The e-commerce space is growing, along with its complications. Consumers continue to shift their spending and purchasing habits in order to reap the benefits of e-commerce, including the convenience of receiving products straight to their door, saving time by not having to visit a store, and finding products quickly and more easily than in-store. It’s an exciting time to be a retailer in the e-commerce space!
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This shift in consumer behaviour parallels an upward shift in the number of online businesses. E-commerce may simplify shopping for consumers, but it also has several benefits for retailers. Alongside the benefits are a fair share of complications.
One of the bigger complications online retailers grapple with is the mystery of abandoned shopping carts. What motivates a consumer to begin a check-out process, only to stop part way through? Understanding why this happens may help retailers combat the issue and, in turn, increase conversion. As the online retail space continues to grow, ensuring customers follow through is important.
The below graphic summarises the findings from a survey on common reasons why customers abandon checking-out midway through the process.
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According to the Baymard Institute, there are approximately 260 Billion Dollars in recoverable revenue from abandoned checkouts, with the average retailer being able to increase conversion by approximately 36%. This should serve as motivation to address this behaviour.
Optimise the checkout experience. By doing this, you can combat some of the drop-off caused by a less-than-optimal user experience. This includes reasons such creating an account, a complicated check-out process, and not being able to see the shipping cost up-front.
Typically, customers don’t like having to create accounts. This isn’t ideal for merchants since there are many benefits that come with capturing client information. The first way to combat this drop-off cause is to make an account optional. People tend to like choice, and if they don’t have one, there’s a good chance they’ll abandon ship.
The issue is that capturing customer information is extremely beneficial to businesses. Some of these benefits include: 1) building a user distribution list (which has a host of benefits, which includes increasing customer return rates with email marketing campaigns); 2) better understanding your customers; and 3) understanding user behaviour and purchasing habits in the context of a customer profile.
So what’s a business to do? Make account creation simple and optional, but give customers a reason to sign up.
A few ideas to encourage account creation:
A few ideas to simplify the sign-up process:
An example of a well-executed sign-up prompt:
Whenever you or your team are moving into a certain degree of uncertainty it is advisable to do it in a safe way by running experiments or launching MVPs instead of a full product proposition.
For those who have never heard the term “MVP”, it stands for Minimum Viable Product and it’s simply the first workable version of a business idea.
When was the last time you downloaded a song? Did you excitedly watch the status of your download while you waited? That progress indicator you were watching was a microinteraction, my friend! As you may already know, with great user experience and user interface design “the devil is in the details.” You can’t have an amazing digital experience if the details aren’t thought through and executed well. If microinteractions are designed successfully, they make a mediocre experience great, memorable and leave users wanting to return.