Why Would You Buy from Yourself?
- To find user experience (UX) problems with your system.
- To be able to answer customer questions from experience.
How do you know whether your shopping cart or purchase system is working? If you can point to completed purchases, you only know that the system worked in those cases. And, you don’t know whether those were the persistent type of customer who worked through inconveniences. Not only should you work through your own shopping experience, but it’s helpful to watch someone who isn’t familiar with your product work through your shopping cart.
How would a shopping cart fail?
Most web software is actually a set of software packages each developed by a different company. And, the pieces may not work together very well. For example, the shopping cart, where you enter your products, and the transaction part where you pay, are generally different pieces of software because the transaction needs to be done in a more secure environment than than where people look at your products.
You may have very honest business practices, but it’s possible that your online shopping cart software isn’t living up to your high standards. For example, a couple of years ago, I tried to buy a pair of compression socks for a family member from Vim & Vigr. The shopping cart system charged my card and then told me that they were out of the particular socks I was buying. The correct thing for the software to have done was not to charge my card, but that’s not what happened. By the time I noticed the charge in my bank account, I didn’t have time to chase down the order, so I didn’t bother. But, I haven’t gone back to that system to buy anything either.
Sometimes the problem with a shopping cart is that it’s confusing, so a viewer starts an order, but doesn’t complete it because of frustration. Today, I tried to order more Drive storage space for Google Drive. But, I was unable to finish the transaction. I clicked the Upgrade Storage link, which when to a page with the package options. I clicked the option I wanted and it grayed out and went no further. There were no error messages, it just stopped. I tried several times with the same result.
