Many online retailers do almost everything right but still fail to win big in world of ecommerce. To illustrate how difficult it can be I’d like to share with you the story of an online retailer who did almost everything right.
Bob, has spent many years (and many thousands of dollars) building up a solid eCommerce site, which is well designed, competitively priced, and ranked well in the search engines for his chosen keywords. He is receiving a large number of visitors, they come, they see and they put his products in their shopping cart. But sadly that is where it ends for most of them. For one reason or another 65.23% of them abandoned their shopping carts and left his store to buy elsewhere. The tradgedy through is not that they where doing this, but that he didn’t know that it was happening, or how to fix it.
In our experience, we have found several reasons why customers abandon shopping carts and the effectiveness of an ecommerce store in converting visitors to buyers (known as the conversion rate) suffers. The mind map below lays out our top 10 reasons why visitors abandon their carts, along with some important considerations when looking at improving your conversion rate.
The first step we recommend to all of our clients is to get their web analytics audited to ensure we can track ecommerce transactions, with a tool such as Google Analytics. This will help us to answer many of the what questions.
From there we need to start considering some of the “Why” questions, and qualitative tools such as 4Q survey can assist in getting feedback from the customer as to why they are visiting your store, and what their experience has been.
Have you ever left a shopping cart at the checkout? I’d be keen to know what caused you to do so, especially if I haven’t included it in the mind map below
