Almost half of UK online shoppers will leave their Christmas gift shopping until the last minute, despite worries over non-delivery.

Online retailers in trying to meet their customers needs and maximise revenues, are takng orders ever later before Christmas. 

They have control over how late they allow placement of orders. But they then have to place their faith in the Royal Mail or couriers for delivering the orders "for the last mile”. Over this they have little control. Add a dash of bad weather and it can all fall apart.

The cost of missing a delivery date

28% of shoppers who experience late delivery will not shop again with that online retailer, even though it may well have been the courier who slipped up (Survey by Econsultancy).
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Some shopping stats:

46% of shoppers leave gift shopping until the last minute even though they know delivery is not guaranteed.
Only 33% expect last minute online purchases to arrive on time
40% worry about delivery times but plough on and order regardless
27% expect last minute deliveries to be late

What happened in 2010?

57% orders were 1 day late
20% were over a week late and were probably delivered after Christmas.

Coming up to Christmas 2011

Of 40 website scrutinised in the run up to this Christmas, 85% don’t provide clear enough details of their last order date.
John Lewis has clear ordering deadlines whereas Tescos, Next, and Amazon are less clear.

What to do

Deliver on your promises.

Make the delivery dates on your website crystal clear - right the way through the length of the buying journey from the home page/landing page, to product pages and the shopping basket pages. Nobody wants to get all the way to the shopping cart only to find out that they won’t receive their delivery on time.

Last year Next used a “count down to final delivery date” counter on its pages which was a very clear way to manage customer expectations.

With bad weather, people do realise that this might present extra difficulties but they do expect to be kept informed with up to the minute bulletins.

Disappointed customers are less likely to be forgiving and will tweet and share their negative experiences widely. So, providing reassurance right at the very start of a visitor’s engagement, that their order will arrive on time, is crucial to them buying and building a loyal following. 

If you need to update the order information on your site, in time for Christmas, then call 08450 740068 or email sem@e-xanthos.co.uk.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Christmas Shoppers dont trust retailers to deliver on time, Graham Charlton, EConsultancy 23 November 2011

Ready to lose a quarter of your online revenues this Christmas?

Before investing heavily in lead generation, think about how well your customers will enjoy their on-site experience with you - because it will cost you dearly if you don’t!

Top 5 Sales killers

A recent survey by Econsultancy, suggests that 5 problems cause more online shoppers to abandon their purchases than any others, to the tune of 24% of total revenues.

They are:

1. Poor find-ability and bad site navigation
2. Poor quality or incorrect information on products (e.g. wrong prices or stock issues)
3. Problems at the checkout
4. Over complicated registration/login processes
5. Systems failures while they are trying to buy

All these can lead to rapid abandonment of a purchase and are the result of poor understanding of customer behaviour by website owners.

At Christmas, many people will be visiting your website for the very first time and as we know, online shoppers are fickle, time-challenged, deal hunting, and notoriously hard to please - but they do pay your wages!

Online websites have a way to go in improving satisfaction rates - and with some companies doing 50%+ of their entire year’s trading over Christmas, the mere thought of chucking away a quarter of their annual revenues should be a real concern.

How to avoid losing out?

Online selling now goes way beyond just your website with shoppers interacting with you from search, social media, email, sponsored advertising, mobile, etc, and the most successful online companies have become highly customer-centric, being pro-active in their investment in managing customer behaviour at every touch point.

Online businesses that aren’t investing in their customers will continue to react to problems, after the horse has bolted, without any real idea how to stem the haemorrhaging of sales.

The companies that are investing in their customers’ on-site experience do this through measurement, using available analytics to improve their decision making.

This can involve:

1. Quantifying site abandonment rates and using a systematic way of identifying and eliminating poor online experiences - why and where you are losing customers
2. Understanding what is happening at the bottom of the sales funnel and learning how to improve conversions at the final step
3. Eliminating obvious poor navigational issues and using correct page information (e.g. prices)
4. Creating an online focus group to test how well their ecommerce site delivers customer satisfaction

95% of companies surveyed by Econsultancy, said they would be increasing their investment in online shopping, but the survey highlighted a continuing blindness to the damage to the bottom line that a poor customer experience delivers.

As Christmas approaches, if you are worried about how well your online sales will perform, you can email me at sem@e-xanthos.co.uk or call: 08450740068.

Source: Reducing Customer Struggle, Findings from Econsultancy’s 2011Customer Experience Survey

British shoppers now spend £1 in every £13 online. Retail organisations are increasingly turning to ecommerce to drive and augment offline sales. But how they go about tackling the ecommerce world is often driven by incorrect thinking - their “field of dreams”. 

