How to Loose 20m Quid Online

Whilst this is a personal blog, I work for an agency that this year is forecasting a turnover of £20m by handling the eCommerce solutions for an array of clients from small traders to blue chip.

A fundamental part of eCommerce is actually taking the customers money, you know the bit where you put your card numbers in and click the magical go button that makes the money vanish from your account - whilst you remain hopeful over the coming day or so that the firm you just ordered from isn't fraudulent and will actually send you your goods.

There is all manner of things which can go wrong with the process of buying online, and customers are very wary of a lot of them - people are not stupid with their money, and rightly so!

As an agency my company relies on a 3rd party payment provider to take the money, these are companies which specialise in just one tiny bit of eCommerce - the typing in of credit card numbers and sending that data to the bank.

We'd do it ourselves, but for anti-fraud legal reasons given our level of turnover and the way that we work it would mean that to do so we'd have to have expensive auditors permanently stationed at our office charging us many thousands of pounds a day, to avoid this we simply factor the payment process out to a 3rd party and let them worry about it.

Given that we host about half a million different web pages across over 100 sites, you'd think a software company established for over 2 decades and who's job it is to host just 1 page that's the same for every site who uses it would get it right, no?

Well think again.

For some years now my company has relied on Sagepay as our payment partner of choice, but there are two things that have disappointed me with Sagepay to the point where the company I work for now has no choice but to take our business elsewhere.

Sagepay has been plagued by problems this year, it's only March and we've had 3 extended outages that have caused us to put apology messages on our checkouts and provide links to pay via paypal instead, one of these outages lasted a couple of days and there have been numerous small issues at times too and it's only MARCH!

During the last major outage before the previous major outage I spotted Sagepay advertising for 3 new programmers 20 minutes after the problem occurred. It's great they're investing time in getting fresh talent in to fix the problems - but at that particular time it would have been much more reassuring to have seen them spending their time addressing the problems!

It doesn't instil confidence when the service goes down and they're only just beginning the recruitment process to get the talent in to fix the issue!

But far far worse than this is the actual page that Sagepay show to my customers.

Every page of the checkout process that a user has to click through will result in 20% of people giving up and not placing the order, so each additional page the checkout provider puts on the process costs us £4m.

Bearing in mind that they only need 1 page in the first place... They only need to take card holders name, card number, expiry date, CCV number, and in same cases issue number... Then show a nice big and clear high contrasting "Place Order" button.

In the world of Sagepay this means they first present a welcome screen where you select your card, this lack of a clear call to action on a page serving no purpose costs us £4m a year. You can detect card type by the number automatically anyway, and it really doesn't have to be a separate page.

Once you select your card they then ask for the relevant card details - but they mix it in randomly by asking for billing address and an additional name field which is information WE ALREADY PROVIDE THEM!

The form looks a mess, a beginner to HTML could design a better looking form by the age of 6 even if they had not yet learned CSS.

They've managed to make asking for 5 pieces of information look really complicated, and this costs us a further £4m per year.

Now bearing in mind a customer has already navigated around a site, added products to their cart, selected their shipping choice, typed in their delivery and billing address, email address, phone numbers and got past all of the hurdles Sagepay have put in the way - what's the next thing that Sagepay does after you click the tiny and nearly invisible "Proceed" button in low contrasting colours hidden away in a no mans land in the bottom corner of the screen?

They ask you if you're really sure you actually want to do all this - in case going to the effort of typing all that in wasn't enough show of commitment, this costs another £4m a year.

Sagepay is the second worst Payment gateway I have ever witnessed from a customer usability point of view.

The worst is HSBC which adds an additional "are you really really sure?" page, and a welcome page, pops in and out of the containing frame of the site you are buying from, and results in nasty redirect messages at every step.

Not only have Sagepay lost the £20m that my company would be putting through them this year, but they've got this blog post about them too. Sure my blog post doesn't carry an awfullot of weight on the net - this [personal] site only has a PageRank of 3 (compared to Sagepay's PR6) - so actually yeah I kinda do have some weight really.

But I write this not to moan about them, but to give you a clear and demonstrable example of why anyone looking to sell products online can't sell a crap product, you cant provide an uncompetitive service, or give poor service - or you'll get a situation like this where a customer takes their money and goes elsewhere.

If I'm wrong then convince me that it is worth staying with Sagepay.

I think you'll find it very difficult to get me to change my mind.

There are lots of better solutions out there, and I'll be moving all of my company's customers over to one of them over the coming months.

The point I'm making is one of competition. The internet is a global market, there is room for your little company online - but if you want to sell something rather than throw money into a graveyard of a website then you will need to be competitive within your niche against every other company ... IN THE WORLD.

Recent Articles

Ask Becky a Question