How buyers behave with Habra

Hello! When habraeffekt in December comprehended my book, we in two days had some hundreds orders from people. Special people. The call center cautiously called the new category “ deeply immersed in IT ”. Before this game, they didn’t really touch upon the most red-eyed part of the community, but the book caught me.



On the second day, the girls relaxed and tried to have fun.



I'll tell you what it looks like .

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Habraeffekt

Habraeffekt in 2011 was from 5 to 8 thousand people in a couple of hours, then another half thousand hosts spread over two days. The figure could reach 40% of the post readings in the first three days. Today - approximately 10% of the readers of the post (the latest data on the experience of the post about the book and the post about the PDF-assembly of translations for GameDev , plus from a couple of people with posts). In absolute terms, respectively, 2-5 thousand people, because posts are now read a lot worse than on the old “big” Habré (there are two factors - ignoring the rating of the post when sorting for unregistered people and separation of the audience).



Physical habraeffekt on stores in terms of the book greatly exceeded our expectations . A couple of years ago, the main model of purchase we had an order through the online store. Since then, we have covered all the major intersection flows with our stores (most likely, you will find at least a couple of convenient options), so a very large proportion went to the physical traffic.



Nobody expected this, because the experience of previous years said that hardcore IT people buy with delivery to and from the online store. So we laid the first miscalculation with logistics. It looked like this: our car from the warehouse transported books to the points, for a few minutes the presence there was on fire - and then it disappeared. I even managed to write a ticket about exchange glitches, when it turned out that these were preorders. The store had time to come to the book - and then the call center sorted everything out. On Tverskaya, because of the last book, a fight almost began. This, of course, is epic, but I did not want that. The lesson is simple - IT-specialists are not hickey and they are not at home. If there is a convenient pickup nearby - time control is more important than waiting for the courier.



Yes. Contrary to popular belief, the main audience sleeps at night and does not fill out forms. Orders on the phone was much more than from the basket site.

User Profile

The call center learned to re-talk with people. Problems for the operators who came this year, really arose out of the blue.



Wrong:

- Please tell me your phone number.

- Why do you need my phone number?

- Well, it is needed to issue a reserve of goods on Kursk on you.

- I will not leave.



Right:

- Please tell me your phone number.

- Why do you need my phone number?

- We need any sequence of numbers that will be the password for your reserved item.

“All right, 31337.”

- I will write 000000-31337, okay?



In the forms, we have inputs like:







This form will skip further, but the “one click” form will not, because we need data validation in the first step. Previously, it was not checked at all, but first there were incidents with parcels and a courier (sometimes you need an exact last name, otherwise they may not give out only by name), then a whole series of orders without a phone.



The fact of checking the fields has upset ten people at a minimum - we are now experimenting and seeing which is worse - checking the fields or problems later. What is recorded in the phone, we traditionally did not check - it is important that the field was not empty.



Secondly, it turned out that it was unrealistic for many to give their first name and surname. We have already tried to make these fields optional, and then there was a whole mountain of parcels that are difficult to receive. Therefore, alas, such is life.



More operators met with three twin brothers named First Name and last name with the surname. I was still waiting for the Hiro Protagonist from Stevenson's “Avalanche” (this is the name of the main character, which translates as “The Main Character”), but no. Hiro did not come. And Whose Whose too.

Feedback

For three days we collected as many shoals as we usually collect in a couple of months. This is damn useful: almost everyone who saw some sort of hitch (just knew how to do better, or saw a bug, or something else) wrote to us after ordering. So it became known that in a store in St. Petersburg you can pay for an order for pickup by courier, at 11:59 pm you can order a courier with urgent delivery on Friday, the time for ordering a callback is not localized (it is not clear that this is Moscow when the person is from Brazil, for example), because of the peculiarities of charging the discount in an instant letter of the order, one amount, and in fact less, right in the letter confirming the pick-up the phone continued (and it’s normal to save the letter and not go to the site if you need it) and so on. A bunch of obvious and not so things.



The funniest thing is that when some people really liked the book, then the same thing happened. You probably very quickly guess how an IT specialist can thank another IT specialist.



Right.



You broke our site. And then they showed XSS in absolutely wild places. I note that this is a very important moment in technical psychology, which wildly scares untrained people. For a non-IT person, criticism or a bug is something bad, like “they don’t like how we’re done, they scold us”. For us, this is a sign of participation. Found a bug - helped the project. I was afraid that our operators would be offended by this, but, fortunately, they understand that the complaint is a gift (because it improves our processes), but about XSS and other holes simply acted by analogy.



