Putting history aside, online video is often used improperly. Companies are hanging on some antiquated TV theory that people want everything delivered in video and not in text. I’ve gotten to the point where I won’t even watch a video article online.

The biggest problem people make, is using an unextraordinary video as a destination rather than additional media or commentary that accompanies an article or other piece of information. I can’t even tell you how annoying it is to click on a news article and have it be a video instead of text. What’s even more annoying is that whole “monetize” concept. I not only cannot read the article I wanted to read, but I have to wait 30 second to see a video which i didn’t want in the first place. Using video just for the purpose of using video is just crazy. I don’t need to see some newscaster or blogger reading something to me that would have takes 2 minutes myself and would have been more clear and scan-able. I will say that online retailers have much better grasped the concept of appropriate video usage, as they often supplement their products with video demos or other informative casts.

In all, if the video is the point of interest, such as a show (in whole or part), a movie, or something that cannot be better represented in text then it’s probably appropriate. If the video is simply a person reading an article, or newscast, or anything that could more easily be explained in text, use text! The same concepts can be applied to slide-shows, flash, and just about any other dynamic content we find on the internet. Don’t use media as a destination just for the sake of using it.

The one caveat to this argument is mobile content. Since it’s often difficult to read lengthy content on a phone, a video may be more than appropriate. However, this doesn’t mean that video should be the only medium that the content is available in. At the very least, put an entire text version with any diagrams or pictures if appropriate below the video so the rest of us on normal computers can “read” it.

This offers an easy method of adding credit card logos to an ecommerce website. We designed some very clean icons for each logo. The API supports 2 sizes currently, fully dynamic sizing and margins are planned for the next update. It also supports specifying background colors.

Here’s a few examples of logos generated using the API.

Using: https://www.merchantequip.com/image/?bgcolor=000&logos=p|g|bml&height=75

Using: https://www.merchantequip.com/image/?bgcolor=fff&logos=v|m|a|d|jcb|dc&height=75

Using: https://www.merchantequip.com/image/?bgcolor=fff&logos=v|m|a|d|jcb|dc&height=35

The order and the exact logos can be specified through the image url string. The logos currently come in 2 sizes 32px and 64px, but as stated, fully dynamic sizing will be available shortly. Logos through the API are all delivered securely to prevent SSL related errors. We also made a simple credit card logo generator for those who don’t want to mess with an API.

Here’s all available logos:

This is my guide on presenting, charging, and handling shipping services and fees for small online retailers.

• Have a shipping policy section on your website.
• Show shipping options, prices, and delivery time-frames.
• Be very cautious about offering free shipping.
• Don’t use USPS.
• Ship Now!
• Keep your customer informed.

Have a shipping policy section on your website.

When your customers know what to expect, they are less likely to be upset when you do exactly what you said you would. No matter what your company’s policies are on shipping, even if they are simply rotten, make sure that they are clearly posted on your site. Make sure that you do better than any policy on your site, shipping or otherwise. A shipping policy or refund policy should be a fallback point, not a guideline. If you say we ship withing 48 hours, ship today.

Show shipping options, prices, and delivery time-frames.

On the shopping cart page, make sure you show available shipping options with their price and the estimated delivery time-frame. This does not mean, make your customer register or fill out their shipping address or fill out anything at all, before you show them shipping options. Ask for their zip code only (Not their zip and state, you can figure this out yourself) if your prices vary based on the delivery location.

I find that the best way to visually present shipping options is a list with a radio button for them to select their desired method. This is better than a drop-down box because it is easier to see and compare all of the options, and doesn’t require any clicking. Make sure to preselect the cheapest or the best value shipping method for them. This way they don’t have to interact at all if that’s what they choose.

If you use UPS or Fedex they offer tools to help you determine the delivery time-frame. Make sure to have your programmer use logic if you ship tomorrow, or need an extra day for packing, or your customer places an order on Sunday, a Holiday, etc. The delivery time-frame should be as accurate as possible. But when in doubt, add an extra day for padding. It’s perfectly fine to deliver early, but is never acceptable to deliver past the date you said you would.

