When was the last time you went through your website’s checkout process as a customer?
If you haven’t then I highly recommend you do it.
Interacting with your site only from the backend won’t let you know the user experience.
Conversion Crimes offers a second pair of eyes to find out all the bumpy parts of your website that might be driving customers away
If you need help with this, head over to http://oasisoptimization.com/
——————-
OK, first of all, I hope that they do, but I think we’ve all been there or you’re like me and you just want to test, you want to know maybe where the bumpy parts are at. So if that’s something that you haven’t done, then I highly suggest you try it yourself. Have you used your own check-out service? Have you drink your own Kool-Aid? Go and do that and check it out. There’s a reason that I “mystery shop” new clients. I go through and when I start working with them, I go and buy a product.
If I can’t use it, I call a friend, call a family member who I think would be interested and I order it to them. But what I do is take screenshots or I take notes or I’ll record like a loom video of going through their process, does anything stand out all the way from just visiting the website, how is the load time to selecting the product, was it easy to find? Did I find the variation or the size I wanted?
And then, of course, critically, the checkout process. Was a checkout process in any way confusing? Once I purchased, did it make sense? Did they send me an order confirmation email? Did the page I landed on make sense? Did it have any useful information? Anything like that. And this can be really, really important and it’s even better. It’s a low hanging fruit a lot of time.
The stuff is not complicated, but I find out that a lot of business owners and understandably we get so involved in our business we’re not thinking of it from the user experience standpoint. And it may not be that complicated. There may not be something we think like, oh, maybe something’s broken with the code or we need a better theme. And it just turns out that the process sucks and we haven’t used it ourselves. And again, this is something that could be time consuming, but we need to remind ourselves that that’s something important to do. Now, if you want fresh eyes on it, I am happy to help.
But also there’s a really cool service out there you can visit at conversioncrimes.com. It’s something that I’m going to start using and recently had a talk with the owner and that’s part of what they do in addition to offering a lot of conversion rate optimization services, but also going through, you can kind of tell them, lay out a test like, hey, here’s what I’d like you to look for. Go ahead and start the checkout. Do this, do that, find this thing and they record it.
And will also tell you, just going through what was the process like. Did they have any issues? What did they notice? Where were the hiccups at? Did they get confused on a button or things like that? All that stuff that can add up to people leaving your website. And maybe it’s not that they don’t like it, maybe it’s just that it can be hard to use and they’re going to go somewhere else. So anyway, that is it.
This can be a really simple one on the very simple end, I would tell you to, hey, maybe once a month, once every quarter at the least go through. And I use the phrase earlier, but drink your own Kool-Aid, go through and either start to checkout or go ahead and purchase the product. How long has it been since you’ve kind of done this for yourself and see what it’s like from the customer side or get someone to do it for you and tell you about it.
And from there you can find the low hanging fruit. If your website is slow to load, you can work on that. Maybe your checkout process is really confusing. Work at each step, start at the beginning, fix it, go on to the next step, fix it and go from there. Hire you someone like conversioncrimes.com to go through and do this for you and write up a report and help you do that. So if I can help you with any of this, please get in touch with me at Oasisoptimization.com.