Be a Customer for a Day

Thanksgiving is three weeks away.

I’ll say that again, Thanksgiving is only three weeks away.  While you’re working through your holiday promotions, special offers, and gift offerings, let’s take some time and look at these offerings through your customer’s eyes. The best way to do this is to become one.

Walk through your order process.  

Browse, research, and review your product list pages and product detail pages.  What changes and additions would your customers find helpful in making purchasing decisions? I suggest reading 6.5 easy fixes to the wine list page and 5 tips to effective ecommerce merchandising for some helpful tips.

Another idea is to add an up-front shipping widget to display shipping costs, or even better, offer a holiday shipping promotion.

(Example: Castello di Amarosa's shipping widget)

Place an order completely through your checkout process. Look objectively for any barriers. For example, ensure your calls to actions and buttons guide the checkout process. We tout button color contrast, but placement matters as well.

Finally, review the complete process of fulfillment, shipment, and delivery. Send a gift of wine to a client or a friend, and ask them about their experience. 

Go online, buy, and compare.

Have a few packages sent to your home and analyze the experience. Did you get an order confirmation, look at order tracking, was the order shipped in time? How does the experience on your site compare with ones from Amazon, Zappos, or Apple? It will be the one of the rare times you can call shopping at work legit.

All done, now what?

You’ve made product updates, a few small changes to your order process, and analyzed other purchase processes, now what?

• Continue reviewing your data, to see how the changes take effect. Read How to be a Web Analytics Rockstar.
• Prep your support team; make sure your offline and online efforts match.
• Enjoy a glass of wine.

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Are there any ideas I missed?  Feel free to post some below.