Website design - Caz Limited

An introduction to entry level ecommerce

Web commerce is well-established in the public mind, but a good many transactions don't complete because the customer doesn't press the Place Order button. The question is why not?

Since getting information about anonymous customers' surfing habits without resorting to the abhorrent 'spyware' is tricky, we have to make educated guesses:

• If the price with all the trimmings (P&P, gift wrapping etc) is not available until the Place Order button appears, the canny prospect may go through to that point just to get a price. Perhaps making the prices clearer at the outset would be a good idea. How many websites have you visited which don't show prices until you go into the shopping system?
• The website changes from one style to another as it goes to the card entry and verification stage. If the styles are radically different, they may have some doubt about the vendor.
• There may be a high level of people actually trying to defraud the website and the system is actually blocking them, ie making it clear that goods will only be delivered to the card address.

Attempting to resolve these issues

This will depend on the nature of what you are trying to sell.

A small product range

It may be possible to get your whole order form, including card entry, on a single page. This is a mechanism we adopt using JavaScript-based shopping systems which calculate all the values live on the page. If the visitor has JavaScript disabled, then there will be a problem, but we haven't noticed this being an issue in practice. We usually offer the visitor the option to pay by cheque or credit transfer in case they don't like plastic. With many of our customers electing to share our secure certificate, the style of the page between the public and the secure pages is maintained.

Catalogue ranges

A 'proper' shopping basket is mandatory for this, but there's still no reason why JavaScript or Ajax updating shouldn't be used within this to give the customer immediate notification of changes without a page refresh. The back-end system would still have to recalculate the sums - partly against the possibility of somebody trying to spoof the process.

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