As a small business owner in retail I've been fascinated by the Mary Queen of Shops series on BBC2 and I'm sure many of you have too even if your business (like mine) is 100% on-line
But what can on-line businesses (not just retailers) learn from Mary? Well two common themes seem to run throughout all the programmes (excluding Ms Portas' appalling taste in tights)
- Mess
- Lack of Customer Focus
Mess
Almost all the shops were messy with years of neglect and 'make do and mend' patching up their tired layouts and facilities. This is equally true of huge numbers of websites. How many sites do you visit in January or even April which still have 'Last date for Christmas orders' displayed or comments about bad weather and strikes delaying the post? (I saw one site last month apologising for snow causing delays in deliveries – Snow, in June?)
It's all too easy for a site to drift away from the designers vision with the owner deciding to save money by chucking up their own logos and pictures hacked together in MS Paint. After all why pay £100 for a decent update when I can do it from the comfort of my sofa in front of the footie.
It's always a good idea to take a long hard look at your site every couple of months to make sure its still as fresh and shiny as it was and if necessary get the pros in to have a tidy up and sort out for you.
Lack of Customer Focus
The second problem can afflict all sites all of the time and is the one where Mary really comes into her own and is simply caused by the owner thinking like an owner and not like a buyer.
All sites have customers. It doesn't matter if the site is an on-line store or a free social media site, all people who arrive are customers and the site needs to be set up and arranged to suit them rather than set up for the convenience of the owner.
This means that the simple conventions of navigation, checkouts, searching etc etc have to fall into line with the rest of the world. It's no good shunting the checkout function to the very bottom right corner of the page because its "better for your design vision" if the customer is expecting it in the top right corner where it is on 95% of all sites. It's pointless laying out your products alphabetically because "it makes stock checking easier" if your customer wants them grouped by age range because they're looking for baby toys.
Don't let your vision of how your site should look and be operated cloud the view your customer sees. You use your site daily so you know its foibles and quirks, your customer sees it once and any quirks, foibles or unfriendliness are a recipe for them to get fed up and check out your competitor.
Whenever Mary goes into a business she asks the simple question
"What does the customer want?"
And this is something we should all ask ourselves all the time.
At Spice we have experts not only in developing beautiful design visions but can call upon experts who actually run on-line businesses for a living ensuring that we can make sure that the answer to "What does the customer want?" is "your website".
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