IT’S EASY TO PUT CUSTOMERS OFF.

Imagine that as you walk into your local supermarket to purchase some cheese, a store representative jumps out at you, greets you, and asks if you have any questions that he can answer. Would you find that to be helpful or creepy? Then, as you select your cheese, he asks if you would like other kinds of cheese, or maybe some pizza dough to go with the cheese. Are you feeling the pressure yet? When you get to the register, the cashier says that you must become a member of the store to purchase the cheese. And just as you think it’s all over, the cashier asks for your phone number, address, business name, and a few more personal details to complete the purchase. Why should the store retain sensitive customer information? By now you are completely spent and full of anxiety. Is this a typical sales experience?

Online, it is.

Offline, you are not likely to encounter such aggressive sales tactics. Of course, we may all be able to relay a story about a horrible experience with a pushy salesperson. A friend experienced it firsthand at a fitness center. They placed her in a room and put a lot of pressure on her to sign up for a membership. They left the room several times to “negotiate” a new price and then applied lots of pressure in hopes that she would sign a costly, non-negotiable or reversible membership with them. Not only did this experience give her a lot of anxiety, but it also made her hate the fitness center, vowing never to return.

This experience is all too familiar for online shoppers. Do these aggressive tactics work? Believe it or not, many times they do create a positive uplift. It’s important, though, to always look at your website from a holistic perspective. Looking at a short-term uplift only can be detrimental to the growth and success of your online initiatives. So, although some of these aggressive tactics may work with a percentage of visitors and lift revenues from new visits, it’s likely that they will lower the number of repeat customers who will probably never return because of a “bad experience.”

We describe users’ bad experiences as FUDs, which is an acronym for fears, uncertainties, and doubts. Every time a user questions her experience with you or is surprised by an element you present to her, she is experiencing FUDs, which can result in her abandoning the sale. FUDs are the site elements or experiences that can increase visitors’ anxieties, deflate confidence, and result in a complete loss of trust of the site. Some of the questions users may have include: