How To Be An Ecommerce Jerk

We’ve all been to ecommerce sites that were just terrible. These online businesses often failed to adhere to the eight proven methods that the leading ecommerce stores use to beat the odds. Of course, not all sites can be amazing. If you’ve ever wondered how to be an ecommerce jerk with your store, this list will deliver an invigorating and spiteful, step-by-step guide.

If you really want to be the biggest jerk in ecommerce, then force your customers to only be able to use one payment option. Studies have found that customers want to have access to as many payment options as possible, including options like PayPal, explains Entrepreneur Magazine. The surest way to push these unruly customers over to your competition is by limiting ways that you can accept their cash.

You know that one day, where you were shopping online and you found that perfect item from your smartphone… only to realize that you couldn’t do a guest checkout. Boy did that frustrate you. There you were, filling out all of these crazy details to create an account you didn’t want because some jerk didn’t add this feature to the shopping cart. If you are like me (and 26% of all online shoppers, according to Econsultancy), you’d simply abandon the shopping cart and move on.

We’ve all been there. At the online store that never ends. Click this. Click that. Click until your fricking fingers are about to come out of their sockets. And during the process, about 35% of us gave up, gave our fingers a rest, abandoned the shopping cart and called it a day. According to QuickSprout, a three-click checkout process improves conversions by as much as 66%. Be sure to avoid making it easy for customers to checkout if you are an ecommerce jerk.

One of the most frustrating things you will ever come across are the ecommerce jerks who never update their out-of-stock products. You get your hopes up high and mighty, only to find out that the product is not in stock. If you were nice, Rank Sharks says, you’d use a plugin to provide an actionable sequence where the customer can find out when the product will be back in stock, and where they could even preorder it.

The biggest jerks in ecommerce care little about what happens to you after you have made the sale. After all, they are not focused on the future sales, retention, loyalty, word-of-mouth or growth. They just want your cash now. Right now. Making returns difficult and charging return shipping puts you out of synch with 80% of consumers that want a hassle-free returns policy. Even more interesting, you can actually make more money by offering easy returns.

We’ve all been there. Comparing our options with different products, only to find that one retailer refuses to price match while another assuredly does. Usually, we extricate these ecommerce jerks in favor of the stores that happily offer price matching, something Today says leads to improved customer confidence and security when making the sale.

Good ecommerce stores, as we all well know, will respond to a negative social media post with a resolution, which is the first part of accepting responsibility, according to Social Media Examiner. But if you want to be a jerk, all you need to do is either delete the offending post and lose the customer’s business for good. That seems so much easier than resolving the problem and improving loyalty and retention while attracting new customers.

Certainly, any time you visit a store from your smartphone that is not optimized for mobile, it’s a frustrating experience. What jerk never took the time to optimize this site for shoppers just like you? What’s more, do they realize that 55% of shoppers are using their mobile devices to shop online, accounting for nearly half of all e-retail sales? That’s what Mint says, and failing to optimize for mobile puts you officially in the “jerk” category.

Topping the list of the meanest things that you can do with your ecommerce store is failing to offer a secure shopping experience. After all, PC Magazine advises that “only” millions of ecommerce sites have been hacked to serve malware purposes. The last thing that you want your consumers feeling is secure and safe with their transaction so they don’t abandon the shopping cart. Right?

Then there are the sites that are so slow and sluggish that you really can feel yourself aging in the process of them loading. If you want to increase cart abandonment rates by 8% or more, you should make your ecommerce store as slow-loading as possible. After all, you didn’t break into this industry to make any money; just to be the biggest ecommerce jerk around.