Christmas Shopping Online – for myself
Gift-wrapping, delivery options, world wide present giving, it is all so easy nowadays with the e-commerce websites falling over themselves to please us. Yet they still get it all so wrong.
90% of e-commerce websites are designed to sell to you and you alone, the other 10% are designed so that you can send others gifts/cards/goods, both miss the point.
Christmas is a time of giving, this much we know, but how do you cater for a marketplace that for 4 weeks of the year is entirely given over to giving instead of receiving, websites are falling far short on expectations and often it is the biggest sites that perform worst.
Amazon, they have an incredible system, you buy your books, they come from different suppliers, they all are sent individually from different warehouses to different addresses, gift wrapped or not, but no-where can you specify this is a Christmas Present, nowhere can you make the sender (in this case the warehouse) realise that this book is not for you, but your grandmother/aunt/sister/daughter. Amazon have missed the point, they have also missed the massive opportunity to capitalise on that market… for example the email that arrives on 1st November and says ‘Last year you order x for y’…
Ebay, it does its job, you win, you pay, you can delivery to a person or address of your choice, but hang on a sec, your granny receives the parcel, looks blank and says ‘I didn’t order this, I wonder where it came from?’, it has happened to often, there is an added negative as you the sender have no way of knowing if the thing arrived safely, yes you can get the email that says it’s been sent, you can even get the email that says it should have arrived, but actually the only way to really know is to call up the receiver and ask ‘did you get it?’. This is both embarrassing and self congratulatory as you appear to be looking for a thank you.
Supermarket websites like Tesco’s and Virgin Wines do little better, you can join their clubs – but actually you don’t want to, you just want to send the gift and be done with it, web designers are missing the point and it is so easily fixed. In fact it is pure laziness not to fix it.
The fix is to include a small tick box, or drop down menu saying the reason for the purchase. How marketers would love to why people buy what they buy, why can they not just ask. Ticking a box marked ‘This is a Christmas Present’ can then go on to offer so many more options to the user. The box only needs to show up between 1st November and 6th January, you can make the box changeable over time, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Ramadan, all happen at a fixed time of year and are therefore pre-programmable into a web application.
As e-commerce builder we set our standard by websites like Amazon and Ebay, navigation, layout, CSS, even delivery options, yet giving is entirely overlooked. I know many people who do lots of Christmas shopping online, but have everything delivered to themselves, so they can ensure its safe arrival and oversea the giving part.
If e-commerce is to continue its relentless climb upwards then this is an area websites can significantly improved upon.