump through, every form field they have to enter, every mouse click they have to make, and every place a customer has concerns about what is being asked is a friction point. As the friction builds up, a customer can become aggravated, fatigued, confused - and ultimately they will abandon the sales process.

Here are three friction points that bother me when buying wine online.

Form Fatigue

Just looking at the overwhelming amount of information that needs to be completed on this checkout makes me fatigued. While some of this information is required, here is how to make it less cumbersome.

1. 60% of customers use the same billing and shipping address, so the shipping address doesn't need to be shown at all (there goes half the fields). Stores like Abercrombie perfected this years ago.  Try the checkout process on some of our latest stores and see how they only show the shipping information side of the form if necessary.
2. Fields such as fax number, website, etc should be completely abandoned, (or at least clearly marked option as I'm sure they are not a requirement to buy wine on this site). Why do I want to give you my website URL to buy wine from you??

Forced Minimum Quantities

I've shopped a number of websites where I'm prompted with a "must buy a minimum of XX bottles to checkout from this site". (Sadly 3 of 5 websites did this to me this morning).  While I fully understand the implications of shipping wine, from a customer's perspective (especially a first time customer perspective), I only want one or two bottles to try - not 12. Careful thought should given to adding a 'forced quantity' friction point. It might be better to offer shipping discounts on 12 bottles rather than forcing people to order 12 bottles.

Required Registration

We are seeing more and more websites step away from the forced account creation on checkout, but there are still too many wine e-commerce sites out there that force users to register on checkout. Why would I want to choose a username and password, or worse yet try and remember my username and password from my last purchase?

Read stories such as the $300 million dollar button, or the report from Forresters entitled Required Registration Lowers Online Conversion Rates. 

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Have you purchased wine from your website lately? What processes could be removed to make the experience better?  What is your pet-peeve when you are buying wine online?

Jan 17, 2010 at 12:35 PM

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How to guide your customers to a purchase?

Your customer is on your winery website, has found the wine he wants, has placed his purchases in the shopping cart and is now ready to checkout.

Which of the following two shopping cart pages triggers the behavior you want your customer to take?

vs

All buttons are not equal. One of the 3 tenets of the Fogg Behavior Model is that you need to trigger the behavior you want customers to take.

Once an item is placed in a cart, you want the the path to checkout to be very clear. Yes you still need buttons to change the quantity, check their shipping, etc but the largest most contrasting button is the button most often clicked and this should be the checkout button as illustrated in design #2.

Dec 15, 2009 at 9:00 AM

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Where's My Order?

Paul Mabray, Chief Strategy Officer at VinTank was lamenting on twitter about how he ordered wine from 6 different wineries via the web and no one followed up with him. Brent and I tried the experiment ourselves a year ago with 20 Canadian wineries - unfortunately almost every website underperformed.

This past week I ordered wine (as a first time customer) from a couple different winery websites. I'm still waiting for my tracking information (even though some of the packages  have already arrived).

At a bare minimum a website should:

1. Send an email order confirmation immediately after the order was placed.
2. Send tracking information as soon as the order has been shipped.
3. Provide a mechanism for customer feedback. Make it easy for customers to respond, ask questions, or even complain.

Dec 4, 2009 at 10:00 AM

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The Most Important Time in a Customer Relationship.

The most important time in a customer relationship is the three months following their first purchase.

That statement may or may not be true for you... but it's true for Kevin Hillstrom. Do you know what percentage of your first time customers will purchase again? And do you know within what time frame they will place their subsequent orders?

We spend a lot of time tweaking the customer experience on winery websites so that visitors will make the first purchase.  We also know that repeat customers are the best customers to have. What happens between the first purchase and a customer becoming a repeat purchaser?

There are some really great comments in Kevin's blog:

1. First time buyers are in a 'honeymoon' period.
2. First time buyers generate a lot of buzz (positive and negative) - maybe more buzz than loyal customers.
3. First time buyers should be given an incentive for their second order. 

Consider the following scenarios:

First Time Purchaser in the Tasting Room
A visitor from out-of-town makes their first purchase in your tasting room. Converting them to a repeat purchaser becomes a lot easier if your POS and website talk with each other. We would recommend that they receive a 'Thank You' for visiting email, followed by an email asking them to rate the wines they bought, and a coupon to entice them to make their second purchase online. 

First Time Purchaser on the Web
For most wineries this consumer may be a little more rare. They heard about your wine from a friend or at a restaurant, and now they come to your website and order a bottle. Do you treat them the same as any other customer?  Wouldn't it be better to treat them special with a customized message and coupon for their second purchase?

