We pull into the most ordinary of Shell gas stations (international readers: you might better recognize this company as Royal Dutch Shell) and are greeted by a very happy personality, Billy, who pumps the gas at this full service station. He has an entire conversation with my mother — not just about the expected “what grade of fuel”  but about regular life issues such as weather, health, etc. Like two old friends who bump into each other in a cafe. Then he finally goes and pumps the gas. Then I watch Billy move on to the next car where he proceeds to have another friendly conversation with another customer who he clearly is well acquainted with. And on Billy moves to yet a third customer, just as our fuel gauge reaches Full. Billy’s station is always busy, it seems.

“Mom, how long have you been coming here?”

“Oh, since I got my first Subaru, in 2001.”

“Nine years you’ve been going to the same place. There’s plenty of other gas stations all over the place. And you don’t go anywhere else?”

“Why would I? He’s a polite young man and he always smiles. And it’s full service for only a penny more than the self-service stations. Plus, now I recognize the other customers, too.”

Can you imagine that? A sort of social-networking-meets-customer-retention at a gas station? As you might guess, this Happy Billy no doubt means a very happy Shell station owner, selling what is otherwise a most fungible of commodities wherein people will often drive miles to save a penny per gallon. Instead at this Shell station on Post Road in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, people go out of their way to pay more (in a recession) for one of Billy’s smiles.

Now, I’ll be honest. This wouldn’t work in New York City, where I live. People are in just too much of a rush. But in the correct environment where life is slower and individual customers are seen as individual people this is incredibly effective. I can only hope Billy gets a bonus based on revenues.

I wonder, how many online businesses are willing to think of their customers as fellow citizens of the same small town and to know them with the online equivalent of a Billy smile? When’s the last time you felt that sort of allegiance to your cable company, or the convenience store where you buy milk? And think of the long-term revenue it means for a company that achieves that sort of loyalty.

Does your sales and customer service staff treat your customers to a Billy Smile?

As I relate the following three eCommerce mishaps, be thinking about whether you can eradicate all of them from your business by the time the “Holiday Rush” hits. ALL are preventable, if you start today and take one item at a time.

Let’s start at the “precipitating event;” the spark that lit my desire to shop online…

1. An email with a promo code arrived.  w00t!  They paid attention to past purchases, and sent me a great promotion: 10% off a brand I’ve purchased before, and free shipping if the order exceeds a certain amount.

How They’re Losing Sales: Despite not mentioning an expiration date for the promo code, it was expired by the time I reached checkout.  I’m notoriously slow for opening emails from online retailers, but I bet I’m not alone.  Creating a sense of urgency with an expiration date is fine, but remember that shoppers sometimes go weeks without going through their personal email accounts to read your promo codes.

And now it’s Customer Service’s turn…

2. When the promo code came up as expired, I was understandably disappointed.  I’d just spent a fair amount of my weekend building up enough value in my shopping cart to qualify for the free shipping (Yes, I’m cheap.)  My credit card was out of my wallet.  So, I clicked the live chat in the cart to see if they’d extend the promo code, or give me an equivalent one.

How They’re Losing Sales: The live chat agent, while polite and earnest, was not able to do anything to help me (be a cheapskate).  They weren’t empowered by their employer to get creative and save me from abandoning my cart.  They suggested I call the “real” Customer Service during regular M-F business hours.  So my guess is that the live chat is being outsourced, which is fine, but if they aren’t empowered to save sales, they’re probably not giving good ROI.

Now stepping up to the plate, Technology…

3. I came back the next day with the intention of calling the retailer and trying to get them to extend the promo code or give me the equivalent deal.  So, I returned to the site and clicked “My Cart” to review what I’d put in there, and have it on-screen when I called.

How They’re Losing Sales: They didn’t save my cart! So many sites are saving cart items via cookie that I assumed my items would be there the following day or week.  So now I’m definitely not going to re-build my cart AND call them to try and negotiate the promo code.  I’m going to just repress the whole memory…maybe I’ll even forget the retailer’s brand in the process!

These 3 blunders may seem unconnected from a business perspective, but from a buyer perspective, they were all part of a persuasion scenario that broke down and turned a VERY motivated shopper into a lost sale.

I do like the site, and hope they can address these issues and stay in business.  But they and others will have a very painful holiday sales season if they don’t treat the disparate parts as a unified buying experience that must be nearly flawless to be profitable.

It all boils down to credibility.  Customer reviews simply have more credibility than your sales copy, so they inspire more confidence in the buyer.  And negative reviews lend credibility to the review process itself, standing as visible proof that the reviews are not edited.

Makes sense right?  Sure it does, until you find yourself staring at the (perceived) ability of a blisteringly negative review to crush your sales of a given product or service. Then those other statistics and facts are easier to overlook.

