Question:

Website review- Please Help!?

I just ordered a pair of Jordan Shoes from the website www.cheapjordansla.com.

 

I received a confirmation email from them and they gave me a tracking number for www.EMS.com (Whatever that is) and the confirmation doesn’t work. I realize that the “company” is from China. But I am just wondering if this website is legit and I don’t have to worry about getting scammed.

 

PLEASE HELP!!

 Answer:

There’s zero chance that you will be getting real Nike. The domain name is only 2 months old, which would fit the pattern of fly by night sites that may fold up the second they start showing up in scam reporting websites.

They are using some tricky Chinese domain registration services that do not show any owner information.

Good luck, take that confirmation as a good sign, though if possible to cancel the order…

okay, I feel like there are two sides to this coin.

You see, on one side if I’m looking for a cheap inexpensive website design because my thinking is that this is a starting point and I will test and tweak my way to what my customers respond to best. There’s no reason to jump in and pay $4000 when you don’t even know what direction the website will be heading in when it’s all said and done.

However, if you are wanting a cheap website because you’re thinking you are going to save money and use that money on marketing and beer. Then chances are you’re never going to make any money with your website and you’re better off putting that money into something else. You’ve started off with the wrong attitude.

If it’s all about saving a dollar then you’re not looking at this as an investment but rather as an expense and you are really better off to stop now and save your money. If you won’t invest money in the business chances are you’re not going to be willing to invest the time either.

So on one side of the coin I agree, go cheap figure out what your customers are looking for and then fine tune and tweak your way up to the nice deluxe website design that you want.

However, if you do it to save money then I think you will lose every penny you put into the business. I don’t mean to be mean but I’ve seen it happen too many times to believe that someone not willing to invest very much time or money is going to do anymore then break even when it’s all said and done.

In my last post I talked about how important it was for a site to build trust, and now I would like to talk about how to build that trust.

So…I’ll start with terms, conditions and pricing.

When I say pricing, I am talking about everything from delivery charges to lead times should be clear. The one thing that really upsets me is those nasty surprises arising from hidden costs or well-concealed print.

The first thing I look for when I am going to make a purchase is https:// in the address bar , the padlock icon at the bottom of the browser window and some logos from 3rd party verification services. When I enter the checkout area I am also entering the secure server, so I look for signs of online security.

I look for company contact information from full postal address, to phone numbers and email addresses as well as sales support, which should be on every page. And the more money I am spending, the more I look for these things. After all, you’d have to be an absolutely crazy person to make a purchase off of an unsecure site.

All online retailers have to capture some kind of personal information (such as name, address, email address, telephone number) however, in the UK they must register under the Data Protection Act 199836, stating what they intend doing with the data, ensuring the security of all information held and allowing data subjects access to their data, with an option to delete it on request.

In the US the privacy and security of personal information is covered by a variety of sector- and state-specific, legislation, although there’s no all-encompassing law regulating the acquisition, storage, or use of personal data. Implementing and maintaining Information Security Management Systems (ISMS) certified to international standards38 can ensure compliance with the Data Protection Act in the UK and legal standards for information security management in the US.

I was working on a website last night for customer, and as I was setting up the shopping cart I noticed the buttons at the bottom of the page all say continue as you fill out information.

This got me to thinking about button labeling and should we say what’s going to happen on that page, instead of just saying continue?

Should it be, enter billing information, address information, other words, label the button address for the page you are going to?

Most sites go the way of noncommittal and use the continue or next is button labels. Which might be the best way, as it is less confusing to the customer?  Currently I see people who have tried this and I see things like, the transaction will proceed and the payment debited.

In actual fact they take you to the payment page where you enter your credit card details. They are, in other words, labeled incorrectly. The clear advice here must be to make sure that when you are labeling buttons that your customers know whether the button labeled refers to what the button action does or whether it refers to what is going to happen on the next page.

Shopping Carts

If the customer is prevented from navigating away from the checkout page, by isolating the checkout process, navigation through the checkout process is nearly always in one direction: towards order confirmation. The exception is when someone wants to go back one or more steps to check or to change what they’ve entered. This often proves the downfall of badly designed or inadequately tested checkout processes.

Customers may want to retrace their steps to:

Change the product they’re buying (I’ll go for the more expensive/cheaper version)

Use a different email address (I’ll use my personal email address rather than my work email)

Use a different delivery address (I’ll get it delivered to my neighbor)

Use a different payment method (Not sure if there is enough money in that account)

Check the details previously entered (Which address/card/delivery service did I specify?)

However, something to keep in mind is trying to limit the need for the customer to click back and forth in the checkout process. This is best achieved through a persistent checkout summary – carrying forward a summary of the information entered in previous steps of the checkout. This persistent checkout summary can also facilitate navigation back and forth within the checkout.

The main recommendation for navigation in checkout, however, is to make sure the browser back button works in the way the customer expects it to. Checkouts can get this wrong in two different ways:

A) Warning messages
B) not taking customer to where they think they will be taken.

I purchase a lot of stuff online so I see a lot of warning messages, like – the previous page, which the customer is asking to be reloaded, has data to the server during the initial page-load process. In some cases, the technically savvy user will want to re-POST the data and in other circumstances they won’t – hence you warn them what is happening and ask what they want to do.

To the average e-commerce customer, a warning is only a cause for concern, possibly to the extent of abandoning their purchase. They don’t understand the warning, they can’t decide what to do, in case they get it wrong… and most importantly of all, this sort of warning is irrelevant in an e-commerce checkout.

Every time checkout data is submitted by pressing the continue button this data will be saved in the database. Resending POST data doesn’t matter because it is all saved anyway. So, what do we do to avoid such warnings?

There are a variety of solutions involving page redirects and, if necessary, the use of GET or session variables in place of POST variables.

A different problem that arises when customers use the browser back button is that it sometimes doesn’t take the customer where they expect to go. This is mostly a problem when AJAX is used to step customers through a checkout process without moving from one web page to the next.

Using the back button will take customers to the last page they had looked at, which in an AJAX-driven checkout is likely to be the shopping cart page – very annoying if you were on the fourth step of a five-step checkout and wanted to go back to step three!

There are many different technical work-around to this problem.

Taking customers to unexpected places is not just a problem with the browser back button – navigation buttons/links on the page must also be checked for incorrect or legacy URLs. This also applies to those sites that allow navigation via the progress bar. It should go without saying that allowing customers to navigate around the checkout should be possible without the loss of previously entered information.