Companies entering ecommerce for the first time will often put their entire budget into building a great website, and somehow forget to understand that customers will need to be able to find it.

Would you buy a car, give it all the bells and whistles, and then find you haven’t enough money left for the petrol? No. So why do this with your ecommerce site!

Anyone thinking that creating a super-duper ecommerce site will drive all before it is living in dreamland. If customers don’t know your site exists how can they buy from you?

Large organisations rarely make this mistake, sometimes investing 50%+ of the total budget in marketing and promoting their online campaigns.

Smaller organisations don’t have the clout of their big brothers but sacrificing the marketing budget is a recipe for disaster. SMEs continue to fall into this trap.

There are numerous ways of driving traffic to your ecommerce site, including direct contacts, SEO, email, affiliate marketing, URL navigation and bookmarking. Other marketing channels include paid search, comparison shopping engines, marketplaces, mobile and social networking.

But which do I choose when budgets are tight?

While optimising the website is always essential - particularly now that social media traffic is being monitored by Google and Bing - determining which channel drives the best traffic, sales or ROI can only be established by testing and analysing the results.

But the beauty of the internet is you can test, quickly and accurately. You can combine different marketing mixes and use techniques like multivariate analysis to assess the outcomes.

Relying on one marketing channel (e.g. seo) exposes your business to the vagaries of Google’s frequent algorithm changes.  Relying on pay per click only works if you keep up the payments, and using sites like eBay or Amazon can make you vulnerable to changes which are outside your control.

Therefore, creating a portfolio of ecommerce marketing channels helps minimise your risk and maximise your sales.

Some channels work better than others depending on your products, your market, your budget. Some may create high margin, some low. Some are more about customer acquisition while others are about customer retention. There will also be channels that suit your particular products.

Ecommerce is described as a “zero sum” game, meaning each consumer is only going to buy from one retailer out of thousands and that retailer wins that specific order. Unless your products have a wider distribution you’ll be narrowing your sales opportunities using a single marketing channel.

If you’d like to discuss how to market your site effectively, why not give us a call on 0845 074 0068 or email sem@e-xanthos.co.uk.

According to a survey carried out in the USA by the research group, Marketing Experiments, over 56% of all shopping carts are abandoned before a visitor completes the checkout process.

So how do you manage or “nurture” the people who abandoned your cart?

The survey revealed that an optimised email campaign, aimed solely at re-engaging visitors who abandoned your cart (the abandonee), can more than double the ecommerce conversions.

Firstly, conversion rates are known to suffer when people are faced with an over complex check-out process. It becomes too much like hard work, or they go off and do something else before completion.

More often than not, the greater the number of questions deemed unnecessary by visitors using your check out, the lower your conversion rate will be.

Certain information, like billing, shipping and payment are essential and recognised as such by visitors. Smart ecommerce retailers split up the process and insert a series of guarantees and inducements to help guide people to the buy button.

Their first page might just be about registering, requesting just the name, email address and password before getting into the guts of the checkout process. These few details are all you need to email and reconnect with people who abandon the process later on.

When you look at the steps taken by the real exponents of ecommerce retailing, like Play.com or Amazon.com, you’ll understand why they set out their pages in the way they do.

Secondly, the re-connecting email should be sent no later than 24 hours after they’ve disengaged. The longer you wait, the more they will justify their decision not to buy.

People will often abandon a cart not because of the price. A follow up email can be written to suggest perhaps a “technical error” prevented them from completing their order - without putting any “blame” on the abandonee.

Checkout processes that display a tracking bar are very useful for reminding users exactly where they are in the process.

The first email should be followed by a second one, after another 24 hours, to include some additional incentive to encourage them to return.

Thirdly, if they still fail to return, try sending an email with a precise offer plus more information about the product they were selecting before they abandoned your process.

While it is impossible to redress all the reasons why someone abandons the process - lack of trust, uncertainty over price, confusion over product features, etc - an automated email campaign can address some of the reasons.

Marketing Experiments showed that adding an incentive to complete a purchase can increase ecommerce conversion rates by over 260%.

Source: Sam Mallikarjunan, ecommerce abandoned cart nurturing, HubSpot. 3 August 2011

If you thought Facebook and Twitter were the height of online social interaction in getting to know your customers then think again!

Enabling your customers to share their personal preferences with you is the key to strong online business relationships in the future. It doesn't just make your data gathering a hell of a lot cheaper and more accurate but it binds customers far more strongly to your brand.

