Black Crafters Guild

African Diasporans creating, decorating, and artistically altering by hand

Customer Service Standards for Operating an Online Store

A brick-and-mortar store has the advantage of tangibility, as well as the ability to easily extend a customer's attention span. Safety is also provided for the shopper, for s/he can see, hear, and touch an item, as well as the store. Even a brand new store on a street in a new neighborhood is viewed as safer than one that has been in existence for years on the Internet. It is much easier and faster to set-up and close down a webstore than it is to do so with a brick-and-mortar one. It is important, therefore, to assure your potential customers that you are trustworthy. Remember, establishing a good relationship with each customer will help turn them into 'repeat customers'.

- Provide a clear, easy-to-use website with sharp, close-up photos. If you can't afford a professional website designer (and even if you can), research on what a good website looks and feels like. You'll find that text across the whole screen, centering all the text, typing in all-capital letters, placing text on a barely-faded image background, using Flash as the only entrance on the homepage, and several other common mistakes are no-nos. A website that appears to have been planned is one that says to your shoppers that you care about their comfort with you and their ease with your webstore.

- Make sure your website is easy and quick to use. Internet shoppers tend to have an extremely short attention span. The same people who will spend two hours browsing in a brick-and-mortar store will spend less than 10 seconds to decide on whether or not they should browse your webstore, and less than 40 seconds to decide on whether or not they should buy from you. So, make sure that your goods are easily and quickly accessible. Do not have your customers click more than once to view a pictorial list of items.

- Send what the customer purchased. Do not send a variation, no matter how minor it seems. To do so risks losing her/his trust. And, s/he may request a refund. Do not view the gift you sent with the purchased item as compensation for the variation. That is unfair and presumptuous.

- Charge reasonable S/H fees. Keep the fee as close to the actual cost (postage plus packing material) as possible. If a customer finds that you are charging even $1 more than a reasonably estimated cost, s/he may not return. Customers do not take unpleasant surprises cheerfully, and most will view that $1 overcharge as a deliberate rip-off.

- Pack the goods properly. An item should not be shiftable in the box, even if it is well-padded. If it can be shifted, it will more likely get damaged en route.

Communicate promptly with your store's visitors:
- When a purchase has been made, acknowledge receipt of the payment, and inform the customer of the date (or brief time frame) it will be shipped. When it has been shipped, tell the customer.

- Respond to pre-sales and post-sales queries within an hour. Taking longer than 12 hours to respond will likely be detrimental to a potential sale. Do not be discouraged if answering queries does not result in an immediate sale. To determine whether or not it is safe to make a purchase, some savvy internet shoppers first test the speed of a company's response.

- Be polite, friendly (but not overly so), and patient. Treating questions as nuisances, criticizing a customer's ability to make up her/his mind, reproaching a customer for not knowing something a product ... A negative attitude -- even if only slightly so -- rings warning bells for your shopper.

- Make it easy to pay you. Accept as many methods of payment as is financially feasible. Whether the customer is paying offline or online, s/he should be able to pay simply and quickly. The less steps s/he has to go through to pay you, the more likely it will be that s/he completes the transaction. At the least, accept Pay Pal (credit card and bank account payments) and money orders. Pay Pal is used by a large portion of online shoppers, and therefore is now a standard method of payment. Sometimes it is the only way for an online customer to pay (because s/he does not use credit cards). Some customers prefer to use Pay Pal in order to avoid giving their credit card information to various (and usually unknown) sellers.

If someone sends you a Pay Pal payment to one of your email addresses that isn't associated with Pay Pal,

"Add that email address to your PayPal account.

Here's How:

1. Click My Account.
2. Click the Profile subtab.
3. Click Email in the Account Information column.
Click Add to add the email address and follow the
email confirmation steps."

You'll then be able to claim the payment. If you don't do this, the customer will have to cancel the payment then resend it to you. This will cost time (Pay Pal's processing of the cancellation takes some days (sometimes 2 weeks or more) and money (Pay Pal manages to find a way take something from the cancelled payment, so the customer ends up paying more in the end).

What's more, customers are not likely to be patient enough to go through that whole process to send you another payment. It's better to just keep the transaction smooth and quick. :)

Email Money Transfers are particularly handy for Canadians. It is like using one's debit card (bank card) to pay online, except the customer pays a nominal fee (less than the cost of a money order) to have her/his bank withdraw the funds from her/his account and send to the recipient's account. In addition, no banking information is exchanged between the buyer and seller, except for which bank the funds are coming from (just like a cheque, except the account number and address are not included). Moreover, an EMT payment is instant. The funds are guaranteed (similar to a certified cheque) since the money can't be sent if it is not available in the account. It is as if you're using your bank card to pay online, just as you do at brick-and-mortar stores.
Online merchants who accept only mailed payments are highly suspect.

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