E-Commerce Success! and Fail!

I recently ordered an item through Target.com.  Today I tracked the package.  This is my story.

Success!
One of the major gripes people have about e-commerce sites is that you have to create an account with the site in order to place an order.  An old coworker of mine is a full-time SEO expert and had explained to me that you hurt your conversion rate when you require users to sign up for an account.  I forget by how much you end up hurting your conversion rate, but it was substantial.  A large enough number that you’d be a fool to not even consider the impact on your sales when making the decision to force users to register.  So the alternative is to give them the option.  Either they register and get all the benefits of order history, etc. or they just give you the minimum information: CC, shipping and billing address and an email address to send notifications about their order.

This is exactly how Target has their site designed.  I loved it.  One less account to keep track of.  One less password to create and keep in my password manager.

So Target deserves a pat on the back for this.

Fail!
However, there’s another aspect of this whole experience that I was less thrilled about.  That would be the shipment notification/tracking aspect.  Let me outline the process as compared to other shipment notifications that I have received in the past and see if you can spot the difference.

Target

1. Open shipment notification email
2. Click “Track your package” which brings me to Target’s website
3. Realize I’m not in the Track package screen but rather the My Account page
4. Click “Track Packages” again
5. Go back to my email and copy the order number from the email
6. Go back to the “Track Packages” page and paste in the order number
7. Enter the email address I used for the order
8. Hit Continue
9. Get confused because I’m still on the same page but then realize that a message is being displayed to me that secure link was just generated for me and to check my email
10. Go back to my email and open that message
11. Click the secure link to view the guest order (noting before I do that the link is only good for 15 minutes)
12. Realize I need my order number again
13. Go back to my email, open the original message and copy the order number
14. Go back to the guest order page and paste the order number in
15. Hit Continue
16. Click on the UPS number to view the actual shipping tracking status
17. Realize I’m viewing the tracking information still within Target’s website and not UPS’s, so copy the UPS number
18. Open a new tab and navigate to UPS.com
19. Navigate to track a package and enter the tracking number and track
20. Bookmark the UPS tracking page for this package so I don’t have to go through this again

Other Site

1. Open shipment notification email
2. Realize Google has auto-discovered the UPS tracking number conveniently supplied right in the email and provided me a link to the right of my email message allowing me to track that package with UPS.com
3. Click the tracking link

Now, I understand the need for the secure link, etc for getting into my order details.  I didn’t register for an account, so they need to make sure that they are securing the details of my order which includes snippets of my billing information.  All of which, again, they did an excellent job on.  However, for simply wanting to track my package and view nothing else about my order, that’s a LOT of steps.  I also understand that tracking details might not have been received yet by the time the shipment notice email arrives to me (it said so right in the shipment notice email under the “Track this package” link).  However, I’d appreciate a second email then with the actual shipping number.

Again, kudos Target on your design decisions around having guest orders and securing those orders.  However, you may want to rethink how a user goes about getting shipment tracking details on a guest order and try to improve that experience.