Shopping Cart Abandonment – Seller’s Fault or Consumer Behavior?

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at 1:36 pm  
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Shopping Cart Abandonment – Seller’s Fault or Consumer Behavior?

By Chris Crum – Wed, 06/09/2010 – 2:21pm.

Why Are People Leaving Without Buying?

Shopping cart abandonment is a problem that continues to plague e-commerce sites. It’s certainly a topic we’ve discussed at SmallBusinessNewz in the past.

How do you keep people from leaving without buying? Tell us about your strategy.

There are certainly things you can do to optimize your online buying experience in efforts to reduce shopping cart abandonment, but it will likely never be enough to keep abandonment from happening at all.

Forrester Research recently put out a report looking at shopping cart abandonment. The firm says:

Despite improvements in site design and increased consumer comfort with online purchasing, 88% of Web buyers say that they have abandoned an online shopping cart without completing a transaction. This is the same percentage as five years ago, suggesting that retailers have yet to address the primary drivers of cart abandonment: frustration with the amount of shipping costs, unpreparedness to make a purchase, and a desire to comparison-shop for a lower price. Cart abandonment highlights the opportunity for retailers to recover lost sales by clearing the path to purchase, clarifying shipping prices and delivery times up front, as well as testing various checkout scenarios.

SeeWhy Founder Charles Nicholls offered us some commentary on the subject (elaborated on in his blog post). “As website visitors gain online experience, even more visitors will abandon their shopping carts, and online comparison shopping will become ever more commonplace,” he says.

“We already know that highly-educated, experienced and wealthy shoppers are more likely to use voucher codes or look for them online,” says Nicholls. “Forrester found that web buyers who abandon shopping carts spend more online than those who don’t. What this tells us is that visitors who abandoned shopping carts are very valuable: higher income customers that are more tech savvy and use this knowledge to comparison shop and get better deals online.”

Among the stats he references specifically are:

-  More than two-thirds of shopping cart abandoners say they like to shop around before making a purchase.

- Nearly one-half of shopping cart abandoners say that they plan to conduct more online research before purchasing in order to get the best price.

“Despite optimization of shopping cart processes, shopping cart abandonment is here to stay,” Nicholls concludes. “This is in part because the top causes of shopping cart abandonment are not addressed by shopping cart optimization, because they are behavioral issues: website visitors not yet ready to buy, looking for a better deal, or concerned about the cost of shipping and handling, etc.”

What would you suggest to beyond the typical optimization processes to keep buyers from abandoning shopping carts?

A Way to Get Facebook Fans to Actually Buy

Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 10:49 pm  
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A Way to Get Facebook Fans to Actually Buy

By Chris Crum – Mon, 04/19/2010 – 10:51am.

Facebook App Gives Retailers/Fans Incentive Opportunity

As you’ve probably figured out by now, there a lot of reasons social media, and Facebook in particular can be beneficial to a small business. Engaging with customers, building loyalty, and driving traffic to your site come immediately to mind. You may or may not have figured out by now that you can list products right on Facebook to drive sales as well.

There are various Facebook apps that will allow you to set up a storefront within the social network, but one of them – Payvment, has just introduced a new feature that may grab your attention. Retailers who use this app (which happens to be free) can give customers a discount for becoming a fan. Just set the percentage you want to take off of a purchase, and those who become fans will get a discount.

I’m not here to sell you this product. All I know is that people love discounts, and getting people to become your fan on Facebook gives you an open-ended way of communicating with them down the road in a place that they’re spending a great deal of their online time already.

“While Facebook has become an excellent platform to build or strengthen brand awareness and communities, companies and their enthusiastic fans have been unable to take that final step between being a fan and being a buyer,” Payvment’s CEO Christian Taylor told me during a phone conversation the other day.

It’s worth noting that if you want traffic for your site, Payvment isn’t the app you’re looking for. Payvment lets consumers make their purchases without leaving Facebook at all. However, if you’re trying to sell merchandise, that’s most likely what you were wanting the traffic for in the first place, so it’s still an option to consider.

As I said, there are other Facebook e-commerce options out there, and as Facebook becomes a greater part of the fabric of the web, it stands to reason, you’re going to have more of a reason to be found in the social network.

I would expect more and more Facebook e-commerce solutions to emerge from here on on out, and I would also expect more of them to follow Payvment’s lead of fan monetization. Keep your eye out for various options and their respective features to find a platform that meets your own needs as an online retailer.

Don’t Waste Your Customers’ Time with Your Site

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 6:37 am  
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Don’t Waste Your Customers’ Time with Your Site

By Chris Crum – Thu, 04/08/2010 – 4:25pm.

If it’s Not Easy, They’ll Just Leave.

If you’ve ever analyzed your website’s bounce rate, you may have found problems with people leaving before they get through the buying process. Have you noticed that a lot of people left your site at the point where they have to fill out a form? This may be because you’re asking for too much information.

By this, I don’t necessarily mean that you’re asking for information that people don’t want to share for personal reasons. Perhaps you’re just asking for too much in general. You’re taking up too much of the customer’s time.

Time is an incredibly valuable thing these days, when consumers have much more information coming into their lives than ever before, particularly online. People have news feeds, Facebook, email, online video, search, and plenty of other things to take up their online time. Sure, shopping is one of these things, and you may fit into that, but it doesn’t change the fact that time is a factor.

Essentially, it should be as quick and painless as possible from the point where a customer reaches your site, finds what they’re looking for, and buys it.

“For instance, if you have an email form and you’re collecting email addresses to put them on your email newsletter, you may ask their name, their interests, their email address, have some checkboxes – where did you hear about us…thinking that that’s just a normal field, but when someone looks at it, they say, ‘I don’t really want to spend the time to fill that out,’” says Brandon Eley, author of the book Online Marketing Inside Out.

“Reducing the number of form fields that you put on a form dramatically increases the number of people who will actually fill it out,” he adds. “So only ask for the information that you really need. The same goes for a check-out process or a registration process. Make it as simple and concise as you can, and you’ll really increase those conversions.”

In addition, it is a good idea, if you run an e-commerce site, that you have a consistent navigation system in place throughout the site, so customers can always get to what they are looking for without having to look for how to look for it. Have a search box on every page. Don’t make it hard on the customer, because they’ll just leave and find a more usable site.

Time is increasingly scarce, and that means people have less patience. Why do you think Google is talking about making site speed a ranking factor in search results?