Don’t blow your 15 minutes of online fame

Grandma called me excitedly to tell me about a product she’d see on the Martha Stewart show. She got the company and the product right, but this is when things start to get interesting.

OK, so after deciphering the information from old school to new school speak, I search the Martha Stewart website. I found the website of the product and clicked on the link.

I eventually found the product after doing a search and scrolling through 2 pages of results. It would of been nice to have the product featured on the show on the front page of the website.

So I finally managed to put the item in the shopping cart and tried to check out. 5 minutes passed by on my broadband connection and the page did not move. Make sure your website can handle the bandwidth before going “prime time.”

Which brings me to my last point. I scrolled up to the top of the page to try to find a phone number. I had to navigate to the homepage in order to find the phone number on the bottom of the page. I then finally called the store to make the order.

So lets review:

1. Product that was on the show should be the star of your homepage;
2. Increase bandwidth for anticipated traffic from show’s homepage and;
3. Customer service phone number on every page of retail site, (especially the order and checkout pages.)