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Comment by davidhyde | Hacker News Reader

People don't mind buying from a vendor's site directly but the vendor should do their best to reduce the admin / pain of doing so.

Some tips I wish vendors would follow:

1. Don't capture more information than is absolutely necessary for the transaction.

2. Don't force the user to sign up or join anything if they just want to buy something.

3. Don't automatically add the user to your newsletter and send their details to your ad network. Be very explicit that you won't do this.

4. Tell the user up front how much postage will most likely cost and expected delivery time before you capture all their details. You can guess their general location from their IP address of have them select a city.

5. Have multiple payment options (like paypal for example), not just credit card.

6. Up front, tell them what you need from them before they can complete the transaction. Nobody likes working through an endless data collection wizard only to stop half way though because you don't want to give up that data or get bored filling things in.

It's really not that complicated.

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I am 100% more likely to buy from your online store if you have a simple checkout process that lets me use Apple Pay. And if you want an email to send the confirmation to use Sign In with Apple and I will default to buying from you over another provider. It’s as simple as that: I get far less spam, I know my privacy is being secured, and I get to support a company that supports the easiest checkout process ever.

As long as it also supports regular credit card payment. Being locked into a single companies proprietary payment service doesn't sound like a good thing to me.

There is nothing proprietary about Apple Pay on the web. It’s an implementation W3C Payments API.

As far as I can tell the W3C Payments API standardises the path from payment provider to merchant, but the customer to payment provider interaction is the proprietary part.

I.e as a merchant I can easily integrate Apple Pay as an available payment option in the same way as others, but as a customer I can't use Apple Pay unless I'm using Apple sanctioned devices/software and have an Apple account. Other commenters mentioned it only working in Safari, and according to Wikipedia it only works on Apple devices.

You can only use Apple Pay in Safari. But if you use the standard W3C Payments API, a Chrome browser running on an Android device with suitable security will use Android Pay just like an Apple device running Safari will use Apple Pay.

Apple Pay is Safari’s implementation of the standard. Apple stores your payment information and uses the Secure Enclave for authorization. How could Apple ensure a secure path on non Apple browsers or on non Apple hardware?

What’s the use case where you would use Apple Pay as opposed to your hardware vendors implementation on a non Apple device?

Just a snippet from the standard.

https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/

This specification standardizes an API to allow merchants (i.e. web sites selling physical or digital goods) to utilize one or more payment methods with minimal integration. User agents (e.g., browsers) facilitate the payment flow between merchant and user.

Ah, I see. So if a merchant supports paying with Apple Pay, they also support paying with Android, or any other payment provider that supports the same standard?

Not automatically. If a merchant does the work to support Apple Pay they don’t get Google Pay “for free”. But if you’ve done the work for Apple Pay, you’ve covered a lot of the ground necessary to support Google Pay, for example.

So they will only support Apple Pay?

Yes.

> I.e as a merchant I can easily integrate Apple Pay as an available payment option in the same way as others, but as a customer I can't use Apple Pay unless I'm using Apple sanctioned devices/software and have an Apple account. Other commenters mentioned it only working in Safari, and according to Wikipedia it only works on Apple devices.

Yeah. It is called the Apple ecosystem. Don't like it? Don't use it. I personally have been very satisfied with Apple so far.

Think of Apple Pay like a virtual credit card.

And so you can't use it without being an account holder just like with Mastercard or Visa.

There are providers that do this like the people from Square. As an Apple ecosystem user with an Apple Card (that I use almost exclusively) I just prefer Apple Pay but it combined with Sign In with Apple means I don’t have to give the merchant my real email (yes I know other email providers provide one time emails and such but for me the Apple sign in feature is much easier and convenient).

The best non-Amazon experience I had recently was with Butter Cloth. No sign up, no need to enter my name and address, supports Apple Pay (amongst others).

If more companies did this I’d be more inclined to shop around than default to Amazon.

I would pay more to a website that offers Apple Pay just for the convenience.

People don't seem to like the additional "convenience fee" when they're paying their bill online, though :P

(which to be fair, is indeed more convenient than paying it in-person.)

I don't like the "convenience fee" for two reasons:

1) I object to being charged to give someone money. If you tell me I owe you $90 and that you accept this list of methods to pay and I go to use one of those methods and you reply "oh to use that method I will charge you an extra $3.95," I am going to use the method that costs me an extra $0 because I already agreed to give you $90; you can work out how to collect that $90 in a way that only costs me the $90 I owe you.

2) It is an outdated fee. When it first started, electronic payments were new, novel, and cost actual money to put into a workflow. Now, physically handling checks and cash often have more cost to the merchant than paying electronically because the cost and logistics of electronic payments have been so streamlined. This fee has turned into a cash grab.

(That first point is why I still use paper checks. My apartment complex charges almost $50 to pay rent with a credit card and $10 to use a debit card. But walking the check three minutes from my front door to the night drop the day I get paid is entirely free since my credit union gives me a box of checks every year and I go through far fewer than one box per year. If my apartment complex finds that taking paper checks costs them money but electronic payments don't, they can adjust their pricing to reflect that.)

Seems to me they did adjust their pricing, and in a way that is both transparent and fair, i.e., that doesn't force check paying tenants to subsidize card paying tenants by raising overall rents for everyone.

It’s rewarding a merchant for a service you like: I like paying with Apple Pay so I will encourage merchants with my wallet who do so. Eventually it will be the norm for merchants to take Apple Pay and Samsung Pay and AliPay and others maybe with a square space etc but contactless payments in real life and seamless payments online is something I want to advance.

I think you're missing the point of the fee. The company (Visa, Discover, Apple) that processes the transaction charges a fee (flat or percentage) for each purchase. This is why they add the fee.

Of course apartments charge high fees for rent - they want to ensure they collect the full amount of their monthly rent according to the contract. A $50 fee on say 1000 dollar rent is 5%, ensuring they cover whatever Visa is going to charge them on the transaction. And if they get a little extra income for themselves - then all the better for then as you got some convenience out of it by not having to write a check!

Yeah, I don't really have a problem with merchants passing card processing fees onto customers. I feel like those fees being hidden to consumers/spread out evenly amongst all payment options is probably somewhat distorting the market.

Merchants do not pay Apple anything for Apple Pay:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204274

Surprising that you can pay with a credit card to begin with. You could probably turn a profit by using a reward/cashback card (in a lot of cities that's easily $10k+ a year in spend).

Though presumably that's $50 a month.. So perhaps not.

They still have to pay the merchant fee which can easily be 3%. My rent before we moved was $1700 and some apartments rented for $2100.

Use direct debit or wire transfers like normal people.

I would only pay more to invective adoption of Apple Pay. Hopefully others see and adopt it too and try to win back business with a lower price with Apple Pay.

I won’t pay extra convenience fees just for online ACH. I’ll just use my bank’s free bill pay service to mail them a check and they can deal with having to deposit paper.

You know who has to suffer from this? International buyers. I buy a lot from Amazon, and I live in Colombia. While these days there are a lot of direct, global shipments from Amazon, I still buy a lot of things I leave at my aunt's house in Miami by the time I travel to pick it all up.

I remember not being able to buy a custom Converse shoe on their vendor site because I didn't have a local US credit card. I hate it, I hate not having options. Even Newegg accepts international credit cards these days. The amount of regression on these platforms is disgusting, and then they ask why others become powerhouses and they don't...

This is a really common fraud scheme. As an independent seller with little fraud protection, it's foolish to ship to an address that doesn't match the billing address.

It's also a really common thing that people do.

Like, I buy stuff on Amazon for my parents, friends, and family all the time.

Not to mention the common cases of shipping to work address, having multiple residence addresses (e.g. students who have a home and a dorm address), shopping while visiting family out-of-state.

It's a really common fraud scheme because it's not uncommon for regular people to do that. Otherwise, we would not have a need for a "shipping address" at all: all the purchases could go to the belling address, right?

So, basically, you are exactly the kind of bad seller that ruins it for everyone else. Your inability to deal with fraud adds so much more headache to the experience.

I hope that, as an independent seller, you have it in bold letters on the front page that you only ship to the billing address. This way, people who you won't ship to anyway won't waste their time (and people who you won't ship to will not be inconvenienced anyway).

That's also why merchant sites have separate shipping and billing addresses. I bill at home and ship at work as I'm not at home during work hours when the courier arrives. And no, I won't install an Amazon lock to my door. If I can't ship to a different address then maybe the merchant doesn't want my money.

Also there are stores that do not ship to my country despite both being in the EU. They ship to New Caledonia (remote colony) or a poorer neighbouring country though. Maybe it has to do with lack of a VAT number and not giving a damn about getting one.

> It's a really common fraud scheme because it's not uncommon for regular people to do that.

Lol, no. It’s a common fraud scheme because users of stolen credit cards can’t update the billing address. They would love to be able to use a stolen credit card with an address matching their drop location.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying.

My point was that if only fraudsters were shipping to non-billing addresses, we wouldn't need to specify two addresses when making a purchase.

In itself, shipping to a non-billing address is not a scheme. It's what people do. That's why that is an option to begin with, and that's why all shopping sites support it.

