Trust me not: the tale of a (failed) online retail experience

Anyone who has small children knows the feeling of having an easy Sunday night disturbed by realizing you forgot to get something your kids will need for school activities for the coming week. Whether it’s a package of crayons or a new outfit, time is against you.

If you don’t have kids, you’ve at least been a kid; you can go nuts envisioning your kid being the one getting left out or the one who always forgets to bring activity props to school. What do you do? You jump online to your favorite e-commerce sites, add what you need to your virtual cart, then click “same-day” or “next-day” delivery. You don’t care about the price, you just want this issue solved. So you pay with your credit card, get a confirmation order number and off you go, feeling like the best parent in the world, juggling a hundred tasks, getting lost in the middle, but coming through in the end.

In Covid-19 times, this might be different. You might not need to buy something for your kids to take to school, but you will most likely need it for some new online activity the teacher came up with (shout out to all the crazy, creative, amazing teachers out there!).

Now follow me on the next scenario. Monday morning comes and you expected the package to have come before school. You’re convinced you’ll have time, and worst-case scenario, if it’s not there before you’re all out the door, you have the hip new courier app to get it to them before the activity.

Half of the morning goes by, and nothing yet. You check the tracking number, and it tells you the order was processed and that it might have left for your place. No more, no less. Panic sets in (and annoyance if we’re being honest) , so you try to contact delivery support, waiting on the line for a while until a robot finally tells you the same information you got from the website. Your order doesn’t make it in time, and now your kid is ‘that kid’ who sits out from activities while you’re ‘that parent’ who doesn’t take part or care about the growth of your child.

What happened? You did everything right. You chose and bought the item, paid extra for next-day delivery, and it didn’t work. Trust has been broken, and believe me, it is not you, it is your friendly e-commerce provider.

It may seem like a silly story, but it really does happen all the time—not the forgetting to get something for extracurriculars, but that of e-commerce platforms not being prepared to give you the only experience that truly matters to a client: the feeling of trust. That feeling you get when you order something online, without even seeing it in a physical store, and you get exactly what you order, in the time you were told, and in the condition they promised you. This is seller accountability, and for any digital sale strategy, having it means more revenue and loyal customers.

Trust moves us to acquire any product or service. Yes, desire matters, but most often than not, you desire only what you can trust.

The big issue is that during this pandemic, companies have focused almost entirely on building their e-commerce presence, with all the bells and whistles, but forget that their platform is just a pretty face to a— sometimes-hollow—backend process.

Due to Covid19, online sales already have risen to between five and seven times during 2020. Volume like that could overwhelm any company’s supply chain, logistics and backend strategy.

Despite the amount of infrastructure and platforms some companies have, the lack of communication between them and the lack of awareness in the whole digital sales process can kill the experience.

We have seen this in small, medium and gigantic companies. Poor visibility translates to low awareness and results in lack of execution at the front line.

As in the physical space, companies that believe the purchasing experience is done after the checkout line, or that the e-commerce experience consists of a great app or a great e-commerce site, are in for a persistent headache. 

Once trust is lost, it takes a long time to gain back. In fact, according to Adobe's Digital Index 2020, 25% of clients that have had a bad experience will desist and not come back to the site—talk about revenue loss (and potentially a poor, public review).

That is where we come in. We want to help companies achieve that TRUST factor by bringing to light the whole process from demand generation, to buying motion, checkout, logistics and delivery. We look at the process and the technology involved as an integrated unit that allows companies to have a great CX.

Check out our Digital Sales Services to see how we are helping companies achieve that TRUST factor.