Lost in Bad Eretail Sites
Yesterday a Sherpa reader suggested, “Why don’t you try JC Penney for cords?” so I dutifully went trundling over there. OK first thing: as a tall woman it’s way fun to have my own section immediately (as opposed to sites such as Target or J Jill where I have to click on each item I like to see if it’s also in tall, and am far too frequently disappointed.)
But then I gotta say I was stunned almost senseless by stupidity.
What really bothered me was Penney’s PITIFUL eretail store graphic of handbag online shoppers have to click on to add choices to their cart. There were several times (especially when Penney’s site taunted me with their exceptionally warm black chenille cardigan) that I thought, damn the budget – let’s order this puppy! And then I couldn’t figure out how to. I clicked on obvious stuff — colors, photos, descriptions — until finally by process of elimination I figured out that the JC Penney site needed me to click on a really lame graphic of a handbag, sitting almost randomly at the bottom center of the page, to actually order online. Then it took a lot more random clicking to figure out how to check out.
This should NOT be this hard. (In fact it should be blindingly obvious to even really stupid people.)
I’m sorry — being a big huge fan of eretail – but I should not have to think so hard, to work at figuring out your system, to buy a pair of jeans online (among other things). If JC Penney is, as independent measurements show, one of the top top eretail sites in the US for this Holiday season, how much better would sales be if site design made ordering even remotely intuitive???
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