Never Hide The Buying Process
Never Hide The Buying Process
Don't keep turning away customers with money in hand because you've hidden your buying process
Author’s Note:
There won’t be a post next week.
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
It was time to buy a Christmas tree.
Thanksgiving had just passed, grey winter clouds covered the once-blue sky, and the smell of winter’s first furnace burn filled the air.
Kelly, my significant other, and I drove to the nearest Home Depot to explore their tree options.
We parked at the garden center. We browsed the trees lined up in a mini-forest outside the building. We picked out the best one.1
When we went to pay and take it home, we realized that we didn’t know how to pay. We had to find someone and ask.
Luckily, we quickly ran into a helpful employee. She let us know that we’d need to pay for trees at the drive-up station outside.
We paid for the tree, a helpful employee trimmed it for us, and we got it attached to the roof of my car.
What was the problem?
Home Depot made the buying process confusing.
By the time a customer wants to buy something, you’ve already done the hard parts: You’ve made the product, enticed the customer into the store, and set a price they’re happy to pay.
Don’t make it hard for a customer to buy your product!
Now not knowing how to pay wasn’t a big deal here—Home Depot still got their revenue, and I got my tree.
But the moral of the story is the same here as for all businesses.
Don’t make it hard for a customer to buy your product!2
Never Hide the Buying Process
People other than me and my weird tree-buying analysis have shown the massive impact digital user experience has on business.
Well-designed digital user experiences can raise conversion rates up to 400%, according to Forrester
The average dollar of UX investment has a 100x return
“UX [is now] a matter of survival” — Andrew Kucheriavy
Staples increased their online revenue by 500% after its UX-focused site redesign, according to Human Factors International
And it’s true—digital experiences do matter a lot.3
But many of these companies missed a key part of all this UX research and hype: Non-digital experiences matter too!
Empathize With Your Customer
For whatever your business is, you’re one of the world experts in it.
If you work in carpet sales, then you know more about the process of choosing, buying, and accepting delivery of carpet than 99.99% of the world.
Put yourself in a new customer’s shoes. They probably don’t know how to buy from you.
And if they get too nervous, they won’t.
How Do I Help My Customer Along?
Professional athletes are terrible coaches.
They don’t remember the feeling of not knowing
Empathizing with your customer will help you know where to put more instructions for them.
Robert W. Bly,4 successful freelance copywriter5, describes what he sends to new prospective clients:
You need sales literature.
My own literature package [includes a]…letter explaining, in detail, my copywriting services—my background, my specialties, how I work with clients, what I charge, how long it takes,…my policy on revisions, and how the prospect can order copy from me.
—The Copywriter's Handbook, Updated Edition (p. 247) [bolding mine]
For chapter after chapter before, he emphasized reasonable brevity.
But he believes that a potential customer should have extremely clear instructions on how to buy and what to expect.
Going beyond Bly’s personal experience, Gartner estimates that: “Companies that deliver a great buying experience grow twice as fast as those that deliver average experiences.”
Conclusion
Don’t miss out on revenue you’ve earned.
Make sure you include clear, consistent information about how to buy at all stages of the sales funnel.
If the client needs to send an invoice that’s fulfilled in 30 days, then that expectation needs to be managed well before they sign the dotted line.
A client handing you money isn’t the last step in their relationship with your brand. Don’t treat it as a finish line you can force someone across.
I’m not sure how to tell Christmas tree quality, but we got a mighty fine tree. According to Kelly, it was a “certified handsome tree”
After writing that line, I did add an extra button so that subscribing wasn’t hard for this post either.
You’ll see the inverse of this ‘frictionless’ buying design when companies don’t want you doing something. That’s called a ‘dark pattern’
Not the essayist
And astonishingly author of over 100 other books on topics ranging from technical writing to digital marketing