Don't Worry About the Chinese

OK.  Now what's he prattling on about.

First, please note, this is NOT a political commentary.  Maybe more of an open letter to explain that everyone has a stance on trading with the Chinese.  "There's a huge trade imbalance."  "They steal our intellectual property."  "They want to destroy us."  "They don't buy anything of value from us."  Hit a search engine and you'll find all sorts of reasons to trade and to not trade with China.

Currently, we're in a trade skirmish.  Call it a war if you wanna. It has to do with tariffs and our trying to get some reasonable balance of trade.  I'd go on but I've already buried the lede, as usual.

It's the bottom line.  We have nothing to worry about. 

h-Why?  h-Why, you say?  It's a simple answer:  The Chinese haven't a clue about real world economics or customer service.  My proof?

Jack Ma  (Courtesy, CNBC)

A couple of years back, I registered with Jack Ma's* Alibaba.  Never bought anything but looked at various pieces of electronic equipment and their manufacture in China.  I was always afraid of the "not quite" - like an EIA connection that's "not quite" 3 1/8" or a length of Cat5E line that was "not quite" wound properly.  Too many hassles.  I got some promos from them [him] but not much else.  However, I did do a followup registration with AliExpress, the so-called consumer-driven arm of Jack Ma's business.

Well, this past Tuesday, I realized that a particular item I was looking for was, in fact, manufactured in China.  I thought I'd give AliExpress a try.  Good to have some experience should a vendor or client talk about the service.

If you think Alicia Silverstone was clueless, go to AliExpress.  Sign in, if you want to.  Fill your cart with any number of items, many of which are really good buys since the US markup (not tariff, markup) is pretty high.

If you have my experience, you'll see that there's a clock telling you that the real sale will start in x days/hours.  Wait till then and you can save a great deal of money.  For me it was about $40 on $203 worth of purchases.  And given that those purchases would have totaled about $350 had I purchased from US middlepeople, it was a great deal.

So I clicked on all the coupons to redeem them.   They all said "added" except one which I finally figured out.  Then it sat for 3 days till Friday AM.  I logged back in.  Had to jump thru all of the hoops but it did pull up my list.  So far so good.

Left hand corner?  Clock said 00:00:00 to sale.  Even better.  Once again, I clicked the coupons.  Once again they were added.  Then clicked on "Buy".  Oops.  Can only buy one item.  Hmmmmmm.  Well, that's OK, maybe that's the right thing to do anyway.  See how this thing drives.

Picked one item that exceed its coupon minimum.  Bought it...almost.  In the checkout, it asked for the usual name, address, etc. but, in this case, as you would expect, "Country."

Click in the box.  No dropdown.  OK.  I can play this game.  Entered "US" and it went blank with a red "enter country" above it.  Next try?  "USA".  Nope.  Then, of course, "United States of America".  No sir-ee.

I know.  I'll try Edge instead of Firefox.  Same experience.

Went looking for online help.  If you scour the AliExpress site, you will eventually get to a chat.  (Holy cow.  I'm looking into the screen and I can see eyes rolling to the ceiling.)  I opened "Eva".  Eva was nice enough to tell me that she/he (I don't know what his/her pronouns are) was busy with someone else and would be along shortly.

Eventually she showed up. I explained everything and she asked if I could send a screen shot.  I did.  She recommended that I enter "other" in the country slot.  Didn't work.  Then she asked me to clear the browser cache and cookies.  I reminded her that that would cost me a lot of time down the road with certain accounts I have.  She didn't get that. 

Regardless, I went ahead.  Nothing.  I told her that neither Edge nor Firefox would show the dropdown.  Then the other 鞋子 dropped.  "Please download and install Incognito browser."

Whaaaaaat?  "Excuse me.  Are you telling me that Jack Ma has had a system designed that only works with Google and Incognito?"

"Please download Incognito."

"I cannot"

"Here is the link."

"No.  I cannot because I will not put a Google browser on any machine I have control over."

"You will need Incognito browser."

"I think I can let you go help someone else.  Please do us both a favor and send a copy of this email to Jack Ma."

So, we're safe.  If Jack Ma hasn’t figured it out, he soon will…he built it but we ain't comin'.

