If you've ever worked at a company that has an online channel, you've definitely seen it: executives, business analysts and eBusiness teams alike, banging their proverbial heads against a wall. Why? They see shoppers browsing online, filling their carts, submitting their credit card information, and then boom! These would-be customers abandon their carts and vanish. What's even more frustrating than the lost revenue is the helplessness these teams feel as they puzzle over WHY the shoppers left.
A few months ago, we discussed the importance of figuring out "the why." Now, new research shows that this is an idea whose time has come.
PayPal recently released results of a survey where they polled 753 online shoppers, each of whom, in the previous two or three weeks, had added at least one item to their carts, had begun the checkout process but failed to complete the transaction. Kudos to PayPal for understanding that in order to improve the overall customer experience you've got to go straight to the source—the consumers.
Survey Highlights
When asked for their primary reasons for not completing their purchases, those surveyed were presented with several options related to business issues and customer struggle:
- The checkout process was too long: 1.6%
- I did not feel confident that the website would be able to secure my credit card, debit card, or bank account information: 2.3%
- I could not contact customer support: 2.5%
- The item was no longer available by the time I tried to check out: 3.5%
- The payment option I wanted to use was not available: 4.7%
- Other: 6%
More than 15% (and nearly 20%, if you include the "others") of shoppers failed to make a purchase because they encountered a problem on the sites or doubted that the sites were secure. Did the retailers know why these abandonments occurred? How many customers and how much revenue did they lose due to their inability to diagnose and react to these issues?
Later in the survey, PayPal asks: "What, if anything, could the online retailer have done differently that would have caused you to complete the purchase at that time?" This was the most compelling part of the data. Only 32% of shoppers answered "Nothing." In other words, a staggering 68% of shoppers believe that the retailer could have done something that would have led them to buy the items in their carts.
One of the last survey questions is: "Thinking about the most recent time when you clicked on the 'checkout' button but did NOT complete the purchase online, which of the following BEST represents what you did?" Almost 15% of shoppers answered that they went to another retailer, offline or online. An additional 36% said that they ended up not purchasing any of the items. So the retailers could have rescued a great deal of business if they'd had the tools to understand why their customers were leaving.
We don't know how many of these shoppers discussed their poor experiences on social networks or online forums. But with Twitter chatter ranging from what people eat for dinner to the latest-breaking news about the BP Oil catastrophe, you can bet that dissatisfied customers are making themselves heard far and wide. Another sure bet is that a growing number of online businesses are listening. Hopefully some of those puzzled (and probably sore-headed) executives who've been trying to figure out why their customers are exiting their buyflows are listening, too.
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