Why A Telephone Number Might Be Damaging Your Store’s Potential
Monday, April 2nd, 2007 11:25 am | Design & Layout, Articles, General
RSS Feed
Digg This
One of the biggest mistakes online shops make is not displaying a telephone number, or hiding it away on the contact page.
If you plan to make more sales and jump ahead of the competition, make one simple change today.
Put your telephone number in your store’s header.
Displaying your telephone number so it can clearly be seen only takes a few minutes to do and can make a BIG difference. Here’s why.
Because customers always have questions
You might now how your shop functions, but new visitors won’t. If they can’t work out how to do something, give them somewhere to turn.
Sure they could contact you via an email, but often they want answers NOW. An email response, even within the hour, won’t stop them buying from your competitor.
One of the most common questions I get is ‘I change an item’s quantity in the shopping cart quantity, but it always resets to 0. Please HELP!!!’.
This is a classic case of osCommerce not being intuitive for shoppers to use. They simply don’t realise they have to click the UPDATE button after they change the quantity value.
But once they experience this ‘problem’ for the 6th time in a row, the frustration sets in. They’ll abandon their shopping cart faster than a bowl of Doritos disappears at a house party.
Providing telephone support gives them quick access to the answer they need, and saves you a lost sale.
Because customers need reassurance
How do I know that your store is genuine? How do I know you are not going to rip me off? What do I do if I want to return an item? Are you going to go out of business next week?
These are a few of the questions that run through a potential buyer’s mind when they visit your site. You need to convince them that placing an order with you is safe.
Having a telephone number on the site helps do this. You can tell a lot about a business by their phone system. Do they answer calls promptly? Do they operate a large call center? Or is it just some dodgy sounding bloke on a mobile?
Reassure your customers and you will see an improved checkout conversion rate.
Because things break
osCommerce is a robust platform, but things do go wrong. Corrupt PHP files and database errors are par for the course. And because you are not on your site 100% of the time, you may not even notice the errors occuring.
For example, think about your shop. If, right now, your checkout process stopped working, how long would it take for you to notice? 5 minutes? An hour? 24 hours? Think how many orders that would cost you, and how much profit you would lose.
By having a telephone support number, your customers can ALERT YOU to any problems with your site. They act as the warning system that catch errors you miss, allowing you to correct them quickly.
Why can’t this happen by email? It can. But customers are far more likely to call and say ‘Your site is broken’ than spend 5 minutes writing an email that they can’t be sure will ever be read by someone who cares.
Remember, customers are purpose driven creatures. The only reason they want to inform you about a problem on your site is to ensure THEY GET THEIR ORDER. Speaking to a real person is more likely to achieve that goal than emailing.
Conclusion
I hope I’ve convinced you that email support alone is not good enough. You need to place a telephone number in a prominent position on your site.
Make the change today and reap the rewards.
Enjoyed reading this post? Get more delivered directly to you.
[…] (more…) […]
Why A Telephone Number Might Be Damaging Your Store’s Potential | Son Of Byte - Web Design & Development | March 3rd, 2010 at 2:25 am