Now, granted, this is an inexact analysis.  But the principle is there.  Of course, if they do figure it out, then we throw the fickleness of American consumers at them.  That'll buy us another 50 years.

* I'm using what I believe to be his full name since I'm not sure if he's Westernized or if Ma is actually his pronome

If You Want Visitors, You Have to Prep for Them

Seriously.  If you had a restaurant with a faulty front door that made it hard for diners to enter, would you not have it fixed immediately?  Or if the phone went out and you couldn’t book reservations or take carry out orders?  You wouldn't be standing on the desk of your telephone service provider?

 

And yet, multiple points in your site can have the same deleterious effect on the bottom line.  I once again repeat my cry, “Don’t take the word of your web marketing or IT person.  Check out your site in depth.  Place orders.  Contact the 'contacts.'"  Even look at the products or models that are featured.  You may be surprised.

Here’s what I see on a pretty regular basis: 

·     404 errors.  When someone gets a “Page not found.” it stops them in their tracks.  “Negative brand contact,” we would call it back in the 1400’s.  Today that often is enough to send the visitor off to another site

·         Forms that don’t work

o   “Cute” departures from name, address, etc. that force people out of the expected for no apparent reason

o   Forms that delete on linking…someone fills out a form and clicks “next” and you tell them they forgot to X and send them back to a now-empty page that they spent time completing

o   Asking for unnecessary information.  I will take it this far:   if you ask for a zip code before you ask for city, A) you’ve departed from the norm (see bullet 1, above) and B) if you have their zip, you know their city – it applies to a lot of those boxes

·    Scripts:  Seems everyone takes high speed Internet for granted.  Page weight apparently went the way of the buggy whip.  So designers dump all sorts of scripts – java and other – onto a page.  Most users, especially mobile ones, don’t have browsers set to map videos, images or scripts.  So the page takes forever and continually hops around the screen.  Amateurish and annoying.  Too often I get the dialog box that says, “A long-running script is preventing page from loading.”  Are you kidding?  Why don’t you post someone at the front door who holds up their hand preventing shoppers from entering.  Same result. 

·     Login confirmations:  You have someone log in.  They don’t remember that they’ve been to your site before.  They try to register and are told that that user name or email address is already registered.  You send them to a “forgot whatever” page.  Then, you make them re-enter the information they already entered.  (Not smart) and then you tell them an email has been sent to that address, and it doesn’t get sent.   (Happened to me yesterday.  Tried 3 times.  Never got an email.  Probably not going back.

·    Contacts:  If you’re taking the cheesy way out, that is, your database folks convinced you that “Contacts” is a great place to grow your database, change that thinking.  Sure, you’ll grow your database, but don’t make that the goal.  Make helping the customer the goal.  Don’t:

o   Force them into categories (silos for you MBA folks) with dropdowns on topic

o   Make them give you their life history.  If you’re selling the product they want, you’ll get that down the line

o   Offer only a form.  Give them an email opportunity

o   Tell them you usually respond within 24 hours and then take 3 days or, worse, not respond

o   I’ll reiterate – dump the form information if they have to return to it because they didn’t do things in the order you want 

Not worth your time to load Xenu or a similar link tracker and check out the site?  Would it be worth $50,000?  If that’s what you’re paying someone to tell you it’s right when it isn’t, it could be what it’s costing you – not to mention the lost revenue.  So do it.  Get an independent review or, better yet, do it yourself.  Check out the site on different browsers, a desktop, laptop, a couple of tablets and a lot of different phones.  If you see something you don’t like, remind yourself that thousands, maybe millions, of folks would use these very devices to visit you.

 

If your site is your business, it’s not micromanaging to check it out – to see how you as a customer experience it.  If you don’t like it, fix it.  No, you don't want to find out any of this, right?  Open an ostrich farm.

[Addendum:  after posting I received a great email from a friend.  Here's a suggestion to try, if you're ready to see the responses...add a dialog box at checkout that asks, simply, "What could have done to make your shopping (ordering, whatever you do) easier?"  Dare you do to it, and to read the responses.]

 

Let me change the title.  If you want visitors, you have to do some of their work for them.  Don’t want to hear that either?  Lock the door.