Or something so exotic: “Your e-mail program does not correctly support the RFC 2047 specification” - with an example.



Just want to apologize to those who sent us holes. There are two problems: we have no bug bounty (or rather, we give games for useful performance suggestions, and even offered a few - but, for example, the same datacompboy put the operator at a standstill, saying that he didn’t need a game - this was not the case before). Secondly, we did not close these holes for a long time, and they hung on the site. The problem in the feature freeze of the New Year is the next release after November 25, not earlier than January 20 of the next year. And in it, in this next release, the old fixes are included, and the new ones fall only after another two weeks. This is a retail feature - the exotic XSS has a lower priority than the change in the mechanics of pricing, alas, this is a question of potential lost profits. Both of these features revealed that we are not very good at bugs - and the process obviously needs to be revised. While we think.



But back to December. Another important thing - with all that it seemed to us that we polish the processes and react to each review, it was from the IT-audience that a lot of edits came. This is due to the aforementioned feature: to say about a bug, even a minor one, is something like a part of ethics. Fortunately, all this does not continue anywhere and will definitely reach work - but I was a little scared by how much we miss. We have already begun to revise the process of finding errors and rational proposals within the company - the first step was an improvised publication in the public access for everyone inside todo by bugs and statuses, plus prizes to those who find them within the company. In a few months I will tell you how and what works. Also from fresh - when redesigned, they hung a sign saying that the site was new, and asked to send bugs. A lot of people showed that they did not like (and it was not necessarily a bug).

And you broke the MYTH

The publishing house also ran into problems, but not as widely as we. Actually, they don’t have a blog on Habré, and no one was expecting anything right from them. But it turned out that in one of the places at their SSL aggregator it was only drawn (and in fact it was an open channel), in another place they saved payment data that they should not have saved, in the third - under certain conditions you can make an “invisible” order . And so on.



All this came to light when the sales of the electronic version of the book began. By the way, yes, we argued with one friend from the MYTH that in a week the electronic version of the book will appear on Flibuste. I lost, it took three weeks. Of course, I could pour it myself, but that would be extremely wrong in terms of the ethics of the dispute. But it took two weeks for it to go to the Vkontakte document storage - this service actually effectively replaces pirated file sharing services.



More habraeffekt comprehended them. If you remember, I tore off the progress of the prepress before leaving the printing house of the main print run. So, we, too, for the most part, took away this reprint - preorders by region. Plus we decided to breed it in the country a little more than usual. A third is being planned, but it has not yet been done.

Slides

Who cares about what kind of people are the data of the Google counter. Analytics from our company card (these are ordinary average customers, not the red-eyed segment):

More features

Again, contrary to the established opinion about the “silent hikkikomori”, the dialogues with the IT-part of customers are very unusual:

• Extremely polite and calm, as with a perfect call in support. For example, no questioning.
• Very precisely structured - usually the operator asks questions and leads the conversation, here all that remained was only to nod. It very much helped with working out of a wave of a habraeffekt and in general in rush of New year.
• Quite often (according to impressions) there were socializing. Operators were persuaded to do something by the process, and often successfully. Fortunately, this is what they can do. When the buyer is polite and friendly - naturally, a little more than usual will be done. For example, very often information was given about where the goods are, but not yet received (this is from half an hour to two until the delivery is accepted) - and for this you need to keep in touch with the shop sellers, because there is no such thing in the database.

Well, we also met with a bunch of extremely unusual people. And some orders will be remembered for years. For example, the community turned out to be able to do this: one person picks up the goods, gives them to another along the way, and he gives them to the third person, who goes to Germany in the evening, and he already passes them to the fourth station at the station. I signed a book with a similar scenario, but fewer transitions: "We have long hands." I hope the recipient understands why.



Or the situation with a girl in a distant city, to which a dozen people came into the store and called the word “Habrahabr” for a discount - she knew that a discount should be given, but did not know what it all meant. And already the fifth one began to ask what Habrahabr is. And no one has handed over her military secrets.



In general, operators and salespeople stayed after this invasion in a light shock, learned to recognize the “Khabarovsk” by the look and answer the strange questions of curious and trolls. It seems like this: “Girl, how do you get a check on a bill, but not bills, you hold them with one hand?” Well, of course, the girl was afraid all day to tear the bills and still slightly spoiled one.



In general, even though it is now April, we need to fix and tighten a lot of things now, and then also rebuild a couple of processes. Thank you for such a stress test.