If it was uncommon for people to ship to non-billing address, then it would cease being a fraud scheme, because we would be able to use this as a reliable indicator of fraud -- or we'd not have this option to begin with. Therefore, fraudsters do that because it's not uncommon in general.

I ship 90% of my purchases to the office where I spend most of the day. There's no one at home from 9 to 5 so shipping it there would be foolish, as you put it.

Most of the people I work with does the same thing so I think you're very much wrong in your thinking. If it works for you, then fine, but it's not foolish at all and it's the best option for a lot of people.

Even in Europe we suffer from this. I never buy from Amazon anymore due to their website being as bad as the average small webbshop if you are not in one of the countries Amazon is in (e.g. US, UK or Germany).

Small shops had superior experiences to Amazon even back in the 90ies. Never understood the appeal of Amazon. There's so much better options locally (NL), in matters of search, payment, website ease of use, shipping, etc. I hope for the rest of Europe and perhaps America bol.com expands ;)

Amazon here literally delivers the same day, or the next.

On the downside, many items are now Chinese fakes. So for brand products, I tend to not use amazon anymore, as it is basically a fake marketplace. If available, I always use the webshop of the company directly. Much less headache.

But in my experience it is usually cheapest, and no one can even touch the shipping time.

I wouldn’t necessarily hold bol.com up as the NL example (so many incorrect shipments, thing that take 2 weeks to deliver while labeled as “in stock”, etc). I’d go with Coolblue as the go to example.

In the US, Amazon trumps pretty much everything else with free 2-day delivery (and often, 1-day and even same-day) with Amazon Prime, and a relatively painless and easy return process and handling cases of mis-shipment.

Also, as one of the most popular stores, it has the most reviews on items like electronics. These reviews provide a lot of value (not the star-ratings, but actual reviews, where you can see what people complain about).

For things like photography equipment and musical instruments, I'd go to other stores (BHphoto/Adorama/GuitarCenter/Sweetwater/Reverb/Ebay).

This has gotten better for me.

Starting a few months ago, I now clearly see a indication if the item would ship to my country.

(also in Europe)

I used Apple Pay on iOS to buy something direct from a vendor recently and was shocked at how smooth the purchase experience was.

1. Click "Buy with Apple Pay" button.

2. Double click power button on the side of my phone to confirm.

I wish more sites would support it.

It works with Safari on Desktop also, and yes, it's glorious and easy.

Other tips to get me to avoid Amazon: tell me your site supports Apple Pay and help me move my full cart (e.g., a cart link with a temporary token) from Chrome to Safari so I can use Apple Pay.

Then they should also support Android. Apple isn't the majority anymore.

Even if Apple Pay comes to others I won't use it. I absolutely don't think Apple has better privacy than anyone else.

There is a W3C standard for web payments. If the website supports the standard, it supports Android.

Did not know that. Thank you!

Slight correction. It’s a candidate recommendation - not quite a standard.

https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/

And Apple implements it.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_w...

Safari supports two JavaScript APIs that let you accept Apple Pay payments from customers on your website: Apple Pay JS, and the W3C Payment Request API. The Apple Pay JS API is analogous to the PassKit (Apple Pay and Wallet) framework, used for Apple Pay in apps. The Payment Request API is a W3C candidate API.

It seems to be supported across all browsers.

https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-js/reference

I tried to buy my Mom a birthday gift with such an apple pay checkout from a manufacture's site, and I have been unable to set the shipping address to her's vs mine. It was a bit cheaper than Amazon, but it is coming to my house today and not my Mom's (happy birthday mom!). Now she has to wait till thanksgiving.

The prompt that comes up to initiate Apple Pay has a section for the shipping information. If you click that, you can create multiple locations and addresses for each location. You can even create custom emails in the same way under the email section.

Is that what you were doing and were unable to do it or was there some kind of technical issue?

I just hit "Buy" and it was bought -- I didn't get any prompt that I noticed except for "approve this on your watch"

There's a prompt after you hit buy where it requires you to either double-tap the side button (on iOS) or TouchID (on MacOS and some iOS devices). On that prompt, it shows all the transaction information including shipping info, the card Apple Pay will run the transaction on, and the contact information for the transaction.

You must have been speeding through and missed it.

I'm supposed to enter the address on my watch?

You didn't pay attention.

I have shipped to other addresses than my main address on file with Apple.

blame the user!

I wish there was a Firefox plugin that'd alert you that a site is checking for Apple Pay support and tell you, so I could switch into Safari briefly to do the purchase.

That would be amazing. I just switched back to Firefox from Safari after uBlock stopped working and the biggest thing I miss is Apple Pay. I try to remember to make purchases in Safari but, without the ability to use an ad blocker, it makes it much less simple and seamless than it was before.

