Tuesday, October 24, 2017

This Is a Required Field

I have a news flash for people trying to sell things online: If you have a thing where we are given a menu for options, sometimes we’re just looking to see what the options are before we check to see if it’s the right thing for a gift. If we then encounter a red box that says: “This is a required field”, we’re probably not going to buy anything from you, because it’s rude. If we don’t pick an option, it’s because we’re not intending to buy it today. Don’t be pushy. We used to get pushy sales tactics enough in person; we don’t need it from software.

There is a reason use car salesmen have the negative reputation they do. People do not like that. Sometimes consumers cave to sales pressure from other people; they probably will not cave to an annoying website prompt so easily. But keep it up if you think so.

I have encountered this issue multiple times recently, and I won’t be buying from any of those websites. Stuff like this is why people buy from Amazon. Plus we like getting their nagging emails reminding us to buy things we’ve only looked at once and decided not to buy. (Oh, wait: That sucks too! Maybe Amazon should not nag us like that either. I hear there’s the new site called Alibaba… I’m sure there are not 40 thieves working for that company, so no worries.)

(For those unfamiliar, there is a story called: Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves which is a tale from the Arabian Nights. There is a lot of thievery, backstabbing and killings in this story. So with that in mind, Alibaba seems like kind of a strange name for a business.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Baba