Now eCommerce, that's where you put together a website and allow members of the general public to buy stuff off you. Why you do this is because its easy to get your customers to "self serve" and it means you don't have to do tiresome expensive things like speak to them in person. Even offshore call centres are more expensive than an unattended website. You can pass this economy on to your customer in part (and low prices should encourage more sales), and put the other part in your own pocket as a bit of extra margin.
Why do I feel the need to explain this?
Because so many websites I deal with on a regular basis seem not to get this. If I need to phone, email or use Vulcan telepathy to contact you to get information which is essential to complete the sale then you have flat plain utterly-butterly failed.
www.thetrainline.com I am looking at you right now.
Imagine you are faced with this situation:: You want to book a ticket to travel from the sunny garden city of Nottingham down to Heathrow and then return another day. You are recommended a "Super Saver Return" by the eCommerce site. OK, £61 seems good. Hell, what kind of a world we live in where sixty quid is a reasonable price for a cattle-class ticket, but I digress. The beautiful moment comes as you are about to put your credit card details in and it casually comments "This ticket is subject to travel restrictions".
Now in the fantasy world I inhabit what happens next is you click on the words "travel restrictions" and you get a nice little page pop up which explains what the travel restrictions are for a Super Saver Return Ticket. This is not what happens. So I try searching the site, browsing the site and screaming "YOU SUCK" for a few minutes. The best I can come up with is that (and I paraphrase) "Super Saver Return tickets are subject to restrictions as to when they may be used. Please see your ticket for details". Now excuse me but surely when I have paid my £61 and received my ticket a week later is just a bit late to discover that I cannot travel on my intended return train with the ticket I have bought. There is a "Chat to an adviser" button but this just caused an error message to be displayed. This was the point the shouting started.
Now I have traveled on trains enough to know that there are many times I hear the announcement "passengers intending to travel on the return portion of a super saver return ticket should be aware that they are not valid for this service" so I know that the sort of trains I like to travel on are usually not allowed. Even Google could not help me as National Rail and other such sites all offer veiled advice about same day super savers only being valid for departures before 0:30 a.m. the following day.
In the end I was forced to phone their 10p a minute service line, where after 4 attempts at navigating my way through their call-tree system I was finally routed to a helpful chappy somewhere the other side of the world who was finally able to help me despite my lack of a booking reference number (no, I'm not actually booking until I know I can use the frikkin ticket).
So, the smooth, simple easy process of booking a return train ticket was turned into 20 minutes of abject misery and technorage because of a really simple and to my mind pretty obvious omission of key information needed to make a decision on the suitability of the product offered for sale. People, don't make these basic errors. It makes your customers want to shop elsewhere. When designing websites for customer use you need to think like a customer and think what the customer will need. If your customers have to leave your site to find that info you risk losing them, if they have to phone you to find it you add cost to your sale.
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