Something counter intuitive is happening on our e-commerce site
A bit of background: our site (selling reading glasses) is essentially a test bed for assessing e-commerce optimising software before we recommend it to clients.
Although it’s not a fully fledged commercial website, we attract enough customers to make some useful discoveries, for example that customers often don’t know they can click on images so you have to be more explicit about where the links are.
As part of the testing we’ve streamlined the order process, minimising the number of inputs a customer needs to make but despite this, we’ve started getting a lot of phone calls. You’d think the number of calls would go down if the online ordering process had got easier, but no.
The phone calls are from customers in their 50s and 60s – as you’d expect for a site selling reading glasses – who are happy to order from us but simply prefer to complete the transaction on the phone.
Fair enough, so we’ve responded by adding a telephone booking line and are now tracking that to see what difference it makes to our orders.
It’s a reminder to us and other e-commerce operations out there that ultimately your audience will tell you how they want to transact with you (if you’re listening) and while you may think you know what your customers want, the reality may surprise you.