This is an old rule, but we come across it so many times that we felt it’s worth having it’s own post šŸ™‚

You have a stunning site with a lot of cool features and you’re really poised to take on the competition and crush them – really.

But suddenly, the numbers aren’t adding up and the sales are barely coming in – you’re disappointed, what went wrong?

You spend hours troubleshooting the site and you check again and again, everything works, so why aren’t your sales piling up?

There could be a lot of reasons, but often the problem is that you’re forcing the visitor to think too much and in today’s day and age even that’s asking too much.

Let me give you a coupleĀ simple examples to better explain what I mean.

Hiding shipping or tax costs – Customers land on your website through a referral link and they see the couch you’re selling is exactly what they want, and the price is Ā pretty decent also, but before they add to cart they want to see what will it cost them to ship, or what will the taxes amount to, or better yet – how long will it take to ship. Since that information is nowhere to be found, some customers will add the item to cart, hoping to see the details there, but often even on the cart page this crucial information is missing.

Pricing ConfusionĀ – If your site is selling packaged items like balloons, you might be offering different package sizes, so the price forĀ pack of 50 balloons is $1.99, and the price for a pack of 175 balloons is $5.99 – because the number of balloons per pack are not similar (like 50, 100…) your user is really not sure how much is he saving by buying the bigger pack and as he starts trying to figure it out something else catches his attention and we just lost a sale.

I could Ā go on forever (and i’m sure you would read till the end) but the point is that you always want to make sure that all the information the customer needs to decide to purchase is clearly visible and spelled out on the webpage. As soon as we force the customer to Ā start thinking or searching for answers we are essentially easing his way off our site and counting another lost opportunity.

You should probably have someone else take a look @ your site and ask them what got them thinking, you will be pretty surprised how many things are “obvious” to you but not so for the average customer.