BizAims

1. Delivery Charges / Returns Policies are Difficult to Find

Consider the site that sells jeans. After selecting the chosen pair of jeans the customer needs to proceed to checkout in order to take a look on the delivery charges. Afterwards the customer needs to quit the checkout process in order to find the information on returns policy of the website. The policy is hidden in the help section in the footer. Surely a lot of customers would abandon such website  when faced with such problems.

2. Obligatory Registration

Not so long ago FutureNow found that half of "top" on-line retailers ask for registration from their customers before performing the checkout. In such a way companies create additional barriers for the customers and cause them to abandon their purchase.

The restored website of the Cotswold Company is a great example of a good practice – people visiting the site may consider logging in, registering or they may go straight to the checkout.

3. Bad Visibility on Search Engines

This mistake is a big one. Some brands instead of considering making their site visible on search engines try simply to create a great website. Thus there are e-commerce websites that can only be found on search engines by the name of the brand.

Some brands who did not take into consideration their mistakes, and this one in particular, may end up being whether totally unseen or very far from the top hundred search results on Google.

4. Say NO to Pop-ups

Pop-ups are very annoying. When a customer opens a website that sells, for instance clothes, the off-topic pop-up may shutter the customer's enthusiasm to continue shopping. Every time one opens the same site a pop-up appears and that's frustrating, unless you have a pop-up blocker. Often pop-ups slow down the load of the page. A website considering the strategy of applying pop-ups may surely "force" its customers to end up their browsing just when it was about to start.

5. Too Much of Flash

A lot of Flash on a website may be harmful for customer's experience and besides, Google's robots do not really enjoy Flash either.

One of the latest examples of websites with too much Flash is River Island. The company's website is fully Flash, which means that a lot of disabled people cannot surf through it.

Websites with a lot of Flash may be slow on loading, thus making customers search for and download the latest version of Flash Player.

6. Displaying Items that are Out of Stock

When a product is out of stock then it should not be available for purchase. These items should be whether removed or unavailable for adding into customers' baskets, otherwise the process starts to be quite annoying when customers finally reach the checkout and stumble upon the note "Product Not In Stock." Consider informing customers about the out-of-stock products on the product page.

It's much better to show any relevant data such as returns policy on the product page. Thus a website will serve well its customers by saving their time to look around the site and make everything comfortable enough for a purchasing process.