Are you ’spooking’ shoppers away?

This is my favorite time of year.  I love crunchy leaves under my boots.  (Oh, I love boots, too.) I love orange.  I love pumpkins.  I love apple cider.  I love Halloween.  And, I love, love, love to be scared! 

But you know what?  As an online consumer, I do not want to be scared away from a website.  In keeping up with the Halloween theme my colleague Jessica started last night on the Cactus Sales Blog, here’s a look at spooky e-commerce practices. 

Scary E-commerce Practice #1:  Your Contact Information is The Invisible Man

No toll-free number in the header.  A P.O. Box as the address.  These are tell-tale signs that you are hiding from your customers– or it at least appears that way.  Customers are the life-blood of your business.  Why would you want to make it a hassle to reach you?  Having your contact information prominently displayed creates peace of mind.

Scary E-commerce Practice #2:  Your Site is Frankenstein’ed together

A stitch here.  A stitch there.  A bolt over here.  Online consumers can tell if a site is piece-mealed together.  If a site looks uniform in some aspects, but then there are big boxes of text here, cheesy clip are over there, etc. things can really look cluttered.  That’s a turn-off to me.  Branding is important to build trust and confidence and really make for an enjoyable shopping experience.  If your homepage is busy and looks like an undone jigsaw (Saw reference right there, kids!) puzzle it could spook shoppers away.

Scary E-commerce Practice #3:  Wrong Turn and The Descent– Where are people going??

Navigation.  I get lost every time I go to New Jersey.  I can’t really follow the Garden State highway signs too well.  They just aren’t clear.  Same can be said about website navigation.  I don’t like when I land on a site that has menus here, menus there, menus, menus everywhere.  People can make a wrong turn, get lost, get frustrated and leave.  Worse yet, I’ve been on sites that have so many subcategories that it takes five to six clicks just to get to an item page– like you are making a descent deep into a scary, scary cave.  This is a highly confusing process that makes me want to shout, “Just take me to where I can BUY something!”  Ease of navigation is crucial to a good shopping experience.

Scary E-Commerce Practice #4:  The Shining

Animated GIFs.  There’s a memory.  I remember my first Geocities page- I had the banjo-playing frog, an e-mail graphic of a letter turning into an envelope and plopping in a mailbox and I even had a blinking “welcome” message.  None of this is e-commerce friendly.  Some flash is okay- that’s professional and tasteful.  However, those animated GIFs look amateur and definitely look out of place on an e-commerce site.  This is my biggest pet peeve so I had to add it to my scary list.

There are more things that give me the e-commerce heebie jeebies, but these four are a good start.  Take a look at your own e-commerce site.  Is there anything that would spook you away?  Scare you from shopping?  October is a fun month- lots of scary things out there- haunted houses, great horror flicks and talk of all those superstitions– but don’t make the scares last yearround on your e-commerce site.  Leave that to the Cravens and the Carpenters of the world!