I'm at one in the same time building the first e-commerce site I've built in ten years and encountering some awful sites where the buying process is fundamentally broken. That got me thinking to ask - what are the most aggravating problems you see.
Here are a few of mine
1. Must register for an account to get shipping cost
2. Terrible form validation. The two I saw recently
- Site won't let me enter my address because it's address lookup insists that I use some form for my town's name that I can't figure out.
- An item that is made in one color only can't get added to the cart and gives the error message "Please select a valid product". I had to call customer service to figure out that I needed to click on the thumbnail image to select the color. This might have been obvious if there were three thumbnails, but I'm not even sure then. The Thumbnails were labelled "Color" not "Select color"
- An old one to make three - numberic only phone numbers. Guys, accept anything, strip any character that is not a digit, *then* validate for phone number (or not - do you know how to validate for every region?).
3. No indication that something is in stock or an estimate of ship date. I placed an order recently where only after it was placed and charged and so on did the order show the item backordered. Uh... I could have placed an order for an item the store doesn't have anywhere.
There are just a couple of mine - what are some of yours. Looking for a list of "worst practices" as it were. The things that make customers want to go away and never come back.