Be very cautious about offering free shipping.

Free shipping is great. It can drive sales and give a company a huge competitive advantage. I’ve experimented on ebay many times with offering the same product at different prices and different shipping prices. Free shipping is a large enough incentive that many people will chose a more expensive overall price, over an item with high shipping costs. Shipping costs make people feel like they are being gouged, so there’s psychological motivation when shipping is very cheap or free.

However, free shipping is not great when you need to cancel it. If you have an established website, canceling free shipping can literally kill the business. Especially in the case of repeat customers, you can lose a lot of business when you revert back to a paid shipping format. This even applies to limited time free shipping promos.

A good alternative to free shipping, is free shipping based on price thresholds. This can also backfire though, as online retailers often make the same profit (not margin) on expensive products as cheap ones. If your products get heavier as they get more expensive, you can end up cannibalizing all profit if you offer free shipping in situations like this. You need to do the math for your products and your shipping fees, but make sure you aren’t destroying your profit by offering this.

In any case, be very careful if you decide to offer free shipping, or threshold free shipping, even as a promotion. The backlash when you retract it, if you can retract it, can be severe, and it just may not work from a shipping cost to profit perspective.

Don’t use USPS.

USPS can be great for some product types. It is perfect for low ticket products or those that can be crammed into a pre-paid priority box or envelope. It’s also great if your customer has no expectation for the package to get there in the next week, month, ever…

If you’re like most of us, USPS is nothing but a headache.

To start off with, their package tracking is simply unacceptable. Since about 1998, customers have expected to be able to see their package progress once it is shipped. With USPS this current day, they can possibly see cryptic postdated message after it’s updated at 7 or 8PM in the evening. Did I mention that delivery confirmation, package tracking, and just about any other expected service costs extra.

Next, the package pickup services leaves something to be desired. Unless you’re shipping out a semi trailer of packages every day, you need to have the box at the pickup location or post office very early for it to go out the same day. This is completely unreasonable for most online retailers that ship their own products. To make this work, you almost have to delay all orders from shipping by a day so they can be packaged the next morning.

Third, delivery time-frames are a complete toss up. Here in Texas, I’ve seen packages take 1 day, and 5 days in the same state. There’s no reliable way to predict the delivery time-frame. Your customer asks you when the package will be delivered. Your answer of “sometime in the next 5 days” does not make people happy.

Lastly, when USPS loses a package, which happens all the time, it’s a bureaucratic mess to try and find it or get compensation for it.  The time it takes to recover anything often offsets the loss of the product and the cost of sending a new one.

There’s good reason why almost every highly successful online retailer uses UPS or Fedex despite them being more expensive.

Ship Now!

Probably most important of all is just ship the damn package now! Don’t wait for 2 days to package it up, and another day to label it and another day to drop it off. Get it in a box, put a label on it and get it out the door.

If you want to be a remarkable online business, your packages must go out the day you receive the order.

I can’t count how many times I’ve ordered and finally after 5 days, I get an email that my package has been shipping. Seriously, did you have to build the manufacturing plant, required to manufacturer my product or something??? I will not buy from you again if it takes 5 days to ship unless there is some extenuating circumstance and you told me about it immediately.

The quicker you get the package out, the happier your customer will be and you no longer have anything left to perform with the order. Everybody wins when you ship quickly.

Keep your customer informed.

Through every step of the purchasing to shipping to delivery process, you should be keeping your customer informed on the status of their order. This is the one area that you have 100% control of, so there’s no reason not to do this. Send an email letting them know you received the order. Email letting them know it shipped. Email letting them know that you messed up and it’s back-ordered. Email letting them know it was delivered, and follow up in a few weeks to make sure they got it, and it is what they wanted.

