September 18, 2009 by Simon King
Lesson 2: Keep it Simple
Always remember, there is only ever a quick tap of the back button stopping a customer from navigating away from your site in frustration. Online customers know they have a choice and thus exhibit a very low tolerance for extra hassle.
Isolate what the bare minimum you need from the customer is and ONLY ask them to supply that information. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to get extra information out of them like ‘how they heard about the site’ or getting them to ‘rate their experience’ – you might get some valuable information, though is it really worth losing sales? If you really must have this information, get it after the customer’s credit card has been billed.
It’s not just about what information you gather, but how you gather that information. For instance, it’s more hassle for a customer to fill in card expiry dates by name of the month as opposed to number, as they have to mentally convert the number on the card to an actual month. This may seem like nitpicking but you really should be interrogating each part of your process in this level of detail to make it as easy as possible.
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