Selling online: how to lose a customer
11 May 2025(2025 May) – Revenge is sweet. I have a natural talent for relationship marketing. Relationship is about help: help is instinctive. Helping yourself, helping others. We form, develop, and maintain relationships to help in some way, and at some level of understanding. Help is unconditional, but in business it is conditional, help usually in exchange for money.
If your business (product or service) caters for a mass market, then you can afford to be unhelpful sometimes and lose customers, provided enough other people find your business helpful to at least make up the difference.
If your business caters for a specific market in the service sector, then you cannot afford to be unhelpful because of the risk to your reputation. For the sale of goods, to avoid the possibility that your employees are not as helpful as they should be, a transactional website is the obvious solution.
A transactional website automates the relationship process anonymously. A contact form on a website is impersonal. Only when someone responds to a query or a complaint does the customer have any contact with the person behind-the-scenes. That person can make all the difference. Here’s an example of how to get it wrong:
I don’t eat chocolate, but my wife does. (I’ve given up trying to discourage ruining her health.) For years, she has had a regular subscription for buying her favourite chocolate direct from a well-known chocolatier online. Businesses that sell their own products direct to the customer achieve a higher profit margin than via a reseller. She chooses from the selection, confirms payment, the chocolate arrives by post or courier. Earlier this week, of the items ordered, one was missing. She emailed the company, and the person that replied denied she had ordered it and wanted proof of purchase. Upset, she told me what had happened. On my advice, she replied to the person it was not for her to prove it, but for the person to check the order and payment. Next day, a director of the company emails an apology, she should’ve been told the item was out of stock, payment would not be charged. Next day, she visited the website again and found the item is in stock. I said a cover-up. An insight into the company’s personnel not to her liking, she has deleted her payment details, cancelled her subscription, a process which required her to give a reason, and will find another make of chocolate.
For my wife, the experience was bad enough, without also obliged to provide a reason for wanting to cancel the subscription. I rarely give reasons for my personal decisions. I think there should be a law prohibiting insisting on a reason for cancellation, where there is no money owing or not a bespoke order, or not under a contract. When a customer enters a physical shop, they’re not stopped on the way out and required to give a reason for leaving without buying anything, unless suspected of shoplifting.
Return to Article