ShoeDazzle

The American online shoe retailer, ShoeDazzle engages its website visitors in a style survey that is fun to do and allows visitors to define their own personal style and create their own fashion showroom - everything they need to go with ShoeDazzle's range of shoes.

ShoeDazzle lets visitors compare themselves to their style icons using an idea that has been around in mail-order catalogues for years but never has it been used so effectively to define buyer preferences with the help of a powerful database.

The clever bit

But the clever thing is that the purpose of the surveys doesn't just give the user a good time it gives ShoeDazzle hot information on who their customers really are, what they want, and indicates how best to market to that individual - plus they create huge numbers of more motivated buyers.

Another bonus for ShoeDazzle is word of mouth recommendation from its survey users. Few other online fashion sites are so pro-active in removing the hassle of trawling page after page trying to find stylish combination pieces with little guidance into what goes with what.

If its good, easier to use and affordable, people will buy.

Takeaway

Whenever you create a good and lasting buying experience for a customer then the impression you make persists and that means more sales and most important of all, repeat sales

Online business is not bound by any rules that say it has to be anonymous, impersonal or plain hard work!

Source: Gautum Gupta, Ecommerce Beyond Metrics, TechCrunch. 02/07/2011

On average, only 30% of your site traffic ever gets as far as the top of your shopping cart, and only about 3% of this traffic ever converts (on average).

A recent study analysed the traffic sources that drives conversions against the overall volume of traffic to the site from the different lead generation sources.

In a sample of 60,000 completed transactions across multiple sites, marketing agency SeeWhy, presented the following findings: 

The make-up of the different traffic sources coming to your site may not be the ones that convert the best.

The table shows that in this study, direct contacts (people who type in your brand name) represented 18% of traffic to the site but were responsible for 24% of the conversions whereas, SEM (pay per click, SEO, etc) generated 5% of the traffic but only 0.9% of the conversions.

User experience

For most websites it is your loyal customers, those who are familiar with your brand (perhaps having bought previously or subscribed to your emails) that are the most likely to convert. But to get any customers to convert at all requires you to guide them effortlessly to and through your shopping cart.

These results are for this study and different companies may well have a different palette of traffic sources. Organic or paid search may be significant traffic sources for another website, but what this study says is “look at the money”!

In addition, your storefront software (e.g. Aspdotnetstorefront) must interact properly with your analytics or you may not be able to track the financial value of the conversions of your sources.

This study only looked at last-click attribution, so the findings should be viewed as more an indication, but it points to the importance of building your brand and strengthening relationships with your customers rather than a shot gun approach to lead generation - if you wish to make spend your own money more efficiently on your lead generation.

The type of website you operate matters. If it is an ecommerce site then it’s there to sell rather than educate.

It may be also be the case that that the majority of your sales are from first time buyers rather than repeat business, so the loyalty level is harder to establish in an impulse market.

But what traffic source drives the best money?

Non-ecommerce sites particularly those offering services, or hi-tech, high mark products, need to educate their visitors over time, before these take the call to action, so the source of traffic that actually converted will be less obvious.

All sites are different, but starting to explore which traffic sources are the most likely to convert will be the ones that will make you most money.

As your website has grown, do the pages take an age to load?

Has your site become so complex that making any changes requires a huge amount of forward planning? In fact, is the site’s slow loading speed holding your revenues to ransom?

Numerous studies have been carried out on website speeds from Google, Shopzilla, AOL and many others, and their findings all agree in that the faster your website loads:
1. People will spend more time on it and be less likely to leave
2. People will more secure and more inclined to buy
3. Your revenues will increase significantly

Can a faster site make more money?

Very likely!

Shopzilla, the global price comparison site carrying over 100M products, found that as the business evolved, the sheer complexity and increasing lack of flexibility to alteration were starting to cost it dearly. Over 18 months they gradually rebuilt their site where upload speed was a prime design consideration.

Was it worth it?

Load times decreased from 8 seconds to less than 1 second.  Conversion rates rose almost immediately from 7% to 12%. Page views went up 25% and top line revenues increased 10%. On a site making $M’s per day, this was significant.

Site speed and user satisfaction

People hate slow browsers. As a test, in June 2009, Google deliberately slowed their processing speed by around 300 milliseconds to a test group of users to see if it made a difference. What they found was at slower speeds, that users undertook far fewer search sessions. More importantly, even when site speeds returned to normal, the test group continued to search less frequently.

So if your site is slow loading, people learn and remember this, and are less inclined to use it again because it’s not delivering a great experience.

Can an increased site speed improve search ranking?

In 2010, Google announced it would be using site speed as a ranking signal and now uses analytics to track a website’s speed, comparing it to that of its immediate peer group. A slow loading site could be penalised because it would be considered as being behind the game line.

