Conversion First

Wow with a headline like that it would seem like this article is going to be making millionaires all over the UK, with a simple 5 minute fix on their websites.

Unfortunately this isn’t the case for everyone but it may be correct for one of the UK’s leading retailers Jack Wills. The figure is purely based on educated guess work at the percentage of customers that would abandon a cart due to this type of issue against the traffic stats from Alexa.

I recently went to purchase a new jacket for my wife from the site, as a Google Chrome user I just typed in jackwills.com into the address bar and away I went, greeted with the Jack Wills home page.

I navigated to the product page, added it to my basket all very slick and well-engineered, then I landed on the shopping basket page, I checked the product was the right one and clicked the checkout button only to be faced with the following screen.

Click to enlarge

Now imagine that I am the parent of a 12 – 16 year old child who is desperate to get the latest Jack Wills joggers or their new Hoody, but as the owner of the card that is going to pay for these purchases this could be very scary and indeed lead to a cart abandonment as the customer doesn’t feel safe putting their card details into this site for fear of fraud, card cloning etc.

As a courtesy I tweeted @JackWills_Help to let them know the error that I had received so that it could get sorted out, I received a standard sales reply with the option to call and complete my order.

Unfortunately 10 days later the error still exists. Now your average parent isn’t going to let customer support know that they have received this error, they are simply going to click off the page and either wait to go and buy the products in store or maybe visit a rival site such as Hollister and purchase similar products from there.

I was telling one of the web developers I know and he couldn’t replicate the error so I went over to his machine and sat down and relived the process the way I had done it when I first went to purchase, that’s when it became clear what the issue was.

And here it is:

Tell me what the difference is between these two images and you are halfway to solving the problem……

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

You get it?

Well if you did congratulations, if you didn’t then that’s fine that’s what this articles for, the difference is the one version of the site is on the sub domain of www. and the other version isn’t.
This is a usability issue, if somebody visits the non www. version of the Jack Wills site, then tries to buy, the “checkout” button points to the non www. version of the cart for which the SSL certificate is not registered for. If they initially visit the www. version of the site, they will have no issues.

The error message in Firefox explains the issue in a more technical way:

The certificate is only valid for *.jackwills.com
(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

In short the SSL certificate is only valid for sub domains of jackwills.com such as www.jackwills.com or cart.jackwills.com for example.

http://www.jackwills.com/en-gb/checkout/delivery?flow=basket_checkout – Redirects to login/register page

http://jackwills.com/en-gb/checkout/delivery?flow=basket_checkout – takes you to error page

The fix:

This issue could be resolved for example with  a simple 301 redirect in the sites .htaccess file with Apache.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.jackwills\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.jackwills.com/$1 [R=301,L]

So in future anytime a user tries to access the Jack Wills website like so jackwills.com they will instantly be redirected to www.jackwills.com.

So there it is the simple 5 minute fix that could make a massive difference to conversions to Jack Wills, it might have a large impact it might only be minor but I felt it made a good little case study and also show’s that even the biggest online companies can make mistakes sometimes so we don’t have to beat ourselves up about it.

Thanks to Andy at ajfmedia for the 301 fix code.

*Update* 19 December 2012
It appears that Jack Wills have fixed the issue on their site now, and having seen that the Senior Front-End Web Developer recently viewed my Linkedin profile I can only presume they used the article as the basis for fixing the issue, all in all a win for the customer.

Cheers

Jared