Wish to drive customers away from your e-commerce site?
You really wish to drive customers away from your e-commerce site? Follow this handy guide of six techniques for push-away web visitors.
1. Make your web site hazy with lots of really large image files and flash animation clips. Don’t bother categorizing what the pictures are for or how they relate to your core business, and make sure they are as large as possible, so they slow down the browsers of anyone who dares show up at your URL with a 56K modem. What’s more, try to make watching a splash screen or flash animation video requisite for entry into the site. Sure, go ahead and post a message that allows users to bypass your intro video, but don’t make this “skip” mark too obvious — use a font that’s the same color as the video or photograph.
2. Try to avoid good navigability. Put all of the critical information about your small business on one page and don’t include easy to use scroll bars. Instead of creating a separate landing page for each key phrase for your Pay Per Click small business advertising campaign, create one master page — your homepage — and mis-title and mis-direct all the traffic that comes through.
3. Disregard all grammatical, factual, and spelling errors. If your writing is clear, concise, and descriptive of your service, chances are that visitors might stick around to see what your small business is about. To put a check on this, disguise your small business’s purpose by writing flowery and un-descriptive language, making illogical statements, or simply writing no verbal clues at all and leaving your visitors to navigate on their own.
4. Include lots of pop up ads and banner ads all over your site. People come to a small business web site to get bombarded by ads, right? They don’t want to get clean, easy to understand shopping cart directions — they want to get blasted off their computers by blizzards of shiny, flashy, obnoxious pop ups.
5. Make it as tricky as possible for your visitors to contact a customer service representative. If you have a 1-800 number or even a local toll number that provides access to your customer service department, hide this number in some backwater landing page. Or better yet, don’t include contact information at all. Instead, include a generic email address, and either ignore the emails that come to you, or write back to your clients three or four weeks after they submit questions.
6. Never revise the content, graphics, or contact information on your site. Once you’ve created your ecommerce platform, seal it in stone for all eternity.