Website Conversion Blog
February 1st, 2012
We observed some significant new buying behaviors at the end of 2011 that are set to continue in 2012, and will impact online and offline commerce. It’s a blend of: online, mobile, social, multi-channel, discount seeking, and connected customer behavior.
Sounds complicated.
To simplify, we’ve developed three customer types (personas) based on the new behaviors:
- The Connected Customer
- The Discount Seeker
- The Social Butterfly
Each of these is a behavioral trend and not a unique segment of customers. The point here is that many customers will exhibit one or more of these three behavioral characteristics. For example, Connected Customers are inherently social, and Discount Seekers often use multiple devices to research purchases like Connected Customers will.
Identifying these personas is useful because it allows us to think about the marketing tactics we should be deploying to address evolving buyer behavior.
January 17th, 2012
In 2011, the shopping cart abandonment rate continued its rise, reaching a new all-time high of 72% by the end of the year. In this blog, I’ll try to answer why the shopping cart abandonment rate has risen, despite a focus on conversion optimization by many ecommerce sites. I’ll also explain why I predict that the shopping cart abandonment rate will continue to rise in 2012.
Everything is more exaggerated over the holiday period: Retailers offer a dazzling array of new products, coupled with equally dazzling promotions, while trying to manage the constant problem of out-of-stocks. And customers make an abnormal number of purchases in a very short period and abandon their shopping carts in droves as they search for the best deals.
November 29th, 2011
The theory goes that if you make it easy for visitors to follow a simple path to conversion, you’ll generate traffic and revenue.
And yes, this is correct.
But this “single track” view of conversion is overly simplistic.
In this column, let’s explore why, and how it’s important to consider all of your available conversion paths.
Why Customers Don’t Buy
November 25th, 2011
In 2006, a Wharton professor first noticed that online buyers were more likely to respond to a free shipping offer that resulted in a savings of $6.99 over an outright savings offer of $10. The explanation was that it made the online price more comparable with the offline equivalent.
This fascinating insight into buyer motivations has contributed to on a major new piece of research into online buyer behaviour, which I’ve been working on over the last few months. It will be published on December 13th as an ebook titled ‘The Science of Shopping Cart Abandonment.’
To mark Black Friday, I’ve drawn from some of this research to look at the effects of holiday promotions, and how different price points impact buyer behavior. In particular, I’ll look at the relationship between the cart value and the shopping cart abandonment rate.
What are key price points that trigger abandonment? And can different pricing tactics lead to more conversions without eroding margin? I began my research analyzing a random sample of 264,631 abandoned shopping carts in August 2011, from a cross section of B2C e-commerce sites.
What we already know is that the value of the shopping cart has a disproportionate impact on whether an e-commerce purchaser will buy or abandon. What we have discovered is that it’s not a linear relationship and too simplistic to assume this as a general rule. This leads us to conclude that there are three promotional tactics that merchants should test this holiday season to improve conversions: Read the rest of this entry »
November 17th, 2011
It’s official: Free shipping is the shoppers’ top retail promotion of choice, driving the majority of customers to buy and to spend more than with any other promotion. This holiday season, customers will be even more price-sensitive, looking not only for the best prices, but free shipping and returns as well.
As we have written about before, customers have become trained to wait for holiday offers prior to making purchases. A tighter economy suggests that this holiday season should see good growth for ecommerce sites as consumers look online for the best prices. However, there is evidence that the 2012 consumer is also moving online to save money across a spectrum of goods, including luxury items.
