axgrindr - 8:32 am on Feb 26, 2007 (gmt 0)

Don't give the customer the impression that email gives real time or close to real time response times.

Why?
Near instant email response to questions during checkout have finalized many sales for us. Sales that might have gone to the competitors if we waited to respond.

And customers are always *very* impressed with instant email responses (I guess because they never get them), the sale almost always goes through immediately after an inquiry has been answered.
I think it also gives them confidence that if they have any questions after purchase that we will be immediately available for them.

get livehelp or some other package.

We tried this and it seemed to slow our site down. We found it was much faster and more user friendly to fire off a quick answer via email rather than force the customer to start up a sluggish chat window.