Editor's Blog Section

From Editor's Rant column, issue 50 – winter 2008-9

If you’re an online retailer and you’re sensible enough to offer information about delivery at the top of your home page, there’s one chance in three that you’ll make the mistake of hiding this behind a Help button.

This is just one of many frustrating findings to emerge from Snow Valley’s latest Delivery Report (see story list for issue 50). It found that the second most popular name for a link to delivery information is “Customer service” (another obfuscation).

Arguably this speaks volumes about the failure by a wide spectrum of online retailers to understand the importance of delivery.

The term “help” implies that the user already has a problem. People click a Help button when they’re floundering, and you don’t enter a retail web site expecting to be floundering, do you? You expect to find what you want by yourself, and manage your interaction with the site on your own terms.

What you do want is clear signposts – for instance, a Delivery button. How many people are more likely to move to another site than click a Help button? A lot, we suspect.

It gets worse. Although delivery information is one of the first things consumers look for on a retail , on over half of the sites examined by Snow Valley, typing “delivery” into the search box produced nothing useful: a frightening example of the way technical people can still hobble the way web sites work.