Dec 2, 2009 at 10:00 AM

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What do customers want this holiday season?

Shop.org released the results of their eHoliday Study pre-holiday consumer and retailer surveys early in November. Here is a brief summary of the key findings when consumers were asked, "When choosing to make holiday purchases from a given retailer, what is most important to you?":

1. Seeing the shopping cart total before starting the checkout process (yes this beat out other factors like values, deals, merchant reputation, etc)
2. Clear product descriptions
3. Value for money / good deals

Shop.org followed it up with a second post summarizing results of a survey of consumers about which specific Web site features they rely on most when making holiday purchases.  When rated out of 5:

• 4.1 rated reviews from fellow customers as important.
• 4.0 rated clearance sale pages important
• 3.8 rated feature sale item pages important
• 3.8 rated shipping deadline calendar as important

While none of these results are surprising, it still is astounding how many wineries don't address these issues that these survey results prove are very important to their customers. Doing so could bring that customer back to purchase again.

Nov 30, 2009 at 10:00 AM

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Wine Producers Should Tweet More

Wine Future just wrapped up in Rioja, described as "the largest wine world forum to discuss the current status of the industry," by wine educator Kevin Zraly. At this gathering of almost 1,000 wine professionals, wine social media’s tornado of passion Gary Vaynerchuk didn’t hold back on how he feels. He said that wine producers are missing a huge opportunity to talk to wine consumers via Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms.

From the Decanter.com post: "I don’t give a crap about Facebook and Twitter but I care about consumers," Vaynerchuk told Wine Future’s attendees. "You should be embarrassed if you don’t recognise that this platform allows you to talk to them."

Gary emphasized that his success isn’t due to his high energy, wacky personality and toys he keeps on his table during Wine Library TV, but rather because he’s passionate and he cares.

Love him or not, there are many wine consumers who flock to him, believe and trust Gary to show them the way, gain wine confidence and value their own palates. From the Decanter report, it sounds to me like he’s making it clear as to why wine producers need to get savvy on Facebook and Twitter if they aren’t there already. It’s a huge missed opportunity not to engage with wine consumers.

Similarly, Jeffrey Hayzlett, Chief Marketing Officer at Kodak, described his team’s social media ROI philosophy at last week’s SM2Day conference as: ROI= Return on Ignoring.

Photo Courtesy of (CC) Derek Wilmot. www.derekwilmot.com -http://www.flickr.com/photos/derekwilmot/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
 

Nov 19, 2009 at 9:00 AM

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Speed Sells

Are slow loading web pages causing you to lose purchasers?

The holiday season is the busiest season for winery websites. If your site isn't optimized for the load, you're selling yourself short. Earlier this month Get Elastic posted some of the research from Forrester Research on web page loading speed on their blog. Here are a few notible excerpts:

• Next to pricing and shipping issues, poor site performance is a major cause of dissatisfaction.
• Overall, 52% of online shoppers stated that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty.
• 61% of online shoppers who spend more than $1,500 online per year insist on pages loading quickly.
• After a poor site experience, 27% are less likely to buy from that retailer off-line.
• Not only does an under-performing site lead to customer frustration, but 64% of shoppers state they will simply purchase from another online store.
• 40% would abandon if it takes more than 3 seconds

There are 3 factors that cause slow loading pages.

1) The webserver is slow. There is a trend (especially in ecommerce) to have more dynamic content which places a larger load on webservers. Webservers can become slow because there is too much traffic, the database may be slow, the hardware might be under powered, and/or the software application may not be optimally constructed. There are a number of ways to combat slow webservers such as load balancing, caching queries, adding more hardware, and reviewing overall code architecture. There are lots of load testing tools available to web developers and your developer should have a sense of how much traffic their webserver can hold.

2) The web page has large images, lots of images, large flash files, or is poorly constructed. Obviously larger images, more images, and large flash content all take longer to load. There are ways to combat slow pages including using a content delivery network, ensuring images, css, and scripts are cached, compressing and/or minimizing files, and using preloaders. Your web developer should be able to tell you the overall size of your web page and give you options to have it load faster. (Tools like YSlow make this really easy.)

3) Connection speeds are slow. Internet service providers don't always provide the connection speeds they advertise. We still see a decent percentage of traffic that is still on dial up networks. Your web page probably still needs to cater to a percentage of dialup users. (Your analytic software may give you a sense of what percentage of traffic is still on a dialup connection.)

