Mystery Shopping is a tool used by market researchers to find out how a company can improve its products and services or to find out about a competitor’s products and services.

A “mystery shopper” is a person who poses as a customer. The mystery shopper goes through any or all parts of the customer journey – looking for information about a product or service, purchasing the product, attempting to make a return or get a refund, and so on.

The mystery shopper will then report on their experience:

How easy or hard was it to find what they needed?

How long did it take for someone to provide assistance?

Were the people who dealt with them polite and attentive?

Did the product they purchased fulfil their expectations?

How easy was it for them to return something and get their money back?

They often come prepared with a questionnaire, so they know exactly what to look for when they do their mystery shop.

Sometimes, a mystery shopper will perform competitor research by going through the same process with different competitors. For example, the shopper will go into a shop and ask for help purchasing a Christmas gift. The mystery shopper will go to different shops, always asking for the same thing.

Mystery shopping can be used to make improvements to your ecommerce site.

A mystery shopper can go through the process of looking for a product or service and then trying to purchase it on your site.  If anything on your website is difficult or frustrating for them, or just doesn’t work, you know that you have to change it.

The advantage of using a mystery shopper to do this is that you don’t have to wait for a customer to encounter a problem – which might cause them to move to a competitor – before you realize that something needs to be fixed.

On the positive side, if the mystery shopper finds something on your website that they think is fantastic, you can move it to a more prominent position.

A mystery shopper can also research competitor websites for you and let you know what you can do to make your website better than your competitors’ websites.

There are professional mystery shoppers, but a mystery shopper can be a neighbour, a friend or a family member.  The mystery shopper should not, however, be someone who is familiar with your website. They should never have seen your website before, and have no knowledge of how it was designed or how it is “supposed” to work. That is, they should be in the same position as a potential customer.

Some interesting facts from the Office of National Statistics’ 2009 survey on internet use:

1. The 65+ age group is the age group with the fastest growing proportion of internet users.

Older people may have trouble travelling to shops and transporting items home, so make good candidates for internet sales.   If you want to get older customers to visit your website, remember that they are likely to have accessibility issues.

This needs to be taken into consideration when designing a website.  For example, fonts should be easy to read, contrast between text and background should be just right, and someone using a screen reader or other accessibility device should be able to understand every piece of information on the website.

Of course, it is not only older customers who may have accessibility issues; people of all ages can have disabilities.  You can gain valuable customers you might otherwise have lost simply by making sure that your website is accessible to everyone.

At York Interweb, we are experts at making sure that your website is accessible to all internet users.

2. Only about one quarter of people who make purchases over the internet read the conditions of sale.

Encouraging your customers to read and understand the terms of purchase will help to prevent disputes and protect the reputation of your business.  Your customers will be more likely to read the conditions of sale if your entire website is easy to read and understand.  York Interweb can assist you by writing clear, jargon-free content.

3. 83% of UK internet users made a purchase over the internet in last three months – another indicator of the value of having an online business.

4. The number of households in Yorkshire and the Humber with internet access increased by 23% between 2007 and 2009.  This is the second largest percentage increase out of all the regions of UK, after the Northeast, where internet access increased by 27%.  Good news for online businesses in Yorkshire and the Northeast.

A while back, I attended a webinar for small businesses on how to design a good website.  The person who was presenting the webinar stressed the importance of paying for a professional service – that in the long run you are better off getting a professionally designed website than trying to save money by purchasing a cheap template website or doing it yourself. I agree with this completely.

However, she also commented that when it comes to copywriting, you should do it yourself, because hiring a professional copywriter is a waste of money.

Now, there are loads of people who claim to be content writers who can barely speak English and “write” articles by taking old articles other people have written and putting them through a machine that “rewrites” them by substituting words with synonyms (which are often completely inappropriate within the context), in the end creating articles that can barely be understood, let alone capture a reader’s interest or make the reader want to purchase anything.

And there are “writers” who think that writing for the web means learning which keywords are good for SEO and making sure that there are the right amount of them in the article – without any thought of style, the needs of the reader or the outcome you expect from the writing (a sale, a return visit to your site, etc.).

The person presenting the webinar may have been thinking of these types of writers when she said you are better off doing it on your own, and if she was, then she was correct.

But truly good copywriting can make a world of difference.  A good copywriter understands your readers, knows how to interest and entertain them and how to encourage them to take action.  A good copywriter will understand the principles of marketing and will have studied a subject such as  English literature, journalism or creative writing to an advanced level.

It goes without saying that a good writer for the web understands basic spelling and grammar, which is why I thought this article was interesting:

Small Businesses Losing Customers Though Poor Literacy

If your website is out of date, or looks like it’s out of date because it was designed a few years ago, you will lose a lot of potential customers. So  even if you get lots of visitors to your well-established website, they may simply click away because what you’re offering looks old, outmoded and like yesterday’s news - they may wonder if you’re still doing business at all and find it very difficult to have any confidence in what you’re offering.

Just like any shop front in the real world, your virtual business needs to look like someone’s running the place. Most people wouldn’t walk into a high street retailer that hadn’t been redecorated for 10 years, and the same applies to online retailers and businesses – this is why Tesco refurbish their stores every few years, and why eBay and Amazon do the same online.

There are several factors that will make visitors think your website is old and unused.

1. The most obvious example is dated items posted on your site, especially when they’re listed as ‘news’. If your last news item was from 2008 people will think your site has been abandoned. Sometimes no news at all is better than old news, so if you can’t commit to posting news regularly it’s best not to post news full stop.

2. Just like designer fashions in clothing, furniture and cars etc, there are fashions in website design. If you made your own website using cheap amateur ‘website in a box’ software with no knowledge of current trends, made your website using Front Page in 1998 or had your site professionally designed 5 years ago – the chances are it will look and feel out of date, even if it does everything you want it to. For example compare this snapshot of eBay in 2003 with how it looks today – which one would you rather shop at?

3. The third, but not least, important factor is technology. Each year technology advances. Mobile phones, TVs, cars and computers are upgraded at a phenomenal rate. The computer I’m writing this post on is 20 times faster than the one I had only 2 years ago. The internet connections we use are similarly many times faster than they were a few years ago and, because of this and other advances, websites can do much more than they could 5 years ago. Internet users expect more from websites;  feedback, live assistance, videos – virtual tours of your hotel for instance. If all you can offer them is an outdated beige background, text that was last updated in 2004 and some crusty old photos from 1978 (exaggeration, I hope!) then you’ve already lost them to your up-to-date rivals.