This last step is extremely important for 3 reasons. First, it is a proactive approach at solving any problems your customer may be having. It tells them you care enough about their satisfaction that your reaching out to them to make sure everything is excellent. Second, it helps prevent chargebacks by reminding them that they purchased something from you (They will be receiving their statement about right now and they forgot the name of your company. Sorry, it just works this way.). Also, if there’s a problem they know to contact you and not their bank. Last, it gives you an opportunity to make another sale with your new customer. Offering coupons or other incentives is an excellent way to gain a repeat customer and this email is the perfect medium. Too often I see this used with an aggressive marketing tactic to get warranty sign-ups or other high-profit, tasteless services. Don’t forget, this email is still about them so keep it reasonable if you want them to come back.

Concluding thoughts:

No matter how awesome your business is, you will get complaints about shipping. You may not meet some-one’s expectations, you may ship a day later than they were expecting, they think you can miraculously ship or deliver on Sundays, your packages will get lost or destroyed or delivered to the wrong address. As long as you are handling shipping in the best way possible, there’s little more you can do except provide good support to your customers when something does get messed up. If you’re running a site that makes your customers register or fill out a form before getting options, or you ship 5 days after you receive an order, I can almost guarantee your sales will immediately improve once you implement some better shipping practices.

I mean seriously, there are 2 buttons on the keyboard that you should never mess with. The Enter key, and the backspace!!! Take my Q or X or something, seriously. Google, wake up, this is not what you are supposed to do. You are not better than the backspace!

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This is meant to be a framework for creating an ecommerce product page. There are of course many additional things that could be put on a product page, but these are the essentials that every page should have. The more features that a product page has, the more likely a user won’t notice them.

In the end, websites benefit from clean and well organized content.

Google Suggested that I drive over a pass called Schofield pass. While this could be just any old pass, but it’s not.

Schofield Pass is one of the most dangerous roads in Colorado. It is a 7ft wide rocky mess of a trail with a 500ft cliff on one side and a solid rock wall on the other. It has been called the most dangerous pass in Colorado, and boasts a near-vertical 27% grade in some places. Over 20 people have perished on it in past 30 years. Just a few months ago we saw an abandoned Suburban on it, who’s owner thought it safer to forget about his vehicle than to risk the descent. Until cleaned up in the recent years, the river below was littered with the remains of Jeeps, and Trucks that didn’t make it. Oh, and going up is 100x harder than going down, which is what Google Maps was suggesting.

Here’s a Youtube Video that shows very well, just how bad Schofield Pass pass is. And yes, this is a “road” that people drive Jeeps of 4wd’s over.

So I got to thinking, how many similar passes in Colorado could Google be suggesting people to use. I found an additional 2, very dangerous passes, in about 5 minutes of looking.

Pearl Pass is the first, and Ophir Pass is the second.

Just a small section of Pearl Pass:

Ophir pass is the easiest:

Now all of these routes are in somewhat obscure locations, but the areas that surround them are visited by millions of tourists every year. It would be extremely easy for someone to pull up directions for a scenic drive on google maps, and … Someone actually tried to drive Schofield in an 18 wheeler some time ago.

So if you are a software, information, or anything else company, it may be a good idea to make sure your program isn’t gearing up to kill somebody. Based on the usage, I would bet that Google Maps has already done so somewhere!

I tried to make a purchase from them this morning, and much to my astonishment, I couldn’t log into my account. I was sent into an infinite loop between their image verification and log-in scripts. After some investigating, I concluded they are now requiring Firefox users to have network.http.sendRefererHeader set to 1. Many Firefox users, myself and every computer in my company included, set this value to zero, which prevents websites from seeing where you came from. To me this is simply a privacy concern, as it’s nobody else’s business but my own to know the last website I visited. Some anti-spyware software automatically set this value as well, so you may not even know if your is set to zero.

7. If you are using Firefox, type “about:config” in the address bar. Set the “network.http.sendRefererHeader” value to 1.

By requiring the value, newegg is completely preventing a huge number of Firefox users from using their site, and subsequently becoming customers. Not only is this unneeded and is most likely due to some corporate idiot that thinks they can add to the bottom line by tracking users better, but this is an unacceptable coding practice. They have currently lost me as a customer (I can honestly say that it is a sizable loss).

