Anyone who has an e-commerce business that stocks an in-demand product must feel like they are in the promised land. With so many people unwilling or unable to shop in person, they have chosen instead to order online from either Amazon, eBay, or a host of smaller websites.
What many of these online sellers do not realise though, is that anyone looking at their product, and even hitting the ‘buy’ button still only has a 50% chance of completing the purchase. This is a shocking statistic, and even if just 10% of those could be turned into buyers, then profit margins for online sellers would increase massively.
Amazon and eBay
From the outset though, it should be pointed out that both Amazon and eBay have devoted huge resources into this already, so sales on those two platforms are probably quite watertight. However, sellers who also (or solely) use their own website, can turn more of those abandoned carts into money in their pockets.
The number one culprit here is shipping costs. Not making delivery charges plain at the outset can lead to disappointment during the checkout process. One solution used by many eBay sellers, and pulled off excellently by Amazon Prime is to include the delivery charge in the price the customer sees right at the start.
General solutions
Before the next point, however, it should be made plain that these are very general solutions for what could be a very specific problem. Companies or individuals that feel they already have every box ticked (and this page will not tell them anything they did not already know), may benefit from consulting a conversion rate optimisation, or CRO agency.
Next on the list are delivery times. Again, these need to be made plain at the start of the process, so that the customer is happy with their purchase: they be happy with cost of delivery but abandon the purchase because they do not want to wait 3-5 working days for it. In this case, the website’s loss is normally Amazon’s gain as visitors are likely to jump ship and buy one from somewhere with faster delivery.
Customer experience
Those two factors the website owner can do very little about, however, clearly communicating costs and delivery times as soon as the customer lands on the site will only leave those customers they can do something about.
The third reason is the very wide subject of poor customer experience. This can happen if your site is slow to load certain pages or products. This can be because of something as simple as image size, so can be easily fixed. It will stop, however, customers getting fed up with waiting for a page to load and looking for the same thing on another site.
This is particularly damaging for those businesses that attract the majority of their customers using advertising. They have paid (often handsomely) for the click that took the potential customer to the site, only to lose out on an almost guaranteed sale due to an easily avoidable issue.
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