When you know that Google rewards sites with the most users, the more page views, best conversion rates and lowest abandonment rates, then as site speed influences all of these you don’t have to be Einstein to work out the effect it can exert - albeit indirectly.

Simple is the new clever

If you know your pages are not loading quickly it could be hurting your revenues. Removing complexity is in line with the general trend in website design and development of “simple being the new clever”. Determining speed, flexibility and quality should occur in the design decision stage of website construction.

Increasing site speed is not automatically going to bring in better revenues but it could certainly be a significant factor in overcoming the issues holding back your website performance - and your own decision in continuing to live with a slow loading website.

Source:  Philip Dixon, VP Shopzilla, Shopzilla site redo. Youtube

The objective for an ecommerce site is to get customers to checkout and buy your products. It’s a sad fact that many customers simply don’t get that far as their on-page experience is less satisfying than they were expecting. So they log-off!

Here are some best practices that might just keep them on page.

1. Checkout steps - the rule is no more than 3 clicks to get customers to where they want to be, so guide them straight to what they are looking for - an ecommerce site is not an    IKEA store! Users should always know where they are in the process and what’s left for them to do.

2. Calls to action buttons- “buy” means “buy now” not “go on for another four steps before they can buy!” Buttons should be clear and visibly isolated from the rest of the content.

3. Isolate the checkout - this is the only place you want them to be. As they say, all roads must lead to Rome! So no distractions please.

4. Summarise checkout information - continually remind customers and reassure them about their basket contents and any information they may have already entered.

5. Loss of information - 33% of people who leave a site, return later so ensure all previous information has been saved and can be viewed by returnees.

6. Available stock - selected products should be in stock. Untold harm to your reputation results if you tell them an item is out of stock after they have pressed “buy”!

7. Forms - never ask for unnecessary information and mark compulsory fields clearly.

8. Trust - comes from clarity and ease in achieving what they want.

9. Register - 25% visitors will abandon the purchase if you make them register before buying. Give them the option to create a password after the purchase plus adding some tempting benefits.

10. Delivery - be very clear in the options they have (express or standard). Repeat the options in the checkout area so they know exactly what their total spend will come to.

11. Payment - standardise and make it simple. Provide reassurances on privacy and the security of their transactions. Show them an order summary before they purchase.

12. Confirmation - thank them for the order immediately through auto-response. Remind them of their order and details on refunds if not happy. Offer promotions and sales guarantees as these are important for encouraging repeat purchases.

Successful checkout performance is about supplying the information that confirms a safe purchase while guaranteeing privacy and delivering a no hassle buying experience. If it was painless, your customers will remember it - probably after very dissimilar experiences on other sites.

Anything that distracts a customer during their buying process must be removed or minimised. Give them just the information they need to reach a decision, when and where they expect to see it, with access to review it at any time - especially if they abandon the site for now. A third of them will return!

Source:  Increasing conversion rates. Econsultancy.com  2010

User experience defines how a visitor feels about using your website, product or services and in such challenging times, you ignore it at your peril.

The better the user experience you can deliver (on your ecommerce website) the more sales you’ll get because a customer who enjoyed being there, who has built trust and a degree of loyalty, is now “emotionally focused” and much more likely to buy.

User experience is not about minor tweaks to design or copy but a radical look at visitor interaction at every touch point through which customers access your business offerings. These are then optimised to ensure a positive customer experience is delivered. This approach is fast becoming central to strategic thinking and the responsibility for user experience now resides high up the corporate ladder.

With an ever more “human” online world, locking into what a website visitor feels about their buying experience is a way to encourage them to become a customer. Social media is driving the friendlier face of business with companies lifting the veil on themselves by being more personal, more open and often providing access to a real person. A bit like the off-line world!

How, when and what you decide to improve requires an understanding of your customers’ onsite behavior. This information can come from feedback forms, site analytics and constant testing of what works (using A/B testing and multivariate analysis) to improve their enjoyment and your ROI.

It is the attention to detail that matters. “The worst mistake companies make is using their overall site conversion rate in decision making for strategic or user experience changes” says Paul Rouke from PRWD . So clear KPIs have to be set to ensure your goals are identified correctly.

What are the steps for implementing a better user experience?
1) recognize the relationship between a better site performance and a better customer experience
2) personalise, humanize the touch points for the user
3) analyse and test every part of the user buying pathway
4) act on the above

User experience represents an important way to differentiate your ecommerce offerings from your competitors and keep customers coming back for more.

Source: User Experience Buyers Guide 2011, Econsultancy.