think TRIBE: Blog

“We won’t see retailers that don’t have transactional websites in 10 years time”

Internet Retailing Magazine write in The Key To Retail 2010.

10 years? Why so cautious?

Any day now – would be my take on that.

Of course, as other folk have recorded, despite market growth, the credit crunch is impacting retailers online.

So it’s clear that the online commercial environment is set to become far more competitive in the near future, and as a result the web customer is likely to have higher expectations regarding their online experience. Respectively we can expect to see an increase in so called ‘web rage’ as users display even lower tolerance levels with site errors and slow page delivery; when there are so many other websites a mouse-click away vying for their attention, and more than willing to take their business, customers are under no obligation to remain brand loyal.

It sounds like it should be the first metric we all want from our website – what’s the money value of Lost Sales due to problems on the site this month? And how do we fix them, and not lose the same again next month?

I’m talking about problems in the final delivery – the website platform itself – where we’ve brought buyers to the site and then let them down through any number of root causes: sporadic technology glitches, treacly slow experience for maybe 10% of users, code upgrades that killed functionality for a few precious hours and so on.