I had considered something much more risqué to do with trying before you buy, but it seemed a bit crass in the context I intended it.
Whenever you buy something online, you have options. Product choices, price, and most of all, who to buy from. For every product there are several dozen people queuing up to sell it to you.
And the most successful online business are unsurprisingly excellent at selling.
But how can you tell who is going to offer you good after sale care? And the the case of products you buy to interact with online (i.e., online systems that you’ll log into to manage) how can you spot the people who care about you after you’ve parted with your cash, from those who just want to keep on selling?
I’ll start by putting this out there–for all sorts of reason, GoDaddy are not a company I recommend. In fact I do my best to warn people off them.
And this is a prime example of why. Below you’ll see a screenshot of the GoDaddy homepage. I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting in red, any area of the screen which is wholly, and unquestionably (I went easy on them frankly) devoted to selling.
Now to be fair their is a prominent support line number which is likely useful to both new customers, and exisiting ones.
But the only section devoted to existing customers is that small, plain looking “Log In to My Account” button on the top left. Now for sure a lot of business run this way, they are predominantly sales on the first page, and then the bulk of their information (and interactive systems) for clients is behind a password.
But I’d expect to see an obvious login box, with some graphic element drawing out attention to it. Not something so small my daughter’s Sea Monkeys could probably ride it like a tiny train.
GoDaddy’s after-sale support is well known to be, frankly, appalling. Unless you’re buying more products from them in which case they’d love to help you, yes sir, of course ma’am, have a nice day!
And you know what? I can see that right there, from their homepage. They haven’t given screen real estate to existing customers except in the most perfunctory, absolutely necessary way.
It’s just an example, albeit a solid one. Before you sign up for an online service (knowing you can very rarely try before you buy), have a look at how much they value their customers, by looking for screen space they’ve devoted to them.