I was pretty amazed as well - frankly I'd much prefer buying direct with apple pay than through amazon

Same. Amazon also lost my trust. Buying expensive fake items is not something I would like to do.

I just used that with yeti.com and it's actually amazing how well it works.

The issue is that Amazon and other 3rd party vendors actually offer deals.

I was in the market for some headphones and had a specific brand and make in mind and when I looked in their site they were more than $100 more than Amazon. This has held true for me for a lot of items and even when using price tracker it is pretty much no contest to just buy off any reputable vendor most of the time.

I think it's just that the people who make the goods often have no market sense and rely on outsourcing it for 90% of their sales.

What are the chances that the deal you found on Amazon involved counterfeit goods? That’s been a big problem with audio and electronics on Amazon recently.

People say it's a big problem but to date, having bought in the low five digits of audio and video hardware mostly from Amazon, I've had zero (obvious) counterfeits and very little defective gear generally, all of which was manufacturer sourced.

I'm sure that counterfeiting is a real problem, but I don't know how pervasive it actually is.

I have bought thousands of dollars worth of electronics and stuff from Amazon. Zero counterfeits so far.

If a manufacturer undercuts all their distributors, they stop having distributors.

If Amazon undercuts all a manufacturer's (other) distributors, they also stop having distributors.

Maybe that's why Nike is going in this direction.

The way Amazon works, it's very possible that the version you found on Amazon for significantly less was counterfeit, being sold by an unknown third-party.

> I think it's just that the people who make the goods often have no market sense and rely on outsourcing it for 90% of their sales.

I've worked on a few client projects that involved large, successful, but traditional consumer goods companies try their hand at a direct to consumer (D2C) model.

As other comments have alluded to, there's tension involved when a manufacturer starts to be seen as a direct competitor by their distributors. Shopper marketing teams can quickly shift from having incredibly collaborative relationships and partnerships with their retailers to adversarial relationships with cutbacks on shelf space and promotional support. Some manufacturers are more risk tolerant than others on the impact that a D2C channel will create, and that may be reflected in the pricing for their D2C channel.

But that's only one side of the picture. Even at clients that don't care at all about the risk to existing distributor relations, they can rarely make their D2C channel profitable, let alone cost-competitive with retail channels. At manufacturers: marketing teams are competent in mass market campaigns and retailer-driven promotions, designed and measured using approximations and proxy metrics (due to having limited if any access to consumer level information), digital teams are competent in creating promo microsites and brochure sites, and operations teams are competent in efficiently moving goods at pallet and truckload scales. And all of the vendor and agency relationships are also around those competencies.

All of that tends to work against the D2C model. Direct response, performance marketing campaigns tend to require a completely different skillset than your marketing team currently has (and the agencies they use have). Your creative, UX, and development teams and processes are likely not the best fit for the needs of ecommerce and conversion rate optimization. And you'll either need to outsource order fulfillment to a third party or be very disruptive to your logistics org when they have to mix in packing and shipping $50 orders with 10+ SKUs to consumers along with their usual duties of shipping $5,000+ orders of 1 SKU to a retailer. Plus your shipping costs will be incredibly painful, as consumers have come to expect shipping to be quick and cheap/free, but you'll need to use new shipping vendors for retail package delivery and likely won't have the volume to get all that great of prices.

Add up the inefficiencies at each stage, and even with pricing that isn't competitive with retail distributors, many manufacturers operate their D2C channel at a loss. They're happy if their loss is low enough to write off the D2C channel as a marketing expense and strategically important enough to subsidize. Breaking even and being self-sufficient is seen as a success, and profit (and growth) is only ever talked about when you need to pitch executives internally for a cash infusion every couple of years.

For my own sake I'd add to that list that they should make disclose every 3rd party site they'll need to load scripts from or at the very least include those early in the process. I'm not allowing JavaScript to run from anywhere if it isn't 100% necessary for exactly what I want to accomplish. Filling out a form only to have it fail because suddenly the website wants to run code from another domain is annoying, and each allow/refresh is an opportunity for badly designed websites to screw up my order or charge me multiple times. I do realize that most customers aren't selectively allowing/rejecting scripts, but its been a highly recommended practice for decades now.

4: Whenever possible (which is, in most cases except for huge and/or super cheap items), incorporate shipping costs into the cost of the product. Then you can say: "Free shipping!"

The problem there is that ecommerce vendors are usually offering products on a variety of channels where price is a major factor in the buying decision. The product is going to be listed in Google shopping, it may have the price attached to organic results, it might be listed on a third party clearinghouse, etc..

And in those cases it's going to show up next to other merchants selling the same product. Inflating the price by factoring shipping into it can hurt your sales. That's why many sellers offer free shipping on orders of a certain size where the profit is large enough to cover the shipping loss.

