No more lonely coffee breaks

There’s a new casual networking venture for microbusiness owners, the self-employed and those working from home in the Sherborne, Dorset, area: weekly morning coffee breaks.

The idea was conceived by Nancy Weitz, owner of Architela, an online learning and internet strategy business. “I’ve been working from my home office for 8 years,” she says, “and though I spend a lot of time interacting with people online and by telephone, I’ve been a bit envious of those in traditional workplaces, who have frequent conversations with colleagues around the coffee machine or water cooler. It’s the one big drawback of home-based or independent working.”

So she approached Cordelia McFarlane of the Sherborne Chamber of Trade and Commerce to help set up just such an opportunity. “Those of us with very small businesses have a lot in common and could really benefit from networking on a regular basis, where there are no demands, no expectations and no sales pitches – just good coffee and friendly conversation.”

Tuesdays, 10:30-11:30am, The Three Wishes, Cheap Street, Sherborne.

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Architela

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One of the complaints I hear most often from those who reside outside of the United States is the inability to input foreign addresses on U.S. ecommerce sites. Some companies might not support international sales due to an inability to handle international shipping, import/export regulations or currency conversions. While strategies do exist to overcome these difficulties, that’s a topic for another post.

But what if an out-of-country shopper is simply looking to purchase an item for delivery to a stateside address? Whether it’s a grandchild’s birthday present from American Girl, a wedding gift from Macy’s gift registry, or a simple gift certificate for the Olive Garden, many ecommerce platforms are unable to accept shipping addresses in one country and billing addresses in another. The result: lost revenue for merchants and frustration for shoppers with friends and loved ones in other countries.

Security is one of the main reasons cited for not accepting international billing addresses. Right now, only a few countries support AVS (Address Verification System), an automated process that uses a cardholder’s billing address to verify his or her identity and thus help reduce the risk of fraudulent transactions. However, there are other ways to protect against fraud without limiting sales to residents of the seller’s country.

The following guidelines can help retailers accommodate international customers with minimal effort and expense. And the potential for increased sales and goodwill should more than cover the costs incurred.

1. Revamp the Checkout Process.

In order to accommodate foreign addresses, a Web site will need to be recoded to take regional differences into account, a process known as internationalization. If international delivery is not supported, only the billing address fields will need to be revised. However, messaging informing users about shipping locales and policies must be clearly and prominently displayed.

Victoria’s Secret uses a flexible checkout form that enables shoppers to input billing and shipping addresses for different countries. By asking users to indicate billing & shipping locations prior to providing them, the site is able to tailor the form fields to the user’s specific needs.

HarryandDavid.com, a site specializing in gift baskets, also makes it easy for users to purchase from one country and ship to another. Selecting an option in the “Country” drop-down menu resets the form to one that accepts foreign address formats.

2. Verify billing information manually.

If AVS is not an option, merchants can contact the purchaser’s credit card company to verify the information submitted online. The reduction in abandoned shopping carts should more than make up for any additional time or effort necessary to process sales. Retailers currently requiring shoppers living abroad to call in their orders via telephone will actually experience a decrease in processing time, by keeping the entire purchasing process online.

3. Use an online payment processing service.

If manually verifying billing addresses is not feasible, utilizing an online payment processing service is another way to expand a company’s customer base. With these simple, low cost services, online merchants can offer shoppers around the world a safe and secure environment for inputting their credit card information.

Paypal, the most widely used of these services, enables users to either remain on the seller’s site throughout the entire checkout process or be linked directly to Paypal.com in order to complete their purchase. Major retailers like Barnes and Noble, Cooking.com, and Dell all offer users the option of paying via Paypal.

Amazon Payments, a subsidiary of ecommerce behemoth Amazon.com, provides shoppers access to the payment information stored in their Amazon.com account, ensuring a simple and familiar user experience. Buy.com and JR.com are examples of large online retailers that utilize Amazon Payments in addition to other means of processing ecommerce transactions.

With all these options, even if a site can only handle domestic shipping, there really is no reason to close the door to international shoppers.

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Elizabeth Glynn

Elizabeth is a user experience practitioner with expertise in information architecture, interaction and user interface design, usability, user-centered strategy and research.

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When potential customers visit your website and decide to fill in your contact form and click “submit”, they are taking a leap of faith. They have given you something of themselves and trust you to give something back in the form of information or, at the very least, acknowledgment. They are alone in the wilderness until you respond, and if you don’t, you have broken that trust and lost a customer.

And the thing is that you may never know this.

That’s why one of the most important website maintenance tasks you can perform is to test your contact form on a regular basis by actually using it to send yourself a message.

Three common culprits are:

Problem 1: Your form-to-mail script is broken or obsolete

Evidence: When you try to submit the form, you’ll get an error message on the site with technical language that probably includes keywords like “configuration”, “script”, “PHP”, “Perl”, and/or “CGI”. This is a sign of a “server-side” problem.

Solution: If your contact form used to work fine, and you know that nothing has changed on your end, find out if your web hosting service has made recent updates that affect the use of mail forms. If so, they will tell you what to do to get mail forms working again (you may need to use a different script). If not, there may be a temporary glitch in the system.

Problem 2: Your email address has changed or become defunct

Evidence: The message will never arrive in your inbox, or maybe you’ll get a delivery failure notice in your email (unlikely).

Solution: Check the email address in the form script to make sure it’s up-to-date. Better than using an address that directs to a specific person (bob@email.com), use a generic address that can be checked by anyone in the company (contact@email.com) and which won’t become defunct when Bob leaves the company.

Problem 3: Your spam filter is overzealous and intercepting good mail

Evidence: If your email spam filter is set to delete spam automatically, the message will never arrive in your inbox.  If it first goes in a spam folder, you should find your message there.

Solution: Choose a unique keyword to be included in the subject line of emails sent from your contact form, such as the name of your business (this would be done in the code for the contact form itself or in the script) and also set an email filter in your mail programme so that anything with that keyword in the subject line is not labelled spam and will be allowed into the inbox.

Otherwise, it’s a matter of…

Problem 4: Your customer service is crap

Evidence: You’re getting messages and not bothering to respond.

Solution: Pull your socks up and quit losing business that’s coming to you!

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Nancy Weitz

Nancy is Director at Architela and specialises in internet strategy, collaborative learning and user-centred design

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