Image by CCBImages via Flickr
Being a former commercial pilot now turned PC enthusiast, I enjoy ‘virtual flying’ on Microsoft’s Flight Simulator from time to time. Over the weekend, I was reading a magazine which gave a favourable review to an ‘add on’ aircraft for Flight Simulator. It was from a UK company, and it looked really nice so I thought that I would purchase this particular add on, which was around AU$45.
I noticed that this company had a website, and that their add on was available for purchase on their online store and immediately downloadable for instant ‘play’. Sounds great, so off I went to their website yesterday morning. Their home page actually had a large, eye catching banner promoting this new aircraft amongst all their offerings, with a ‘click here’ button for more details. Wonderful, I thought. This shouldn’t take me long at all!
Uh Oh, clicking the banner only took me to their main online catalogue with a bunch of unrelated stuff listed in front of me.
Mistake #1: If you are promoting a special in an ad or on your home page, at least link to that item’s detail page when users click the banner or ad.
I had to dig down the navigation menus on the left to see the product I wanted on a third level menu category. Interesting, when you consider that this vendor only had about 10 products to sell in total.
Mistake #2: Just because your online catalogue system allows you to have hierarchical product categorisation, it doesn’t mean you should always use it, especially if you only have a handful of products to begin with.
Now we were getting somewhere. I found the product I wanted, and added it to my shopping cart, then clicked the ‘checkout’ button. Very straightforward here and nothing out of the expected.
Next, I am asked to create an account on their web store to carry out the purchase. Why? This is probably the only thing I will ever buy from these people. I already have about a thousand accounts strewn over web sites all over cyberspace that I will probably never ever use again. Why do I need to create another?
Mistake #3: Don’t force your customers to have to create accounts on your site. Allow casual buyers to breeze through the purchasing process as quickly as possible.
Oh well, at least the form asking for details in order to create the account is not too long. As I am filling the information, and thinking of yet another password, I notice a lot of ads down the right hand side with some of their other products that they are trying to entice me to buy. Not a problem – I have nothing against upselling.
When I get to the bottom of the form, I notice a drop down asking me for my currency of choice. Seeing as all the pricing on the site was in UK Pounds Sterling, and given the recent currency fluctuations, I thought it would be nice to confirm my pricing in Australian Dollars. So I change the drop down. Immediately, the entire page resets to show me the ‘upsell’ items in Aussie Dollars. Aaaargh! The rest of the form that I painstakingly filled in has been reset!
Mistake #4: If you are going to have a form field that resets the page, either have it at the very top of the form, before the user has to enter anything, or else use some other AJAX style technology that can refresh parts of the page without ‘undoing’ all the customers other hard work.
Take 2 on the form – at least everything looks OK now, and I can see my purchase in AUD which is nice. I go to process the payment, and I am confronted with a stark MySQL database error message saying that there was an error on their payment processing gateway.
Mistake #5: If you are going to use a third party payment gateway, which 99% of online stores use – at least make sure the service is reliable.
Fortunately, when I went back and then reclicked the ‘Process Payment’ button again, it brought up the payment gateway window asking me to approve the purchase. However, when I clicked the ‘Approve’ button, I was immediately confronted with an error telling me that the currency I chose is not supported. Huh?
Mistake #6: For a seamless experience, make sure that the settings on your online shop are carried through to your payment gateway provider – in this case, making sure that they could accept the same currencies that you offered in your store.
So I go back and change the currency back to GBP, which of course then resets my entire form, forcing me to re-enter my details a third time. Things are beginning to get tedious, but I really want that plane! This time I can get through and approve the purchase. It is at this stage I notice that the credit card type that I normally reserve for online purchases is not accepted.
Mistake #7: Make sure that the credit card types your accept are shown clearly on your site – preferably even before the customer starts the buying process.
No biggie, I simply used another card type that I have and the payment gets accepted. I am immediately redirected to the download page on the vendor’s website. Things are starting to look up. I also immediately get an email from the payment gateway site with my serial number for the product. Hooray.
One download later, I install the package using my serial number. Almost trembling in anticipation, I fire up Flight Simulator, and Zounds! – my aircraft is there and waiting to be selected, so I (figuratively) jump in, strap on and fire up the engines and blast into the sky. But wait – what is this timer on the top of the screen counting down from 300 seconds? I find out 5 minutes later when the counter hits 0. It turns out that this add on pack has an anti piracy function built it. Apparently (when I read the README file afterwards – I mean, WHO reads the README file when you are installing? I don’t) I have to activate the product first using their activation utility.
Ok, I have no problem against protection of intellectual property and preventing software theft, so I launch their activation utility, which shows me my serial number I entered earlier, plus a secret hash code, and a space for me to enter in my new activation code, which apparently I will need to phone or email the vendor to get. Say again?
I look around the activation screen for a ’send email’ or ‘auto activation’ button, but cannot see one. There is a ‘help’ button and when I click this, I am advised that I should retype in the numbers into an email or take a screenshot of the activation screen and email to the vendor. What?? Hello! This is 2008. Surely you can send an email or activation request from the activation utility screen?? I mean, even Microsoft has been doing this for years.
No time. I hastily capture the screen and attach to an email and send off to the vendor. I figure that this is going to be a manual process on their part. It was only 10am Australian Central Standard time, which made it around 1am in the UK, so I was expecting to wait at least 7 hours for a response.
Mistake #8: If you are going to have an activation process on your software, make it as painless and as automatic as possible to avoid inconveniencing your customer, especially AFTER they have paid good money and bought your package.
Mistake #9: Don’t force everyone to work the same time zone as you. If you are going to have customers that are in a zone 12 hours different from you, set up interim procedures to ensure that they feel they are getting instantaneous service. A simple autoresponder would even go a long way to helping.
Sure enough, at about 8pm at night my time, about 10 hours later, I get a nice email from the vendor with my activation code. There is also a handy tip at the bottom of the email requesting that users of Windows Vista (which incidentally I was installing on) should visit an article on their support forums for some installation tips. Good pre-emptive strategy.
Only, when I click on the link for the article, I get a message saying that the article does not exist. What? Further investigation on my part reveals that I have to register as a member on their support forums to see any article at all. What? I am expected to create yet another user account on the net just to get support?? To cap it off, the user account I created on their online store does not work on the support forums.
Mistake #10: Don’t force your users to log in just to get support. This information should be ‘out there’ for everyone to see regardless of whether they are a customer of yours already or not. If you must make them register, at least do it for posting new topics. Don’t lock them out of reading existing articles. Sheesh!
Mistake #11: If you have to make people create an account to use your site, at least make it transparent across all areas of your site to avoid two or more usernames to get to different areas of your site. Abolish the account creation process for casual users who will only deal with you once.
So, finally, following the advice of the article, I manage to get my add on aircraft working properly on Flight Simulator X. I am certainly having fun with it, but looking back, this should have been a painless 10 minute experience, but instead had turned into a gruelling, painful 10 hour saga.
If you run an online shop, or are thinking of starting one up, please heed these mistakes. In my case, a great product and a great vendor was hampered by a less than ordinary experience – don’t let this happen to your customers.
Note: I dont claim to be perfect myself. Thinking about it, I make about half of the mistakes above on my own site and software products. Just goes to show that there is always room to reflect and improve!
Another fairly quiet, low key event today, is that Swedish company 
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