And, of course, what happens when a customer buys multiple items? Now they're potentially paying for shipping more than once.

Shipping is really the core reason Amazon usually wins. No one can compete with their multi-billion dollar distribution system.

If only retailers with similar physical infrastructure (Walmart, Kroger, et al) hadn't been so late in building the technology to compete. Even now any chain with an existing, large warehouse and distribution system could introduce a cheaper FBA type system for merchants and capture part of the market while giving smaller MFRs and retailers a way to reasonably compete with Amazon on shipping.

Sadly they're all old school brick and mortar organizations which are notoriously bad at tech.

"retailers with similar physical infrastructure (Walmart, Kroger, et al)"

There's a lot more to direct-to-consumer logistics than there is to "center-to-store" logistics. Distribution-center-to-store logistics can rely on largish shipments of any individual product, very large shipments for any DC to any store, and has a backup mini-warehouse (aka the back of that Kroger's) for each delivery site.

Amazon can't store ten extra "diamond-coated Samsung Makeupsian-2" cases at your house when you order just the 1. Walmart often stores a few pallets of "nobody wants it" at their stores. Amazon doesn't drop of multiple pallets per deliver (usually, that is); Kroger's never gets less than several pallets at a time. Amazon can't predict what you're going to order months in advance; Target knows they need ten cases of "Fresh Bloom"-scented bleach per month, plus-or-minus 10%. Multi-pallet vs. singleton; buffered vs. just-in-time; predictable-load vs. "I want only one, once, randomly".... there are a lot of differences in the logistics that Amazon faces versus what Kroger/et. al. face.

I honestly do not think that most existing distribution systems could support an FBA-style system w/out massive overhaul. That's not to say that FBA is not replicable... it just requires a massive capital investment and a massive rethink of how to do product logistics. Even if they're good at tech, I don't think the old-school organizations could successfully pull it off.

You might be right, that they won't be able to pull it off, but a future where the majority of retail happens digitally isn't far off. If someone other than Amazon doesn't figure out the logistics before then, Amazon will eat the whole marketplace.

I think the primary barrier here is that, while you can assume based on IP/Locale, you don't entirely know where the customer intends on shipping the product, and therefore rates fluctuate.

It would be great to allow customers to estimate shipping as soon as possible, rather than just before clicking the "give us money" button.

But for the continental US, weight and size (and contract terms) is the controlling cost factor, moreso than destination.

Also, you want to present the same price to all customers.

Yeah, I don't know why you'd do what they're prescribing. It's just misleading and seems more like a dark pattern. As if "free shipping" will manipulate them to make the purchase.

People already understand the price of an object vs the cost of sending that object somewhere in the world. Everyone understands $100 shoes with a shipping fee, not $105-$130 shoes that shape-shift depending on where the person lives that opens the link.

But seeing $100 shoes then seeing $5 shipping fees tacked on separately will make people feel cheated, and abandon the purchase. They made a decision to spend $100, and now you're trying to make them make another decision to spend $105 instead.

Disclosing the shipping fees up front helps a bit, but not completely.

That's what I'm saying. I don't think people feel cheated seeing $100 + $5 S/H. I mean, speak for yourself: do you really feel cheated by the transparency?

And if people do feel cheated (I'm unconvinced), I still don't believe they need to be manipulated into thinking that shipping doesn't have cost. These kinds of reality-distortion practices are all too common in tech and ecommerce.

It's like Verizon manipulating people into thinking they get a "free iPhone" when they sign a 2-year contract. It's 100% misleading.

If people are surprised by shipping fees, it's only because this misleading practice is widespread and we're racing to the bottom on dark patterns. All the more reason to be principled, imo.

I understand what you're saying, but it doesn't change that seeing additional fees after an initial decision seriously puts me off. Note that I'm from Europe, i.e. if the sticker on the shelf says something is 5.99, it's 5.99, not 6.47.

I also often do feel cheated because the shipping fees often match or exceed non-discounted consumer postage fees, and many stores just use it to advertise deceptively low prices. The argument here is "handling cost", but a grocery store also has handling costs - and how would you feel if a "check-out fee" was added at the end?

When I'm on a shopping site to buy an individual item, I want to know "how much do I have to pay to have this item in my hand". I don't care if you charge $5 for the item and $10 for shipping, or $15 with free shipping.

If the shipping fee is clearly advertised (i.e. in legible, discoverable font right next to the price) and is reasonable, it's one thing. But patterns I often see and always hate:

- ridiculous shipping fees used to advertise lower prices than others when the actual price is higher (sucks if the platform you're using sorts by price, not total cost - like Amazon does!)

