Hi, I had a regular customer who wanted to purchase something in my shop yesterday but decided not to because of the following problems. Here's what she had to say...
["I can't check out on Luulllllla!!! I tried to create the account - did not receive the confirmation email. And half way through the check out, after I filled out my address and clicked on 'final review', it wiped out the cart. Tried to log in, it said the account don't exist. Tried to create a new account, said my username is already taken - so the 1st attempt must have gone through, right?
hmmmmm... it is NOT userfriendly at all. No categories. And when I click on continue shopping, it brought me back to the generic 'buy' page, NOT back to your store. And I can't search by seller either - although I typed in opusmuse in the search field.
Anyway, the account activation doesn't work well. I registered with username Midnight Crafts and my email address at first. Then it's wonky at final review. Then I created another username with the same email address, and it went through, but still wiped out my cart at the final review. I finally received the activation address and it created my account with the 2nd username... I saw that the Cart is now empty (I checked out like 3 times!) and I'm not really keen to add the items to the cart again to have it fail on me again... I have since de-activated the account."]
I hope the Luulla technicians can fix these problems or more sales could be lost because of this.
Thank you!
Nicole | OpusMuse
"Currently, there is a discussion about whether we should require the buyer to retype his/her email twice during signing up to prevent such incident from happening again."
Tommy, I think that would be a very good idea. Errors do happen; lots of online sites require you to "confirm e-mail" on registration. It protects both the customer and the site.
It's great that Luulla Tech Support are so on-the-ball! I'm so pleased when I see how quickly and efficiently you have addressed issues - it definitely inspires confidence! Keep up the good work guys!
Lizzie
Hi, Nicole,
Thank you for contacting us and letting us know about this. First of all, let us apologize. We are sorry that your customer went through this experience and for the past six hours, we have pull together two of our best engineers to investigate on this matter, and we have read through the data accumulated to understand the whole situation.
We do have some insights on what happened, and we will be providing all the details here. We tried our best to understand the whole situation based on the information we have, and we believe we are very close to understanding what actually happenned.
In the initial phase, the buyer mistyped her email address and therefore she did not receive a confirmation email. We tested the confirmation flow multiple times today both on our development machines, our servers and also on the live site. It did work out correctly.
The shopping cart was built with multiple checking in place. In this scenario, when the buyer found out that she did not receive an email due to the mistyped email address, she tried to register again. And at this point the previous browsing tabs were left open. And when she logged in to the new account, and tried to checkout using the old tabs (that she previously registered using the mistyped email), the shopping cart did an integrity checking and denied her to proceed and therefore cleared her cart. Multitab browsing can be extremely tricky and the shopping cart actually checks for this special situation and clears the cart whenever the cart become inconsistent.
The fail safe mechanism is there to actually protect the buyers and sellers. In a scenario where user A opens two tabs and then signed out in one of the tabs, and user B came to sign in and go to the tab that was left opened by user A. At this point, if we allow user B to checkout user A's items, user B would have purchased the incorrect item. And therefore the shopping cart clears itself protecting the second user. In the scenario that your buyer went through, it's a very special case as user A and user B are the same person with different email addresses and she expects the cart to work correctly.
There is also a question about usability and also about search. And I think it would be good to explain further on what Luulla will do in the future to further improve usability.
We need to admit that our search mechanism is far from perfect, and in the past few weeks, we have started to work on store search and also people search. Both these options will be enabled within a month or two. We also did a test to search for the term "opus muse" and "opusmuse" and both return results of your products. Store categories and site wide sub-categories are something that we are trying to work on as we try to find a unique solution that will make sure that each seller has equal opportunities to rise on top of the buy page. We are almost there in terms of the idea.
Finally, the feedback on the Continue Shopping button is really a good one. It's really something that we should improve on. Instead of directing the user back to the buy page, it should go back to the store that she visited previously. That's definitely a good one!
We hope that we have provided the details about the incident. Currently, there is a discussion about whether we should require the buyer to retype his/her email twice during signing up to prevent such incident from happening again.
Thank you again for letting us know about this. I hope that you are not upset with us after we have gone through this detail investigation, and we hope that we will be able to bring OpusMuse more sales as the site continue to improve!
Thank you, Nicole!
Tommy
