I was comparison shopping for printer toner on the weekend and found some great deals South of the border (I’m from Canada). My comparison shopping experience usually goes like this: type in my keyword into Google Shopping, open up every result that’s reasonably priced in a new tab, and start eliminating all the stores that don’t ship to Canada.

What’s disappointing is when you do find that kind-hearted merchant who will ship to Canada, but whose site usability causes me (and other international customers) to exit the site broken-hearted and empty-carted. Not because I don’t think I’ll eventually find the product somewhere else, I just hate to think an honest retailer is leaving money on the table.

Here’s what happens when you add an item to your cart. Kudos for showing front-and-center international order details. Love it. There’s even a link to “Estimate Duty and Tax Here.” Now I’m getting excited!

But when you click on “Estimate Duty and Tax Here” you are taken to FedEx (Enlarged version):

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A Sure Fire Way To Lose An International Conversion »

The holiday shopping season is now in full swing, and while there’s still plenty of time for online shoppers to receive their orders by Christmas (or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa), not receiving an order on time is a concern for consumers. Great online stores ease the fears by providing holiday shipping cutoff dates and making this information easy to find on home pages and product pages. Let’s take a look at some examples:

Bed Bath and Beyond

Tagline: “Holiday Shipping Cutoff Dates”

Bed Bath and Beyond dedicates some central home page real estate to its holiday shipping information:

And it’s not limited to just Christmas, either:

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Holiday Shipping Cutoff Dates Make Good Ecommerce Usability »

The beauty of an ecommerce website is that you have the potential to sell products to people around the world, even from your own basement. But many online retailers expect to make international sales yet are not doing all they should to help convert international shoppers. Here are a few ideas to help make the online shopping experience smooth for your international customers.

These tips apply to “international” websites — websites that are based in one country but accommodate orders from other countries — as opposed to localized websites which may be a country-specific subdomain, have a country-specific domain extension (Yourstore.co.uk) or have their own domain (YourstoreUK.com). Localized websites have their own complexities which will be covered in a follow up post.

1. Have an International Shipping page

Sure, you could have it buried in an FAQ section, in the Help area or some other hard-to-find place, but why not make it easy for users to find by making it its own link visible from every page on the site? (The footer menu is a great, conventional location). Backcountry.com hides its international information in the “Help” section which is generally associated with technical site help rather than customer service info. And Provantage.com has an impressive international shipping page, but you can’t find it through their Shipping footer link. Instead, it’s hidden behind an inappropriately labelled site map page labelled “Index” (doesn’t Index usually mean home?) and then under an equally inappropriate sub-category called “Doing Business.”

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International Ecommerce Usability Tips »

I love it when the “little guy” does something that I haven’t even seen on some of the larger sites I cite as examples here on the Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog. I recently bought a few items from C28, a Christian-lifestyle-clothing shop in California and noticed they were doing a couple of cool things I’d never seen before.

Even when scoping out sites for personal purchases, my usability consultant’s hat is always on. (It’s like those people who take film studies and can never watch a movie the same.) So I was really impressed by this virtual unknown offering features like “Email Me if My Size is Re-stocked” and “Email Me Before This Item Sells Out.” I even went to the search engine to see if I could find another site with this features (after trying a variety of word combinations) and so far haven’t found any. If you’ve seen another store doing something similar, please comment.

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Small Etailer Packs Big Usability Features »

Ecommerce can be a crazy messed up world indeed. The Elastic Path team recently produced a series of e-commerce shorts including my personal favorite: “Zero Results Found.” Because art imitates life, and search box failures are all too common on even the most sophisticated ecommerce sites, I decided to start my own series on ecommerce search, beginning with how easy (or difficult) is it to find non-product information.

When comparison shopping, you can compare prices and find a store selling an item for a dollar less than everyone else (for example). But it’s possible that another store sells the exact item for a bit more yet is significantly cheaper to ship, even free. So a savvy consumer would be interested in comparing shipping policies between etailers, as would an international shopper. If the searcher is “search dominant” (as opposed to a menu-browser), he or she is going to head straight for that little white rectangle to find the desired information.

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Shipping Policy Usability - Results Not Found! »