15 Online Shopping Pet Peeves

Being an avid online shopper, I purchase from several ecommerce websites. The majority of these websites are useful and effective. But there are a few that have annoying features.

Here are my top 15 pet peeves.

1. Slow Site

A site that’s slow is a complete turn off. I switch to a different site unless I want a specialized product that’s only sold there. Slow, for me, is a page that requires more than three seconds to load. Unfortunately, according to a current Marketing Land report, the average page load time for the best 2,000 U.S. retail websites is 7.25 seconds.

Create the home page and key landing pages quicker to load to avoid losing customers.

2. No Support for Guest Checkout

It’s important for retailers to identify sellers and customize their experiences, to increase the odds of closing a sale. But this shouldn’t be done at the cost of losing the consumer by not supplying guest checkout. Many sites still need shoppers to make accounts or log in using their Facebook accounts.

Allow guest checkout and give a choice to establish an account during the checkout process after the shopper has entered her shipping and billing details.

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3. Incorrect Product Recommendations

Most retail websites have some type of recommendations performance — though the logic used to display these recommendations varies from site to site. It is annoying when sites continue to advocate a product even after the item was purchased. Various other websites base their recommendations on a shopper’s search phrases, his surfing history or preferences. These recommendations aren’t always helpful.

The best way to prevent annoying shoppers with meaningless recommendations would be to offer you the possibility to indicate whether the recommendation was helpful or not. This may be done using a little icon overlaid on top of the suggested product’s picture that asks the shopper if the recommendation was useful.

4. Misleading Product Availability

Ecommerce sites occasionally allow a shopper to add a product to the cart and go through the whole check out process prior to displaying a warning about the product being”out of inventory.”

This is annoying. If a item isn’t in stock, it ought to be displayed on the item page or before the item could be added to the cart.

5. Pricing Variations

Some of those omnichannel retailers that I store with price the identical product differently based on whether it’s online or at the physical store. I know that the cost of carrying the item differs across channels. However, these times when consumers use multiple channels, it’s vital to provide consistent pricing for products whatever the channel.

6. Complicated Use of Promotion Codes

Promotions are a popular way to entice shoppers to a website. However, it is frustrating if the advertising code may be used only if rules or terms are satisfied. As an example, I’ve received promotion codes in mails and when I try them on the website, a message appears saying that this item is already available (so I am unable to use the advertising code), or the promotion code isn’t yet active, or advertising code only works on a subset of goods.

Promotion codes are useful only if they’re simple to use.

7. Product Page without Pricing

A brick-and-mortar store doesn’t have products on shelves which aren’t available for sale. So it’s frustrating to look for a product on site and then discover it isn’t for sale.

If there’s a product displayed on the website, there needs to be a way to buy it.

8. Deficiency of Channel Integration

Consumers are getting to be omnichannel shoppers. It’s annoying when, by way of instance, a product added to a cart with the mobile website doesn’t appear in the desktop website. Or something purchased online can’t be returned in the shop.

Omnichannel is here to stay and it’s necessary to have a seamless integration across channels to avoid customer frustration.

9. Too Much Email

Unfortunately there are a number of sites that don’t respect their shopper’s time and send many mails for merchandise campaigns, news, product releases, and much more. Sometimes, the website doesn’t even have an option for a customer to opt out of these emails.

Too much email is an easy way to shed shoppers.

10. Needing to Log In Repeatedly

Though I don’t enroll or change passwords often, it’s still annoying if a website asks me to log in when I’ve just registered or changed my password. It needs to be simple to authenticate a user based on the password which was just set up rather than introducing another measure.

11. Not Secure

Most shoppers don’t pay much attention to safety characteristics of a website. However, a frequent online shopper will see the difference if your website doesn’t support a strong password policy or permits credit card information to be transmitted without using SSL. A customer account is readily hacked or a credit card may be redeemed if the website isn’t secure.

12. Browser Favoritism

Some retailers don’t take the opportunity to check their site on various browsers. They assume that if the website works on one browser, it is going to work the exact same way on others. I encounter this often, as I am a Apple Safari user.

Retailers should review their analytics occasionally to identify their customers’ browsers and be sure that their website works on all them.

13. Bad Customer Service

A fantastic customer support staff resolves issues quickly and ensures telephone hold times are short. Sites that don’t have such policies and teams struggle to keep customers.

This is a simple fix and should be a priority for many retailers.

14. Not Mobile Friendly

Some websites still don’t work on mobile devices, or they partly function on these devices. I use my phone and tablet to the majority of my online shopping and research. I much prefer sites that are mobile friendly.

Retailers don’t have any excuse to not support a mobile friendly website, since there are several easy-to-use tools that could instantly convert a site to a mobile friendly version.

15. Third-party Payment Options Hosted on Another Website

Ecommerce sites often support different techniques to pay for a purchase. Some of the payment methods take customers to a third party website for checkout and leave them there. Sometimes, there’s absolutely no confirmation that the payment went through and the purchase was successful. The only choice is to await the website to send an order confirmation email.

Have you got the exact same pet peeves or do you want to increase the list? Please share by commenting below.