Question
Thirteen "points to consider"
1. Link from the home page and from all product and service pages to the order page.
2. Give the links on your order page names that your customers can easily recognize: "Order", "Buy", "Store", "Checkout", etc.
3. Don't hide the price for your products or services. People won't buy if they don't know what they have to pay.
4. Tell your visitors about shipping costs and state taxes.
5. Tell your visitors the final price before they have to enter the credit card number.
6. Tell your visitors who you are and tell them your complete company address.
Offer an unconditional money-back guarantee if at all possible.
7. Tell your visitors upfront about your refund policy.
8. Make sure that your order pages are secure. Use at least 40 bit encryption so that your customers can safely enter their contact and purchase information.
9. Make sure that your order pages are easy to understand. Test them with your friends or relatives that don't connect to the Internet very often.
10. Regularly test your order pages to make sure that they work.
11. Make sure that you'll get notified if your server gets down.
12. Make sure that your order page displays a meaningful message if the customer forgets to enter the street name or any other required field.
13. Make sure that your order pages work with international customers. German customers don't know what to enter in the "State" field and usually leave it empty. Some countries don't even have postal numbers. Your order pages should work for these customers.
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Answer
12. Make sure that your order page displays a meaningful message if the customer forgets to enter the street name or any other required field.
Take this one a step further..
Make sure your order form includes any form specific data requirements..
If the telephone number field requires the format of (xxx) xxx-xxxx make sure you tell you customer up front. don't let them get an error message just because they entered it as xxx-xxx-xxxx becuase you didn't tell them.
Answer
Don't make your potential customers search for the "OK" button. That's my name for it, anyway; the button you push to proceed to the next page, confirm your order, or initiate any kind of positive progressive action on your pages.
I did some usability testing recently for a local company revamping its order pages. On each page, the "OK" button was tiny and located in a different place from the last, so that I had to search to find it. On some pages it was to the left of the "Cancel" button, on some it was to the right. I told the programmers to make this button prominent and consistent; in fact, if they could have it flash colors after the appropriate text had been filled in, that's even better.
They laughed. And implemented the pages their way. Oh well.
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