- charging 9.99 for shipping for something that comes in a barely padded envelope with 1.50 worth of postage on it

- shipping costs well hidden, so you have to spend time before you know what the actual price you'll pay is

I consider "free shipping" not "manipulating me into thinking that shipping doesn't have cost". I consider it a promise that what I see is what I pay (i.e. I consider that transparency). Without it, if you see $19.99 on a web site, it could mean $19.99, or $39.98, and you often can't easily tell.

I find the best deals are where shipping is separate. With free shipping I have to pay for the rare person in remote areas (Alaska...) who costs a lot more to ship to. By separating shipping my costs are much less.

The above applies ONLY when the shipping charge is the actual shipping charge. All the big shippers make it easy to figure out what shipping a package will cost so you should know when I click add to cart what the costs are. (As a bonus it would be nice if you would tell me which item in my cart costs so much to ship - some things are worth buying locally because retail can use cheaper shipping to the store)

I prefer to pay 120 with free shipping than 100 + 15 for shipping. Not just me: most people. This has been tested repeatedly. Yet, it seems so irrational that retailers don't believe it. But it's true!! And Amazon wins because of this.

I have far too many abandoned carts because of shipment charges. Do I feel cheated ? No but I was not willing to pay the shipment charges even though I was willing to pay for the product. Amazon solves this problem pretty well.

Wouldn't they feel more cheated if they find out that the price given to them is, with no justification, more costly than the price given to friends and family in other locations?

You can certainly present the same price of the good to every user, while also automatically calculating the cost to ship to their postal code--if they specify it, or the postal code most likely for their IP address if not. Then apply a "combined shipping discount" calculation when they go to view the contents of their shopping cart, for everything that can fit in a single box shipped from a single warehouse.

Then allow the user to sort on base retail price or price plus shipping, as they prefer.

Being transparent about goods versus shipping makes the customer feel better about not getting manipulated and/or ripped off.

My problem is that for a lot of small sites, especially auto parts in my experience, will have an outsized shipping cost that totally ruins the deal.

One example I found recently was a couple of small brake light bulbs. $4.13 plus $14 shipping from a parts dealer or $5.75 plus free shipping from Amazon. Initially you think the price is great, it's cheaper than Amazon! Then you find out they have a hard time sourcing padded envelopes.

Also, please make it easy to find out which countries you do and don’t ship to. I’m tired of going through a long payment flow only to be faced with “We only ship to the continental USA”.

> 4: Whenever possible (which is, in most cases except for huge and/or super cheap items), incorporate shipping costs into the cost of the product. Then you can say: "Free shipping!"

But won't that typically be a worst-case estimate? I actually kinda like itemized shipping charges. Then I know if I'm buying two items then I'm not being double-charged for shipping.

I'd add make sure your site loads quickly. I tried buying something yesterday from an online vendor, but it took 10s+(!) just to load a product page. I eventually gave up after 2 minutes of frustration and bought from a competitor whose site loaded quickly.

I agree with each item but I'm not optimistic. Even brick and mortar stores are demanding phone numbers and emails to complete in-store transactions now. I used to fight a war of wills refusing to provide either until Home Depot associatesstraight up said they wouldn't finish the transaction and no one had authorization to bypass the email field when I tried to buy a freezer there.

I since set up an email alias with fastmail to deal with this crap. I recently had a similar thing go down at DSW -- they sent my junk account via my alias 4 emails in the space of two days.

why even give them a real email address?

>> 1. Don't capture more information than is absolutely necessary for the transaction.

>> 2. Don't force the user to sign up or join anything if they just want to buy something.

>> 3. Don't automatically add the user to your newsletter and send their details to your ad network. Be very explicit that you won't do this.

>> 4. Tell the user up front how much postage will most likely cost and expected delivery time before you capture all their details. You can guess their general location from their IP address of have them select a city.

Yeah, alright, because marketing and the higher-ups will be totally a-ok with all of those missed opportunities...not?

>> Don't force the user to sign up or join anything if they just want to buy something

Especially isn't going to happen. The marketing team is honestly stupid if they don't do this. If a customer has purchased something, companies do everything they can to encourage a repeat purchase. Part of that is offering newsletters on updates for new products or sales.

>Yeah, alright, because marketing and the higher-ups will be totally a-ok with all of those missed opportunities...not?

I've definitely just aborted out of a purchase flow for pretty much all of these things. You're supposed to be making profits, not happiness for your marketing team.

> You're supposed to be making profits, not happiness for your marketing team.

These two things have a strong positive correlation. Marketing teams don't become happy just because you get a newsletter. They become happy because you engage with the brand and the brand makes more sales. Which in turn makes for more profits.

