Bill Myers - February 19, 2010

Do you require your customers do impossible things before they can order from you? You might be, without even realizing it. Read this tip to see what I mean.

One of the quickest ways to drive away potential customers is to require them to do something that costs them time, money or aggravation.

Here's an example.

A visitor to my web site asked me why he wasn't getting any orders from his web sales pages.

I checked his product pages and immediately saw the problem.

The only way a customer could place an order was to find and print out an order form from his web site, fill it out with the correct product numbers and prices, and then FAX the form back to the company to place an order.

That's right.

The burden was on the customer to find the order form, print it out, fill it out with correct information, and fax it back.

Talk about creating a system sure to drive away potential customers!

Not to mention the negative image created by not having an online order system (which is a real problem).

The requirement that customers must FAX the order pretty much eliminates everyone who doesn't own a fax machine - and that's about 90% of the population these days.

The solution to the problem was easy.

Offer customers an online order process with the ease of a one-click buying.

Moral: Most consumers no longer have 8 track tape decks, betamax video recorders, or fax machines. So don't require them to use equipment they don't have just to do business with you.

One final point - if you do need to send a fax and don't have a fax machine, consider using http://faxzero.com/ .

I've used that service several times and it works quite well. And it is free.