So if you’re in that position, just consider this quote from an Amazon.com review:

“…You may find it extremely interesting that I am leaving a review on Amazon because the company I actually bought the product from DID NOT post my lukewarm review. In fact, all the reviews on their website are nothing but 5 star, positive and glowing. I abhor this manner of conducting business and felt the public had a right to know ALL personal experience with this product, not just the 5 that are wonderful…”

When it comes to possible venues for negative online reviews there are:

• forums for any number of interests
• scores of review sites available online
• blogs,
• and FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, and new social media platforms popping up every day.

There’s simply no shortage of online venues for posting negative reviews.

And what do you think happens to your credibility when negative reviews (of one of your products) are easy to find on the web, but non-existent on your website?

Here’s another example:

About three weeks ago I installed some Dream Home laminate flooring in my recently enclosed garage.  I bought it from a nationally known flooring wholesaler, Lumber Liquidators.  The product was supposed to be “click & lock,” floating flooring, except there was no click, and the boards didn’t really lock together.   So the boards could, and in fact did, come apart as I got several layers into the project.  Gaps would appear and I’d have to undo and then redo all those layers to fix them.

Unbelievably frustrating and a total pain in the butt.

Yet the product reviews, which were balanced between 4 and 5 stars, never said anything about this.  The FAQ never said anything about this.  Customer service said they’d never had customer encounter this problem before.  Apparently, it was just a freak, unexplained phenomenon – a flooring mystery!

Then I Googled “Dream Home Laminate Flooring” and was led to a DIY-forum full of people who experienced the exact same thing I had.  We’re talking like 30 posts of customer experience with the product.  And yet none of these mixed or bad reviews had ever ended up on Lumber Liquidator’s site and they – the only people who sell this product – had never heard of the main installation problem mentioned.

To be fair, some of these reviews/forum posts were very positive, mentioning the reviewers installation struggles in passing or in good humor, and some of the forum members/posters were outraged, trashing on the product and its country of origin.  But all these reviews, both good and bad, were available to me from the 1st search engine result from Google.  It’s not like they were hidden or I had to hunt these down or anything.

The point: Your brand and product perception is not what you say it is anymore but what Google says it is.

Removing negative reviews from your site doesn’t mean they disappear; it just means there’s now a mismatch between what you say and what Google tells me your customers say.  I mean, how much credibility do you think Lumber Liquidators had with me after I found that forum?

While I couldn’t say for certain whether they were editing their reviews, by that time, you could say I was rather suspicious.  So I wrote my own fair but not overwhelmingly positive review.  I gave the product 3 stars, said the installed floor looked nice and was a great price, but that it was a total pain in the butt to install and that the click & lock feature neither clicked nor locked.  I even confirmed my identity to ensure the review went through.

About a week later, my review has still not posted.  Yesterday I called to find out why and Customer Service couldn’t answer me, said someone would get back to me on that issue.

Of course, I still can’t say for certain whether or not Lumber Liquidators is editing their reviews.  It’s possible I’m the first person who has ever given that product a negative review.  It’s possible that all their products, just about every single one, actually do score 4s and 5s with nary a low score in the bunch (though I DID see one 2-star review for one of their products when I went hunting for lower-scored reviews – but only ONE of them, mind you).

Still, for the sake of example, let’s just say – hypothetically speaking – that they do edit negative reviews, including my review.  Let me ask you this: did that strategy work for them?  Did they stop the review, or did they just switch its location?

And had I known about the difficulty of the flooring, would it really have ruined their sale, or just helped me to expect and work around the installation challenges – or even just pushed me to buy a more expensive (and easier to install) product from them?

Personally, I think negative reviews would have worked in their favor.  And I hope you now grasp the emotional (as well as the statistical) truth of that, too.

P.S.  While I continue to be suspicious of the Lumber Liquidators website, I have to say that their Pensacola branch, and the people working there, were very pleasant to do business with and I’d still recommend them to friends and family looking to DIY install hardwood, engineered, or laminate flooring.

Would you be willing to lie? Cheat? Steal?

I didn’t think so. Most of us wouldn’t.

How about just ever so slightly burying a fact — one that’s essential and potentially harmful to your sales — at the bottom of the page?

Now you judge.

My Little Tale

One day several weeks ago, I noticed my Apple MacBook Pro laptop battery was driving toward a slow and painful death. As so often happens with those of us who use a laptop for a primary machine, we can often just wear the poor thing down to its lithium ion bones.

I started to talk about it a bit around the office, and got a very good recommendation from a colleague. He had purchased a battery made by a third-party for his MacBook Pro and was pleased with it. The battery was less expensive than the brand name manufacturer’s replacement and boasted a 50 percent plus higher capacity.

So week before last I got the URL from John, and with credit card in hand I went to FastMac.com, easily found the exact battery I needed, added it to my cart, and quickly completed an order. I bought it without even reading the product description; John’s good experience was sufficient enough for me to plop down $99 “sight unseen.” I can’t imagine I’m the only person who does this on occasion.