Making people jump through hoops to stop the barrage of spam certainly means your users will be engaged. But it also means they'll be unhappy. Which in turn makes for fewer profits.

If that were true, businesses would notice and stop the behavior. The unfortunate fact is that spam works, reengagement marketing works, lots of things that are annoying work, for definitions of work that mean, "works for the business using the tactic".

reengagement marketing works

That sort of shit works because the utility is being measured incorrectly. All those hoops to opt out really juice the engagement metrics but don't determine if someone is interested in using your product or flailing about trying to escape the clutches of unwanted spam.

Take for instance Western Digital. In order to provide feedback on their (lousy) customer support you have to opt into all sorts of marketing surveys. If nobody opts in, nobody's complaining and so everything must be fine, right?

lol

It's something akin to "don't sell past the close." Just get the info you need for the sale, and offer the user an opportunity to sign up for more info/etc after getting their payment.

Yeah, alright, because marketing and the higher-ups will be totally a-ok with all of those missed opportunities...not?

And what does the spam cost in terms of lost sales?

You know how to encourage repeat business? By not spamming me. I've got a list of companies that continue to spam me that I'll refuse to patronize. I'd say the marketing team is honestly stupid if they annoy paying customers.

A recent example in my life was signing up for a warehouse club type membership. It's a company that's well known for treating their employees and customers well. I signed up online and went to the local store to complete the process. As I was completing the in-person part of the process the employee helping me kept pushing the store credit card (annoying but not a deal breaker). By the time I got home a couple hours later I'd gotten multiple emails from the company. No problem, right? Welp the server(s) handling the unsubscribe requests was offline. I could get the unsubscribe landing page but nothing else. Online chat support was a 10-15 minute wait. A phone call was similar. Eventually I found some corporate email addresses and fired off a few missives. End result? Someone in corporate support managed to unsubscribe me but I'm deciding between outright cancelling the membership or purchasing a few loss leaders and then cancelling the membership. How's that for a missed opportunity?

Another great example is Newegg. They had a promo a couple years ago that required me to sign up for their spam mailing list. I subscribed, used the discount, and unsubscribed after a constant barrage of irrelevant crap. They've also started allowing third-party sellers. As a result of both of those behaviors Newegg went from one of the first places I looked for computer components to one of the last just like that.

It's death by a thousand paper cuts really. If your company insists on opting me into more noise I'll shop elsewhere.

> the marketing team is honestly stupid if they don't do this. If a customer has purchased something, companies do everything they can to encourage a repeat purchase. Part of that is offering newsletters on updates for new products or sales.

Everyone unchecks those boxes anyway. The ones that don't and actually want that crap are engaged enough in the product/company that they'd gladly sign up for the spam if you asked right on the front page or anywhere else but the checkout screen. Why annoy the crap out of 99% of your customers so that you can catch that 1%?

It depends. A marketing team worth their salt won't do things that substantially increase bounce rate just to capture a few emails.

I'm slightly surprised there isn't room for a logistics company that can give smaller retailers Amazon-level efficiencies, but not have ecommerce ambitions, itself. And it should be branded (like Amazon Prime), not just someone in the backround, so people know it will ship quickly, arrive quickly, and have a good level of support.

Isn't this Shopify [0]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopify

Sort of, but Shopify (at least last I checked) is only the storefront and credit card processing. Warehousing, inventory management, fulfillment, and shipping are all 100% still on the vendor.

EDIT: Looks like Shopify is indeed setting up its own fulfillment network, but it was only announced a few months ago and is likely some ways off from launching:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-19/shopify-s...

Shoprunner tried to be somewhere in that niche, but it kind of has died down after the initial hype, I still see a few sites using it but the big retailers seems to be gone from the program.

It surprises me the large shipping companies (UPS, Fedex) haven't pushed fulfillment to the level Amazon has. Frankly, I would be shopping directly through retailers more if I could get everything for free two-day shipping.

I get part of that is funded through the Prime annual fee and Amazon's cut of the proceeds but given their large distribution networks I would think they could come to Amazon's level (but this also probably depends on the volume of other packages they handle which AREN'T retail).

I'm pretty sure Amazon offsets a fair bit of their "free Prime shipping" costs by raising prices, perhaps selectively. UPS and Fedex can't really do that since they're not also setting the price of goods sold.

A lot of companies have 3 parties do all the fulfillment (warehouse/packaging) for them and then the carriers are always FedEx, UPS, USPS. I've pushed almost all my online shopping off of Amazon (except for Kindle books) and haven't really notice a drop in service or speed, except that the same day delivery isn't an option.

Something like a "UPS Prime" or "Fedex Prime" even?