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The holiday season is almost here. It's probably a good time to ensure that your website is performing at an optimal speed before the traffic increases.

Nov 16, 2009 at 10:00 AM

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3 Mistakes When Redesigning Your Website

Thinking about redesigning your winery website? If so, here are three common mistakes to avoid before jumping into your redesign.

1. Forgetting about Search Engines and Inbound Links

Even though your old site might be dated, it still garners traffic from outside sources. Half the people visiting a winery website enter via a search engine. Inbound links from blogs, social media, and other websites also represent a good portion of traffic.

These links to product pages, company pages, contact pages, etc are often broken in a site redesign. (Different platforms and designers handle URLs differently, and often you will want your URL structure updated for search engine ranking and other reasons).

The proper way to handle updating URL structure is:

• Look at your site analytics and determine where your traffic is coming from and what links people are visiting.
• Create 301 redirects pointing traffic from your old links to your new links. (A 301 redirect is the proper way to inform search engines that the redirected URL is the new URL for the old content). Your developer should be able to do this for you (or in the case of our platform you can do it inside our content management system)

2. Forgetting about your Frequent Customers

Your most frequent site visitors probably don't want you to drastically change the site design (even if it's better, people don't always want to learn a new way of doing a task).

In an ideal world, your site would be continually enhanced rather than drastically altered every few years. If your club members are used to coming to your site and quickly placing an order, and you then completely redesign the store, it often throws the user way off.

Consider the redesign we did this past year for Twisted Oak. The new site is more of a progression on the old site rather than an evolution. The overall navigation structure and location of the wines and products didn't change that much and previous visitors should be able to find their way around.

Bottom line, think 'evolution' rather than 'revolution'.

3. Not Setting any Goals Before Jumping In

We see a lot of redesigns just because a site is dated. While it's fine to redesign a dated site, it's even better to set goals for your site.

Design is very important to your site, but you should look first at function, structure, goals, and business objectives of the site. Your designer should walk you through a design process that starts with these goals.

We start all of our sites with a goal questionnaire followed by wireframes. A wireframe will allow you to focus on function (for example what are the key elements on the homepage and what are their goals) rather than on design.

Bonus:

One more thing to think about when redesigning your site is the historical data. If you are switching platforms, it's important that order history, customer lists and other data be brought over to your new site. The longer you sell online, the more important this data becomes. (Being able to build lists, segment customers, etc off historical data is a very effective way of marketing.)

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If you are thinking about a redesign, there are more options and better tools than ever before. Just make sure you are thinking about the overall affects rather than doing a redesign just for the sake of a redesign.
 

Nov 3, 2009 at 10:00 AM

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Customers want simple.

If you are launching your new web site and wonder what customers want - customers want simple!

1. Customers don't want to give you their birthdate before they enter your website.
2. Customers don't want to read about your wine in one part of your site and jump to another part of your website to purchase the wine.
3. Customers don't want to create an account, give you a username and double confirm a password just to buy wine from you.
4. Customers don't want a long drawn out checkout process.
5. Customers don't want to be tricked into signing up for a newsletter.
6. Customers don't want to be spammed.
7. Customers don't want to be forced to buy minimum quantities.
8. Customers don't want flash.

Everything we force a customer to do before they get what they want carries consequence. Choose and weight those things carefully.

Oct 19, 2009 at 10:00 AM

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Connecting to your wine website visitors

In my last blog post "The Experience" I talked about how winery websites face the challenge of sharing a persuasive experience on their website, or share the essence of the winery and wine.

I just wanted to point out a great way to enhance the connection between your winery and visitors to your web site, which is video tasting notes or messages from the wine maker and/or wine owner.

I thought this was really powerful for a couple of reasons:

1. Builds a personal connection between the people in your winery and your customers. Faces matter more than you think
2. Although people can't taste and smell wine on your site, seeing and hearing someone doing that might just want to make them come and try it out.
3. Visitors are more likely to watch someone talk about wine than read a couple paragraphs about it.
4. Videos are really easy to share.

Here are some great examples:

Inman Family Wines: Video message from Winemaker/Owner Kathleen Inman
Ceja Vineyards: Tasting notes on every wine, here is an example.

If you are thinking about adding videos to your wine website there are lots of ways to get out there from doing it yourself which is totally acceptable in today's social media scene, or go pro - Artisan Media specializes in digital marketing for wine.

Oct 2, 2009 at 11:10 AM

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