SUMMARY: Poor usability is a known factor in cart abandonment. The top 23 sites all gross over $1 billion per year but have a 44% worse checkout user experience. At the average abandonment rate of 68% each of these sites could be losing $3 billion, if not more.
Buying something online should be as easy as a click but too many online eCommerce sites keep interrupting online shoppers while they’re dealing with other interruptions. Studies show that the average person gets 1 interruption every 8 minutes, while the average employee gets interrupted 56 times a day. With e-retail sales accounting for 14.1% of all retail sales that’s a LOT of lost sales.
Experts predict that retail eCommerce sales will reach $4.13 trillion in 2020 but how many online retailers actually focus on the user experience? The truth is the more steps someone has to take to finalize the sale the higher the shopping cart abandonment rate.
Every $1 invested in UX results in a return of $100 (ROI = 9,900%) but I have found that clients seldom invest in ensuring their websites have a better user experience. Here are some things to think about:
- 68% of users wouldn’t submit a form if it requires too much personal information
- Customers who have a negative brand experience on mobile are 62% less likely to purchase from this brand in the future
- Types of personal information that buyers prefer not to release in a form:
Phone number (58%), address data (53%), role/title (21%), last name (20%), company (18%), email (16%) and first name(11%) - 55% would deter from a form if it included an automatic email subscription
Yet I’ve seen clients who constantly make these mistakes. Nothing is more frustrating to a consumer than suddenly receiving a bunch of emails from a site where they just made a purchase.
People who buy online tend to be savvy enough to use the “auto-fill” function from their mobile devices or laptops. It saves a lot of time, but there are still many sites that don’t integrate with auto-fill. Again, a bad user experience.
Your goal on an e-commerce site should be a constant improvement. Your website metrics can tell you where you’re losing customers in the online sales process, and every effort should be made to improve these metrics by testing different user scenarios.
Nobody has learned more about ecommerce than Wal*mart. The star retailer upped its e-game just in time to benefit from a pandemic surge in online shopping. A survey of American shoppers by McKinsey, a consultancy, found that kerbside pick-up has nearly doubled from pre-covid levels, and in-store “click and collect” sales have shot up by nearly 50% from last year. Walmart’s digital sales leapt by nearly 80% in the latest quarter, year on year, to $10bn. That is still less than 8% of revenues—but more than in the whole of 2016, according to Morgan Stanley.
If, after reading this, you’re still not convinced that you need to continually invest in the user experience your mindset means you won’t succeed. Improving the user experience should be part of your online sales objectives.
