Back to the Top!

It happened to me today. I’m at a national retailer, women’s apparels site and after narrowing down my search for items, size and prices, they send me to a page that is not only sluggish and super slow in downloading, but equally as sluggish in going thru the screen with “view all” on display.

For every item I added to my “shopping cart’ (not wish cart, but the real thing) it was forever getting there. Got worse if I wanted to compare colors and accessories to go with the item(s). After loading up my shopping cart, I wanted to go back to continue shopping, and the page is not loading properly. Finally, as it did, it was even slower and now I’m almost at the bottom of the page wanting to go “back to the top” and to my horror, there was no such link or button to do just that. If I wanted to re-visit some items that were close to the top of the page, I couldn’t do it. I had to “slowly” scroll my way up which at one given point, I just went away from the screen all together in frustration over the whole experience.

So I went on to other sites (unrelated to shopping for clothes) and eventually went back to make my final purchase. I get a message that my “session has expired”, “try again”…and my shopping cart…..”EMPTY”!

I’m cooling my heels before I call the company; however, my point here is the importance of having a “Back to The Top” button when you have a long sales page, or long Home website page or something that symbolizes going “back to the top” for your readers. You’ve put a huge amount of effort into creating a phenomenal rich-content page and then, scare the visitor away by lack of options and your readers want you to direct them somewhere else within your site to solve a problem and fulfill their needs. They really want you to give them a “call to action”!

There are many sales and marketing points to be made of my experience, among them, “understand what your clients want” and yes, we’re all shopping all the time, and it needs to be a “wonderful experience”; even when we’re looking for educational products or just knowledge about something, we’re shopping, yes, shopping; so we better have the items our audience wants and give them the experience they deserve for their hard earned money they are about to invest not to mention “their precious time”, which once gone, they can’t get it back.

I’d love to hear what other lessons you are gaining from reading this…and…if you have experiences of your own you’d like to share, I want to hear them!