6 Ways To Lose Online Sales

If you’re really looking to drive customers away from your ecommerce site, follow this handy guide of six techniques for alienating web visitors.

1. Obscure your web site with lots of really large image files and flash animation clips. Don’t bother identifying what the pictures are for or how they relate to your core business, and make sure they are as large as possible, so they slow down the browsers of anyone who dares show up at your URL with a 56K modem. What’s more, try to make watching a splash screen or flash animation video requisite for entry into the site. Sure, go ahead and post a message that allows users to bypass your intro video, but don’t make this “skip” feature too obvious -- use a font that’s the same color as the video or photograph.

2. Try to avoid good navigability. Put all of the critical information about your small business on one page and don’t include easy to use scroll bars. Instead of creating a separate landing page for each key phrase for your Pay Per Click small business advertising campaign, create one master page -- your homepage -- and mis-title and mis-direct all the traffic that comes through.

3. Ignore all grammatical, factual, and spelling errors. If your writing is clear, concise, and descriptive of your service, chances are that visitors might stick around to see what your small business is about. To prevent this, obfuscate your small business’s purpose by writing flowery and un-descriptive language, making illogical statements, or simply writing no verbal clues at all and leaving your visitors to navigate on their own.

4. Include lots of pop up ads and banner ads all over your site. People come to a small business web site to get bombarded by ads, right? They don’t want to get clean, easy to understand shopping cart directions -- they want to get blasted off their computers by blizzards of shiny, flashy, obnoxious pop ups.

5. Make it as difficult as possible for your visitors to contact a customer service representative. If you have a 1-800 number or even a local toll number that provides access to your customer service department, hide this number in some backwater landing page. Or better yet, don’t include contact information at all. Instead, include a generic email address, and either ignore the emails that come to you, or write back to your clients three or four weeks after they submit questions.

6. Never update the content, graphics, or contact information on your site. Once you’ve created your ecommerce platform, seal it in stone for all eternity.

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Do you have questions? Call 866-311-4158 now to ask a superpages.com consultant about Online Advertising.