If you own an ecommerce site, don’t ever make changes and requirements that force your customers to lower their privacy standards or lower their browser security. I promise that you will lose customers as a result of making changes like this. This is completely fixable, but at the expense of your own privacy. I’m surprised that newegg would do this given that a huge number of their customers, if not the majority, are tech savvy shoppers who are likely to also block referrers.

A contact form is a seemingly simple feature, that most websites mess up. While a broken or poorly designed contact form may not be the end-all problem with a website, there’s no reason that it shouldn’t work correctly.

What a contact for must contain:

1. Name, email, (optional: phone), and message fields
2. Shouldn’t Contain… A ridiculous captcha verification script
3. Confirmation / feedback that the form was properly submitted
4. An email response that the form was successfully received
5. Finally… A response from someone that read the form (If necessary)

1.) Name, email, and message fields.

This is the one part that is rarely messed up, but often far overdone. A phone field is often useful but you will rarely need an address or any anything more personal than a person’s name, email, phone, and whatever they want to tell you. This is not a application form, it is a contact form! You shouldn’t be trying to qualify your customer in some way with a contact form.

The more fields a customer has to fill out, the less likely they will use your contact form, and the more likely they will call you for something that can be handled over email.

An example of a horrible contact form!

2.) Shouldn’t Contain… A ridiculous captcha verification script!

Captcha scripts can help reduce email spam from bots and automated programs designed to spam you. They also make it a complete pain to get through. Captcha itself is virtually impossible to get through at this point.

Use alternatives that are actually readable or ones that make a user solve a simple math problem to proceed, or use nothing if spam isn’t a huge problem.

USE THIS:

NOT THIS:

Requiring anyone to decipher an unreadable image of text is not a proactive customer service approach and will undoubtedly end with frustrated and confused customers.

3. ) Confirmation / feedback that the form was properly submitted.

DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT simply dump your customer into another page or refresh the form itself without a clear message that the form was submitted. This is a sure way to get multiple emails from your customer, each successive one showing more frustration than its predecessor.

Ideally, you should have a dedicated thank you, or confirmation page that the user is redirected to once the form is submitted. This is a better method than displaying an in-line message on the same page because there is no question that the form was properly submitted. This is one area where Web 2.0 is killing usability, because on-page changes are very often hard to detect and are not what a user is expecting.

It’s also a good idea to include links to informational pages, FAQ’s, and other areas of your website that could answer a question that a customer might have.

4.) An email response that the form was successfully received.

More than half the sites that I ever have contacted do not provide immediate email response when using their contact form.

You should always provide an immediate confirmation email that the message has been received. This will reiterate the response in the previous step, and makes your business look much more professional. Even a generic message is much better than no message. The message is a great time to provide alternate / emergency contact information in case they really need to get a hold of you, or provide links to FAQ and informational pages about your services or website.

You can setup a automated email response on just about any web server. It’s free and takes no human interaction to send an automated response email. There’s simply no reason not to send one.

6.) Finally… A response from someone that read the form (If necessary).

I put this on here because a huge number of customer inquiries are never responded to. Actually get back to your customer, by email, phone or whatever method you can. You don’t need to reply to spam, but you’re probably in business because you have customers. Providing unmatched response times is one of the best ways to set yourself apart from your competitors. Seriously, shoot for five or ten minutes during normal working hours.

Only when you customers reply with “wow that was fast”, is your response time prefect!

Contact forms are a cornerstone of online customer service and there’s absolutely no reason to mess them up. Stick with these steps and you can’t go wrong.

Mistake 1 (Old dates and information):

The internet is a very dynamic machine. When a visitor shows up on your website and sees your copyright date “Copyright © Anything < This Year” it instantly brings up questions. Are these prices still correct? Is this company even in business?

Unless your website has an enormous amount of perceived trust and you have a very strong brand (in which case your copyright date would most definitely be current), you will undoubtedly lose sales from this date alone.

