The Bar Has Been Set – Part 1

One of your customers just sat down with a cup of coffee and is about to do a few online errands. She watched a great movie on TV last night with her daughters and as a result discovered an up and coming film director. So her first ‘errand’ is to Netflix where she logs in, and adds other movies by that director into her movie queue for easy direct-to-home delivery.

Mother’s Day is coming up, so she runs over to Amazon.com where she uses the Amazon gift suggestion tool to help find a gift for her mother-in-law. She gets immediate email confirmation of her order and a few hours later the FedEx tracking number arrives via email to track her package.

After visiting a few news websites, and logging in to check her investments at Vanguard.com, she types in the your company’s web address into her browser. And that’s when the problems start.

Very few of you reading this might not have much of a problem. But the majority you and your businesses probably do. Let me explain.

Millions of consumers are doing their online errands at consumer-centric websites, then arriving at your website and are underwhelmed, or even worse, so put off they never come back! The sites that they’re visiting (Netflix, Amazon, etc.) have set consumer expectation levels for websites so high that the shortfall of your company’s website leads them link a poor online experience with a poor product.

I can hear some of you whining. “But it’s not fair. Those companies you listed have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on their websites. I don’t have that kind of dough!” Well, you’ve got two options. You can either put your head in the sand or you can figure out how to meet expectations. (You know your competition is hoping you choose the sand)

Good, you chose to do something about it. A few suggestions for getting your website on par with the big boys is coming in part 2. Do you have your own ideas? Post them in the comments section of this post.

~ by Jason Lee on May 10, 2007.