Mistakes Cost Money

"Spelling mistakes cost millions in online sales," shouts the headline of a recent BBC news story.

I was fascinated to see this story. Spelling mistakes cost millions in sales? Really? If the article had contained hard data, it would have been a real coup for editors.

Alas, it's not scientific. But it is interesting. The guy making the claim is not an editor or writer, apparently, but an "entrepreneur" who publishes websites professionally. An excerpt:

Mr Duncombe says that it is possible to identify the specific impact of a spelling mistake on sales.

He says he measured the revenue per visitor to the tightsplease.co.uk website and found that the revenue was twice as high after an error was corrected.

I wrote about this issue a few months back. If a website is riddled with mistakes, I do tend to take the website -- and sometimes the entire company -- less seriously. To me, the mistakes make the company look careless and amateurish. If they don't care about communication, I wonder, how much do they care about their product?

I don't know if mistakes on a website would cut sales in half, like Mr. Duncombe claims, but I'm sure it would cut sales at least somewhat. What do you think?

I'd love it if some brilliant researcher would do a real study on how bad web editing affects web sales. It's seldom that you can put a hard dollar figure on the value of good editing.