As you may already know, in the universe of Apple users, word of mouth travels far and fast. So you might also not be surprised to hear the news that at the time I bought the battery, it was completely sold out.

That would have been a nice thing to know before I handed over my credit card number.

This is the part of the story where my blood begins to simmer a bit, so please excuse me if my column starts to teem with a bit of anger.

You see, I needed this battery before I hit the road next week. So on Monday, I returned to the site to check the status of my order. I was a bit irked to find that my order still had not been shipped and was marked as “in process.”

Where’s Waldo?

Then I went on a hunt to determine exactly what was going on. I wanted my battery and I wanted it yesterday. After a little bit of time and diligence, I finally discovered that this particular laptop battery was out of stock until May.

In all fairness, technically, that information was on the Web site when I made the purchase.

Click on this thumbnail image or visit the page and see if you can find it.

Waldo was a little less elusive than this information.

Maybe it was easier for you to find it than me — even when I was intentionally looking for it. But I was never good at Waldo. Even if your visitors were award-winning Waldo hunters, you shouldn’t force them to scroll, squint, and break a sweat to find information important to their buying decision.

Additionally, I didn’t see this information anywhere in the checkout process.

Why did the team at FastMac.com place this information where they did? Did they think that simply placing it on the page means that people would actually read it? Do they have an actual technical challenge that somehow makes it difficult to place this information higher up on the page?

Maybe I’m jaded, but did they deliberately place it at the very bottom of the page to ensure better conversion? I have to ask, especially for a specialty e-commerce site like this with limited SKUs (define).

Here was my message to FastMac.com sales:

I’d like to cancel my order #37959. When something is out of stock for as long as this is — you should let people know on the top of the page or near the add to cart button. I lost a week waiting to see what happened to my order and I had no idea the item was out of stock. I am extremely frustrated.

And here was FastMac’s response:

Hi Bryan
Thanks for contacting us.
I am sorry for the inconvenience.
I will inform our sales department regarding your experience and will make the necessary adjustments.
I’ve also informed our accounting department and we cancelled your order.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to send us an email

Fastmac Customer Service

As of my writing, the page is exactly the same and they still haven’t followed my request to place the information near the “add to cart” button.

What Would You Have Done?

Am I overreacting? Am I the one to blame here? Should I have read the entire page before I hit “add to cart”?

What would your e-commerce site have done? Would you have been more transparent? How would you have responded to my contact form?

Was this a moral decision/situation? Where does a vendor’s obligation end and the customer’s responsibility begin?

How does your company handle decisions like this?

I’ll be happy to share what you share in my next column.

I had to laugh at myself when I found myself in this exact situation. I had my boxing gloves on and I was ready to duke it out, expecting the worst. I purchased a pair of weight lifting gloves at Amazon at the beginning of December. With all the holiday events and some travel, I had forgotten about my purchase and realized that I had not yet received my product in over 4 weeks.

It was quickly pushed to the top of my “to do” list. I started my investigation by finding the tracking section on Amazon. Upon tracking my order, I noticed that the delivery status indicated that it had successfully been delivered. Well, I can assure you that it hadn’t! Thoughts started racing through my mind. Perhaps the package was stolen or not delivered at all. Will I be held responsible for this? I wonder if they had any clauses in their guarantees against lost or stolen items. If they do send me a replacement, I am sure they’ll charge me for shipping.

I puzzle- pieced my way through Amazon to try and find a customer service number to call. Because it was difficult to find the number, I was even more convinced that they’re trying to avoid their customers and feared the outcome of my phone call.

When the customer service rep answered the phone, I almost started the conversation by telling him that Amazon can keep their darn weight lifting gloves and should go take a hike! Let’s just say that I’ve been tainted by a lot of negative experiences with several large companies when similar situations have arisen- Bell Mobility offering the ultimate worst customer experience ever (I’ll keep that for a different story).

Instead of automatically lashing out, I remained calm and stated my case. He pleasantly responded by telling me that not only will a replacement item be shipped out that day, but it would also be sent using expedited two day shipping.

The same thing happened to Bryan Eisenberg recently when purchased a new SD card for his camera from an independent reseller on Amazon. It took him weeks to realize that he never got it, and when he reported the missing item, he was not only sent a replacement item, but then they sent him a free reader with his replacement order. Not that he needed it, but the gesture was wonderful!

You don’t have to be Amazon to have this corporate philosophy. This is something that every company can benefit from doing.

That could have been the last purchase I ever made from Amazon, had they treated me poorly. I will never hesitate to buy from Amazon and when I need something, I’m likely to purchase with them again because I know that I can trust them and will always have a good customer experience, even in the worst situations.

Amazon successfully took a negative situation and turned it into a positive, using it to their advantage. They are putting customers first. When customers are calling in with complaints, how are you dealing with them? Are you going the extra mile to please them or are you doing the bare minimum? They are your customers to lose. In this economy, it is probably cheaper to keep a converted customer that try to convert someone who never bought from you before.