Help me check-out please!

In my recent article on Consumer roles in online decision making I said how important it was to treat transactors with cotton gloves.

Here’s a great example of a nice site that does most things reasonably well then totally flunks it by sending the prospective customer into a state of dizzying turmoil at the very first step of the order process.

See what’s wrong? The welcome text states the benefits of signing in, I personally didn’t read that, it’s just blah blah, I just want to get on with the job of buying my goods. All I see is “Are you a… New customer or Returning customer… I click on ‘new customer’. Then there’s a check box allowing me to be kept signed in if I’m a returning customer and then a ‘Sign In’ box. Well, I can’t sign in because I’m a new customer right? I’m confused. I really don’t know what I should do.

This is a classic example of a major problem that would no doubt be causing significant shopping cart fall outs that could have been identified really easily with some basic analytics and user testing.