The same thing goes for about us pages, and other information pages that can be date specific. If your about us page states that you specialize in computers with Windows 98, and Windows 2000 while Windows Vista is the current release, it brings up questions to which there is no good answer.

Mistake 2 (SSL related error messages):

I come across sites on a daily basis that serve up secure pages with some problem in their SSL configuration. When you send a visitor to a SSL protected page, there is a good reason for it. And, when an error message precedes that secure connection, all confidence in your security is lost. If you can’t figure out how to properly encrypt a website / page / sub-domain without errors, you need to hire someone who can.

Does this make you want to continue checking out?

Also, to help prevent this from ever happening, make sure you do not permanently install mis-configured ssl certificates. If you do get a ssl error, make sure not to click the permanently allow this connection option.

Mistake 3 (Not showing payment and shipping options immediately):

You should display your accepted payment methods on every page of your website! Don’t make your customer click on the about us, faq, or any other link to get this information. I’ve got securely hosted credit card logos here, if you need them.

You should display the shipping options and prices as soon as technically possible, on the shopping cart page is best! Also, do not make your user enter all of their shipping or billing information, (or worse yet, make them register) before you give them shipping prices. Much of the time, your customer won’t even consider filling out that much information just to get an idea of how much shipping will cost.

Use a single zip field to calculate shipping and ask for the rest of their information further in the checkout process.

Mistake 4 (Improper add-to-cart functions):

With the Web 2.0 craze going on, it’s common to see spiffy Ajax and dynamic add to cart functions where some small area of the website is updated when an item is added to a shopping cart. This is not only a bad idea, but it can be usability suicide.

While these actions may seem obvious to you, a lot of users don’t notice a small box being updated, and it’s rarely what a shopper is expecting to happen. It’s always best to redirect your user to a shopping cart each time they add something to it. You can then provide a return to last item / category / brand or whatever else link from the shopping cart page as needed.

Mistake 5 (Poor internal search):

Google became popular because their search results were quick, and highly relevant. Search function on your website is extremely important, and should be quick and relevant. You need to be able to account for things like misspellings and incomplete words. If you don’t have the ability to implement a solid search function yourself, you should look for a 3rd party application to use. If your website is well indexed, Google offers a custom search engine that you can integrate into your website.

The only thing worse than showing bad search results is showing none at all.

Common methods to obfuscate email addresses:

• Encoding
• Javascript
• Flash
• Using an Image instead of text

Javascript and Flash obfuscation basically create a text version of your email that cannot be read by all but the most complex email harvesting robots. These methods work well at stopping email harvesting (Flash is far better than Javascript), but your visitors must have flash installed or javascript enabled for these to work or they too cannot see your email address.

Example of what a Javascript email would look like to a computer. (From: seowebsitepromotion.com)
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
var email = "questions"
var domain = "ecommerce-blog.org"
document.write("" + email + "@" + domain + "")
//]]>
</script>

These can also be called externally or through an action script which is even more effective.

Images of an email address can be used in place of text. While this is probably as effective at stopping spam as flash and Javascript, it completely prevents copying the text. This makes it very annoying to try and email the site owner as contact addresses are often long and can be complex. Users are very prone to mis-entering email characters and this generally leads to frustration and annoyance by everyone. I recommend not using this method.

Encoding is by far my preferred method of email obfuscation. While it is not as effective as the other methods, it stops the majority of spambots. It does not create browser compatibility or usability issues. It is as easy to use as copying and pasting some html onto a web-page when it is being created.

Encoding can be done with a hex, decimal, and others. HTML interprets these encoded characters as the ones we see and read. This way your visitors sees an A while a computer sees an A.

Some good encoding tools:
http://www.ianr.unl.edu/email/encode/ – This is a simple and very effective encoding generator.
http://www.seowebsitepromotion.com/obfuscate_email.asp This script offers a variety of encoding and javascript obfuscation techniques.

Email Obfuscation Comparison: