American Express

Posts Tagged ‘purchase’

The functionality of your Web site must be unique to your business and the needs of your target market. On a retail Web site, customers will be able to view complete details about your products, understand pricing and shipping, and get a good view of the product from multiple angles since they cannot hold it in their hands and be able to make the purchase. After the purchase, the customer should automatically receive a confirmation, or receipt, by e-mail so that he or she knows the order is in good hands. You will want to keep in touch with your customers to encourage them to come back and purchase again, so you will want to give the target market opportunities to sign-on to receive email communications from you–right from the checkout.

On the other side of the coin, don’t include everything you can possibly include on your site just because you can. What you do not want to do is overwhelm the user in the middle of the purchase process with 20 other, unrelated products that will distract them and potentially put a halt to their current order.

Equally important to functionality is the performance of the Web site itself. This drills down into how the site and all of its supporting functions are coded. Users will quickly become frustrated by a Web site that generates errors on a regular basis or that does not load within a reasonable time period. Likewise, focusing on only one dynamic of the market can frustrate other market segments.

Here are my recommendations (and it will be great if your list and mine are similar),A smiling face. This should be genuine. We have all been told that people buy more with their eyes than they do with their ears. If you were welcoming a friend into your house, you would quite naturally smile. It is also pleasurable when walking into someone else’s premises to be greeted with a smile. If you are lazy this should appeal, as apparently it takes less muscle power to smile than it does to frown. Eye contact. It is so important to look people in the eyes.
Not only do you convey body language when you look someone in the eye but you also are subconsciously registering
that person’s body language. We have become conditioned to believe that a person who looks us in the eyes is more trustworthy. Be pleased to see the customer. This is harder to describe, but it is a combination of facial expression, body language and tone of voice. We have all experienced, at some time or another, sales people who give us the impression that we are a nuisance and are interrupting their day.

This really is irritating when we as customers, should we make a purchase, are actually making a contribution to their pay packet. I have often longed to say ‘I help to keep you employed, so be nice to me.’