I tried to place an order from Nordstrom the other day. (I won’t even begin to bore you with the details of how they DUMPED MY FLIPPING CART AFTER LEAVING THE SITE FOR EXACTLY SIX MINUTES.)
This is what I got when I attempted to check out. (God only knows who wrote this copy. I thought Solzhenitsyn was dead.)
This is the type of thing customers HATE.
Actually, that’s a lie.
They don’t even get a chance to hate it as they leave IMMEDIATELY after seeing it. (Or get lost trying to solve the problem, which is even more exasperating.)
Every site has this kind of stuff. Your mission, whether or not you choose to accept it, is to find it on your site and fix it.
Begin by looking at your exit pages.
Now.
Today.
As in right this very minute.
By the way, two minutes after I posted this, Jason Billingsley (@jbillingsley on Twitter) commented that what he got from the post is that I browse with my cookies off. Yeah, well, I adore Jason (he is truly one of my favorite people in this industry) but he’s also a smart ass. No, I don’t browse with my cookies off. They’re always on. This was an internal conflict with IE, which didn’t happen on Firefox. Companies know this stuff by looking at their exit pages. Period. End of story.
This is a classic case of a marketer making it difficult for a customer to give over his/her money.
It is also a classic case of IT overriding both marketing AND finance’s goals. Or maybe it’s a case of marketing overriding finance’s goals by demanding that customer surrender not just their shekels but their life’s stories as well.
Sometimes the pencil pushers with the well-worn HP 12C calculators get it right. Trying to collect customer data DISCRETELY is a fair-enough endeavor. Not processing an order because a marketer simply must know the 25 sites browsed before submitting credit card information ain’t.
Memo to Nordstrom’s: When I publish my autobiography, buy a copy and append it to my customer file. And I have no intention of publishing my autobiography, so I guess we won’t be doing business.
The Herve Leger dress I was considering really didn’t flatter my form anyway.