As both an ecommerce store owner and marketer, I’ve seen my share of sites that are poorly designed, difficult to use, and downright anger-inducing.

In fact, pretty much every day people are posting on here, looking for feedback on their websites. Naturally, some of these sites are a lot better than others.

Still, given what I’ve seen, it seems like a lot of folks are going out of their way to look for ways to frustrate the hell out of their customer base.

If you’d like to lose prospects, lower your conversion rates, and drastically increase your abandoned carts –this one’s for you! Here’s a look at some sure-fire ways that you can drive customers away, and keep them from coming back for more.

Get ready to take notes people, this one’s gonna be deep!

1. Use Illegible or Miniscule Fonts Want to really turn people off of your site? Use obscure fonts that don’t scale well, are about 8pt, are light grey, or are otherwise hard to read.

2. Have Unclear Navigation This one should be obvious, but whenever possible make it difficult for your visitors to navigate your site. Trap doors, glitch redirects, broken links and the like will drive your visitors crazy, ensuring that they never really make it to the meat of your website.

3. Have Top Secret Shipping Information Here’s a good tip that most companies are fond of using: don’t list shipping information on your website. Or if you do, make sure it’s all-but-impossible to find. Keep your visitors guessing as they add things to their carts, then spring it on ‘em last minute. They’ll be so shocked, they’ll click away instantly, increasing your abandoned cart rates.

4. Hide Your Contact Info Speaking of hiding things, make sure your contact info –something that 64% of visitors want to see, is also suspiciously MIA. Place it somewhere obscure, or make them jump through hoops to find it. You’re invisible –like the CIA.

5. Don’t Set Conversion Goals Don’t have any conversion goals? You know, a clear idea about the next step you want your visitors to take? If you don’t know what you want your visitors to do, they won’t either! So keep them in the dark –and don’t prompt them to follow you on social/opt into your newsletter/start a free trial.

6. Don’t Bother With a CTA No CTA? No problems! Your visitors won’t have a clear path to follow, or any real action that they’re supposed to take. Instead, they’ll wander aimlessly on your website like it’s a 2007 MySpace page. (Flashing GIFS and pop/emo/grunge background music optional.)

7. Try Not to Optimize for Mobile Again, while we’re rockin’ it like it’s 2007, you’ll want to ignore the fact that half the world uses smartphones to access the internet, and do everything that you can to not optimize for this crowd. After all, if they’re a true customer/fan/follower, they’ll be willing to switch from their phone to their desktop computer and type your website address in by hand. Gotta screen out those prospects that aren’t serious!

8. Choose Small, Hard-to-Click Buttons Ever been on a website on your phone, only to find that the buttons were so small you couldn’t click them? Recreate this effect with your own website! Try-to-click-the-buttons is a fun game for your visitors to play.

9. Install Pop-Ups That You Can’t Click Away From Another classic trick. Make sure you have popups to solicit email addresses –that are a nightmare to click away from. Your visitors will have no choice but to enter their email address and opt-in to whatever you’re peddling. A great tactic!

10. Deploy Killer Chatbots Chatbots are a marketer’s best friend. Especially when they’re designed to harass customers nonstop throughout their journey on your website. Instead of simply having a chatbot message once and leave it at that, get your bots to spam your visitors incessantly throughout their journey on your site. A great way to warm your prospects to your company.

11. Don’t Do Any Sort of Audience Segmenting Cast that net as wide as possible! Don’t worry about defining your core audience or segmenting for your ideal customer, instead, try to be everything to everyone –from Boomers to teenagers! It’s lit fleek fam!

12. Don’t Have Any Sort of Marketing Plan in Place If you build it, they will come! Stick your newly created website on the worldwide web and get ready for the traffic to start rollin’ in. No need to have a marketing plan, or spend any ad dollars to increase traffic. While we’re on the subject, totally disregard anything you’ve ever read on SEO. Keywords = irrelevant.

13. Don’t Worry About Analytics You know how they say you should use analytics so you can see what’s working and make data-based decisions? Don’t believe a word of it. It’s all a ruse to sell more analytics software. Don’t bother to set conversion goals, or track page loads, click-throughs, and referrals. Instead, go with your gut!

Whew. If your customers make it through all of this, and still manage to buy from you/opt-in/convert, then you know they’re legit. Give them a patronizing pat on the back, and throw some free eye-masks in with their order.

In all seriousness, I’m not saying that you have to drop 10k to get a good website, but I do think that it’s important for companies to put a little bit of time and effort into ensuring that their site doesn’t look like a pile of crap when it goes live. Sure, you could go with a generic WordPress template, but just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should! Just as important as the front-end stuff though –like design and UX, is the actual content and structure of the website, the behind the scenes stuff, if you will –the “what you want people to do on your site,” and “how you’ll get them to do it!”

Know any sure-fire ways to drive potential customers away? Maybe some that you’ve used yourself with great success? We’ve all done at least one of these when we’re first starting out, so don’t be afraid to spill the beans. Let’s hear it!