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
Only 3 percent of visitors buy within one session on an e-commerce site. And once they get as far as the shopping cart, 71 percent will abandon. To understand why, Forrester Research asked 3,000 people why they abandon.
Source: Forrester Research, May 2010; “Understanding Shopping Cart Abandonment” Note: Respondents were able to give multiple answers
As it has been for years, the cost of shipping is still the number one reason why people abandon their online shopping carts. What’s interesting to note is that none of the top reasons have anything to do with the actual checkout process. They’re all behavioral and related to lack of readiness or willingness to pay the final purchase price.
So, making the checkout process easier for the first-time buyer is only part of the answer when addressing cart abandonment. In fact, many have learned that once changes are made, abandonment rates are still high.
Multiple Paths to Conversion
Visitors will make multiple visits to your site before finishing a sale. And on their journey, there are many different purchase paths they may follow.
After analyzing the online buying behavior of over 600,000 consumers across numerous e-commerce sites, I learned that surprisingly 75 percent of shopping cart abandoners would actually return to the site they abandoned within a 28-day period. This defies conventional wisdom: we polled online marketers and 81 percent believed that the majority of abandoners never return.
Additionally, these returning visitors are more likely to finish their purchase, as well as make future purchases. (…)
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:
Offer discounted shipping for low cost shopping carts.
Set a $99 minimum order for free shipping.
Consider specific promotions for individual products with varying abandonment rates.
1. Offer discounted shipping for low cost shopping carts. As might be expected, higher value shopping carts are abandoned more frequently, and as a broad rule, this holds true. (…)
Recovering abandoned shopping carts and web forms is a lucrative business. On average 70 percent of shopping carts and 56 percent of web forms are abandoned before completion. In an effort to win these customers back, retailers employ email remarketing campaigns that should recover on average between 10 and 30 percent of abandoners. That translates directly into significant incremental revenues.
When it comes to email remarketing, one question that I get asked fairly regularly is about what is needed to ensure compliance with CAN-SPAM in the U.S. and the European Privacy Directive in Europe when setting up a remarketing campaign. The situation is really straightforward in the U.S. (it comes down to little more than checking your privacy policy), but it is slightly more complicated in Europe.
The theory goes that if you make it easy for visitors to follow a simple path to conversion, you’ll generate traffic and revenue.
Visitors will make multiple visits to your site before finishing a sale. And on their journey, there are many different purchase paths they may follow.
