Tag Archives: etail

3 Ways to Lose an eCommerce Sale

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What you’re about to read was inspired by a real-life online shopping experience. I won’t mention the guilty site, but I’ll say they sell clothing and jewelry to young urbanites.

As I relate the following three eCommerce mishaps, be thinking about whether you can eradicate all of them from your business by the time the “Holiday Rush” hits. ALL are preventable if you start today and take one item at a time.

Let’s start at the “precipitating event;” the spark that lit my desire to shop online…

1. An email with a promo code arrived. w00t! They paid attention to past purchases, and sent me a great promotion: 10% off a brand I’ve purchased before, and free shipping if the order exceeds a certain amount.

How They’re Losing Sales: Despite not mentioning an expiration date for the promo code, it was expired by the time I reached checkout. I’m notoriously slow for opening emails from online retailers, but I bet I’m not alone. Creating a sense of urgency with an expiration date is fine, but remember that shoppers sometimes go weeks without going through their personal email accounts to read your promo codes.

And now it’s Customer Service’s turn…

2. When the promo code came up as expired, I was understandably disappointed. I’d just spent a fair amount of my weekend building up enough value in my shopping cart to qualify for the free shipping (Yes, I’m cheap.) My credit card was out of my wallet. So, I clicked the live chat in the cart to see if they’d extend the promo code, or give me an equivalent one.

How They’re Losing Sales: The live chat agent, while polite and earnest, was not able to do anything to help me (be a cheapskate). They weren’t empowered by their employer to get creative and save me from abandoning my cart. They suggested I call the “real” Customer Service during regular M-F business hours. So my guess is that the live chat is being outsourced, which is fine, but if they aren’t empowered to save sales, they’re probably not giving good ROI.

Now stepping up to the plate, Technology…

3. I came back the next day with the intention of calling the retailer and trying to get them to extend the promo code or give me the equivalent deal. So, I returned to the site and clicked “My Cart” to review what I’d put in there, and have it on-screen when I called.

How They’re Losing Sales: They didn’t save my cart! So many sites are saving cart items via cookie that I assumed my items would be there the following day or week. So now I’m definitely not going to re-build my cart AND call them to try and negotiate the promo code. I’m going to just repress the whole memory…maybe I’ll even forget the retailer’s brand in the process!

These 3 blunders may seem unconnected from a business perspective, but from a buyer perspective, they were all part of a persuasion scenario that broke down and turned a VERY motivated shopper into a lost sale.

I do like the site, and hope they can address these issues and stay in business. But they and others will have a very painful holiday sales season if they don’t treat the disparate parts as a unified buying experience that must be nearly flawless to be profitable.

[A version of this post was originally published August 11th, 2009 on GrokDotCom.com, an award-winning, but now defunct, Marketing Optimization blog.]

The Shopping Cart: Are You Answering These 5 Silent Questions?

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The ecommerce shopping cart is a great place to run tests because simple changes (layout, copy, color, etc.) often yield fantastic results. But once you’ve hit a point of diminishing returns with “easy” A/B tests, you’ve got to dig in deeper and find out if you’re answering customers’ silent questions. I call them “silent questions” because customers don’t ask them of site owners directly. They simply buy from you if their questions are answered, and buy from your competitor if they go unanswered!

There are unanswered questions in the minds of our customers that we think are obviously answered on the page, but guess what? We’re blind to the truth that our customers miss things that we put in front of them. We’re too close to our own designs and user experiences to be objective. (If you’ve ever witnessed a usability test, you know the pain I’m referring to).

If you’re not sure about what those unanswered questions are, specific to your business, you can back up a few steps and use personas or user testing to uncover them. Personas help you empathize target customers (not you) and imagine their specific shopping questions. User (usability) tests can be designed to uncover customer questions by assigning a shopping task and asking the subject(s) open ended questions and encouraging them to “think out loud.”

For example, here are 5 key, unanswered questions (beyond shipping costs) of the shopping cart:

  1. Do you offer alternate forms of payment (aside from credit card)?
  2. Are you safe and secure?
  3. Why are you asking for this information?
  4. Do I have to set up an account to buy?
  5. Do I get to review my order before we transact?

I recently bought a Father’s Day present online from a gift retailer, and their overall shopping cart process was “OK.” I would give it a “B-” grade; it was good enough to get me through the purchase without bailing, but not nearly good enough to earn brand loyalty. But, they did a good job of clearly answering the 5 Questions, and it was enough to help them “Get The Cash.”

Are you adequately answering the 5 unanswered questions? You won’t know unless you’re doing customer research and experimentation. Whether your confidence level is low, high, or somewhere in between, I know you could run some interesting tests to validate your assumptions about how well you’re doing, and you might increase your funnel conversion rate in the process! Want help? Let me know.

[Originally published June 22nd, 2009 on GrokDotCom.com, an award-winning, but now defunct, Marketing Optimization blog.]