For the three reasons people log in: tracking an order, returning it, reordering it. Profile and addresses come after.
The people opening this page have already paid, yet it's one of the least developed pages in the stores audited.
The benchmark
Export a month of customer service messages and sort them by reason. The "Where's my order?", "How do I make a return?" and "Can you resend my invoice?" messages give you the list of pages your customer account is missing, or where people can't find them.
There's no benchmark percentage to give you, because it depends on your delivery times and your return policy. Your own store's number is the only one that's useful, and this export is enough to calculate it.
The rule
After login, the first thing visible is the latest order: its tracking and the available actions, shown as buttons.
The steps
- Sort the tickets. Sort a month of messages by reason before touching a single template.
- Tracking first. The latest order, its status and the link to the carrier come before everything else.
- Self-serve returns. The customer starts a return or exchange without writing to anyone; on Shopify, the return request can be made directly from the order status page.
- Reordering. Every past order has a "Order again" button.
- The invoice. It can be downloaded from the order page, which matters even more if you also sell to businesses.
- Login by code. The new Shopify customer accounts already work this way: an email address, a six-digit code, and a session that can last up to a year.
The trap
Your terms and conditions and your FAQ have often already made promises on behalf of your customer account, and nobody checks that it keeps them.
In the same week of September, audits of two Shopify stores found the same gap. In the first, the terms and conditions state that customers can "print their invoice by logging into the Site in the order tracking area," but the order page template contains no invoice link. In the second, the FAQ points to the confirmation email, and customers who've lost it write to customer service for a copy, business customers included.
Browsing both sites, the auditors didn't notice it either: they had to search for the word "invoice" in the theme code. Nothing breaks on screen: customer service absorbs the gap, one message after another.
Yet making invoices available online is part of the Opquast quality framework (rule 62), and the fix was estimated at about three hours of work, invoicing app included.
The exercise fits in a lunch break. Search for "customer account" and "invoice" in your terms and conditions and your FAQ, log in with a real order, then check each promise one by one.
You'll come away with one sentence to bring to your leadership:
"Our terms and conditions promise this in the customer account, the site doesn't do it today, and customer service is making up for it by hand."
