Online shopping carts - why customers walk away...

Imagine you are walking through a grocery store and have just crossed off the final ingredient from your shopping list.


 
Suddenly, you desert your filled-to-the-brim shopping cart and quickly exit the store. Hard to imagine? That’s probably because you’ve never done this before.

Now think about this same scenario but in a different environment – an e-commerce Web site. Make more sense?  Probably – if you’re among the many shoppers who have abandoned their e-carts online.

The explosion of online purchasing has given rise to an ultra-competitive environment for retailers and, as more and more consumers shop via the Web, shopping cart abandonment has become a significant problem for retailers. Abandonment can be attributed to a broad range of factors – the most common being high shipping costs, comparison shopping and frustration with the complexity of the checkout process.

If retailers are to increase online sales and revenue, they need strategies not only to drive customers to their Web sites, but solutions that facilitate the completion of customers’ online transactions.

If they are serious about driving volume online, they need to understand why their customers are leaving and course correct as needed. The best way to get to the root of the shopping cart abandonment problem is to obtain customer feedback in a way that doesn’t disrupt the online shopping experience.

But how?

Online survey tools and feedback have become an overwhelming popular choice among large online retailers such as WalMart and Petco. These tools collect information from would-be customers who didn’t make it through the virtual checkout line. By asking a brief series of questions about why the customer chose to leave the site prior to completing the transaction and collecting some key pieces of demographic data, retailers can obtain information that can inform and improve their e-commerce strategy.

But in order to retrieve credible data that can be analyzed and sorted for key trends and issues, online surveys must be short and sweet. Some tried-and-true survey questions include:

· Why did [you] decide to leave the website? This question can be open-ended or include choices such as cost, browsing purposes and user experience.

· What can [we] do to encourage a future purchase? This question can be open ended or offer similar options mentioned previously.

· What is your biggest concern about shopping online? This question may be open-ended or give choices such as: security, online price versus in-store price, etc.

· How frequently do you complete purchases online?

· How frequently do you comparison shop online?


Many online surveys also allow retailers to deploy hidden fields within the survey – fields which provide visibility into SKU numbers, Web pages visited and products viewed – all without customer knowledge.

Retailers may also consider inquiring about customer reactions to incentive offers. Sometimes promotions drive customers from Web site due to strong messaging that may seem like pressure to complete a purchase. Other times customers are driven to a Web site by an incentive offer, only to find that it was not the offer they thought it was once they read the terms on the site.

Using feedback directly from customers, information obtained via hidden fields and demographic data, companies can get a good sense of customer profiles and make deductions and inferences about why customers are leaving prior to purchase. As companies begin to learn about their customers and understand the reasons behind their actions, they can begin design plan of improvement. However, the only way the truth can come out is to get direct feedback from shoppers themselves. After all, the customer is always right.


Source: Inside Retailing

Tuesday, 28 October 2008

 

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