Where I live, Cash/CreditCard on Delivery is very common, which helps a lot for buyers who aren't sure about the service. Yet, it clearly adds a burden on the seller.

I'd like to add to your points, especially for brick and mortar stores going online, make sure the shopping experience is good! Few of the stores we have 10x harder experiences in shopping and browsing.

This is like how "Buy on Google" works.

https://support.google.com/googleshopping/answer/9115668?hl=...

You don't need to even visit the vendor site, you can just purchase from any vendor with your stored purchase credentials.

And security. Please have someone who understands security if you are not on something like Shopify.

Have you used Nike+ ? It's 2-4 day shipping, 30 day returns with wear and tear. It's fantastic.

5 takes care of 1.

That would be ideal but every piece of data they capture is a component for a future sales funnel. The smart way to do this would be to have some boilerplate language about respecting user's privacy and having a minimum number of required fields and then baiting you to provide more info for discounts, insider info, and whatever else they are willing to give as digital tchotchkes in exchange for more and more marketing data.

I buy the number of shoes per year that I'm going to buy and I'm going to buy them first based on a value calculation that considers things like their price and my expectation of their longevity and secondly based on whether or not I'm contributing to business practices that externalize costs of my purchase to others. I will forever opt out and unsubscribe from anything I can, and furiously report spam for the remainder.

Who are these people that, having bought some sneakers already, get a email about other sneakers into their nearly bottomless inbox full of junk (presumedly, given they don't avoid these kinds of marketing messages) will actually notice it amongst the noise and then actually be compelled to buy additional shoes they wouldn't have otherwise (and therefore apparently didn't need)? Certainly they exist in some number, because they show up in optimization dashboards I've built for my clients, but what portion of the market are they, truly? Is this reflective of a psychological disorder (perhaps the underlying cause of "hoarding" is a spectrum-type pathology)? Is optimizing for these customers's odd (and apparently self destructive) behavior the same thing as optimizing revenue in the total market or is it just a local optima that everyone's in a big hurry to to corner themselves in? Even if it was a true global optimum, is it ethical? Is this the microtransaction whale-hunt optimization race to the bottom that mobile games went through (and results in many such as myself avoiding participation in that market) in slow motion due to physical goods' slower cycles?

>Who are these people that, having bought some sneakers already, get a email about other sneakers into their nearly bottomless inbox full of junk (presumedly, given they don't avoid these kinds of marketing messages) will actually notice it amongst the noise and then actually be compelled to buy additional shoes they wouldn't have otherwise

They exist, I just think it's stupid to build your business around them.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/17/sothebys-sells-sneaker-colle...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWSGN0Er18E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw9_tB1tzT4

https://www.sacbee.com/sports/nba/sacramento-kings/article23...

I would say runners might be in this category. I often get emails from Altra, RunningWarehouse and a host of other shoe companies and I will open them up and take a look. I think it was about a month ago that I received an email from RunningWarehouse about some shoes I hadn't thought of at a good deal and I went ahead and bought them even though I didn't need another pair. Another time about 3 months ago Altra sent over a email about a special edition pair which again didn't need already have 5 pairs of shoes but I bought them anyway.

The reason I go through and buy them is because I know I will eventually need another pair and I would much rather buy a pair on sale then need a pair and have to pay more.

your question is whether there are people who might be prompted to buy fashion items based on advertisements?

this seems like an obviously true thing. i would estimate that the majority of clothes retail is absolutely _not_ utilitarian: it isn't driven by sentiments like "my old shoes have worn out so i need new ones", but rather by ones like "i think those shoes look good and so i would like to own them as well as the ones i already have".

How is making it seem like the data is mandatory any better than it actually being mandatory? I will probably bounce as a customer either way before actually in detail investigating the huge form I was presented and buy from an online competitor or from a physical store.

And maybe I am an odd customer, but I also think that the customer who buys more sneakers just due to a spammy newsletter is too.

Edit: Online casinos here in Sweden recently went through a revolution where they added e-ID login (meaning that users do not need to complete a huge form on signup) and automatic withdrawal on logging out when possible. Sure, they were lucky that they could get almost all of the old data they gathered by using the e-ID, but even if they had not been able to I think it still would have been worth it to collect less data to get more sales. And apparently slowing down withdrawals was bad for business (who could have known!) despite making some gamblers lose their money while waiting for the withdrawal to be approved. Customer hostile greedy strategies can trap you in a local optima.

Your suggestions are what give that icky feeling. It's creepy. People don't like creepy. You are losing costumers.

Is your spelling of "customers" as "costumers" intentional? It feels like some inside joke I am missing.

It was a swypo I thought was funny so I left it because it fit. The joke was only in my head, but I really love when the autocorrections pick something insightful.

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