Proof in the pudding (& the crow)

Don’t you HATE it when customers call complaining they are having a problem and you can’t duplicate it? It doesn’t always happen, you may go a whole month without hearing about it. But trust me.. it’s like termites, if you actually have a customer who’s motivated enough to call, there are ten more who just abandoned their carts who didn’t bother.

So lately we’ve had customers calling and saying that when they are ready to checkout, they are getting a message saying “Your Shopping Cart is Empty”. However, Lee Ann has been running orders for those folks all week without experiencing any problems. I kept going in and couldn’t get the message myself. I couldn’t chalk it up to user error, since we got at least 5 calls inside of a week.

I called my technical support, and they said it was a Miva problem, contact them. So I was off to Miva, and checked their message board, and found some REALLY useful information about how to clean up my store, and more. I can’t believe in all the years I’ve been running my business that I’ve never done that. My shopping cart doesn’t have long wait times anymore. It was a simple fix, see My Miva store hangs periodically. Why? (This is a big problem that causes duplicate orders since people are not patient, so if you have Miva, read it!)

So back to my empty cart issue… I found nothing at Miva, however with all of my reading, it occurred to me that I had made some brilliant changes the weekend before. I had made my checkout button more obvious to my customers. I did this sort of on a whim in my massive store redesign, which I have yet to blog about, and is not yet complete. I had put a CHECKOUT option just above my RETURN TO SHOPPING button in my Shopping Cart. AND HERE IT IS…. I NEVER CHECKED IT! I’m an IDIOT.

I had pasted the wrong code into that link.
I was able to not only duplicate the problem once I realized this, but I found it in other places, too! And the reason we couldn’t duplicate it was because we use the original checkout button at the top of the page out of habit. My biggest mistake was that I didn’t test it, and I lost a lot of business because of it. I was so impressed with myself last weekend when I made what I thought were insightful changes to my store, and shopping cart. I tried to make it more user friendly. Miva 5 allows you to go in and manually changed your dynamic pages. The problem was that I made so many changes, and spent so much time making it look pretty, that I didn’t think to make sure it was put to use, that it worked.

This has happened to me before, and I didn’t learn my lesson. Test, test, test! Take my advice, and don’t lose a whole week of business because you were too busy to try the pudding, or you’ll be like me, and have to sample the crow instead!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 5:15 am and is filed under eCommerce Entries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Michelle Lambert is co-owner of an online business called Red Hats By You. Lambert handles all of the internet responsibilities related to designing and maintaining their ecommerce presence.

Michelle has been an Art Director at McCabe, Duval & Associates in Portland, Maine where she specialized in multimedia and print design. Currently, Michelle works from her home in Michigan where she lives with her husband Chris and two children, Maddie and Grady.