A study undertaken by online marketing company Amaze in association with the University of Glasgow has revealed that 9 out of 10 online shoppers abandon the shopping cart or checkout on ecommerce and online retail sites before they complete it.
It’s a staggering proportion and the report has identified three reasons why. 42% of customers wanted more information or wanted to think over the purchase. Another 42% found the postage costs off-putting or found the product cheaper elsewhere. 16% were dubbed “window shoppers” and had no intention of buying in the first place.
The full report can be found here. But what it reminds online sellers is that there is always an opportunity to enhance your processes and improve your conversion rates. Clearer information and better messaging on your website could help you get more customers. Even small changes, it would seem, can make a massive difference.
Tags: ecommerce, online selling, usability
January 13, 2010 at 2:00 am |
What this really shows is that what retailers want (thing in cart > checkout > pay) isn’t what buyers want. The way buyers use carts is massively more messy than either retailers or web designers think. So the crucial element is to make it easy for buyers to come back and pick up where they left off:
~ shopping carts should have long-life cookies. Having the cart empty itself after an hour or even a day is silly: it should remember what buyers put in it until they deliberately take it out. (Have your cart update from live inventory, so you can tell buyers that the item they’ve asked for 10 of now only has 3 available.)
~ give buyers the opportunity to create multiple lists: not just a standard “wish list”, but more than one, useful for different purposes.
~ let shoppers bookmark and share things with Twitter and Facebook and Stumbleupon. I bet a fair few of the 42% who wanted to think about it also wanted to get friends’ opinions. Make that easy for them.