Partner Article

e-Commerce ? Before the Basket

Consumers want to buy from websites, but the truth of the matter is that websites are not good at selling. Online basket abandonment rates are now at a whopping 88%, according to the latest analyst reports. However, these statistics don’t tell the whole story…

I would urge online retailers to look beyond the basket to address the wider issue of buying abandonment.

When consumers go to websites or a retail store to buy something, they go through three distinct steps in their purchase process – find, decide and buy. While basket abandonment happens in the final “buy”, stage of a transaction, consumers are quitting their purchases way before they even put anything in the basket or start filling in the dreaded enrollment form, the latter more common in non-retail industries – this is called “buying abandonment”, which goes far beyond just “basket abandonment”.

When trying to understand why browsers don’t turn into buyers, etailers must look before the basket and examine the “find” and “decide” stages of a purchase interaction. One of the biggest traps etailers fall into here is a one-size-fits-all approach to service and selling.

Each consumer is different, and the same consumer is likely to behave differently while researching, than while buying. Effective retail websites, that are addressing the wider shopping abandonment issues successfully, are those designed to interact with consumers in a whole range of ways, focusing on specific goals at various stages of the purchase process.

Here are some of the biggest technical hurdles consumers (and businesses) still have to overcome across the three stages; find, decide and buy…

Find

Finding things in any retail store can be a challenge, and in this day and age, in-store customer service help can be poor at best. While shopping abandonment rate in a bricks-and-mortar retail store might be lower due to the shopper’s “escalation of commitment” – after all, the shopper likely spent a sizeable amount of time (and petrol!) driving to the supermarket – there’s no such commitment to web sites. With no real-world space constraints– shoppers get lost in a hurry and simply bolt with the click of a mouse or the “swipe” of a tablet.

According to research from the Technology Services Industry Association, successful web self-service visits have dropped from 48% in 2003 to 39% in 2011. In a recent survey of customer management and ebusiness executives conducted by eGain, 53% of respondents said that the top two issues in customer web self-service today are the inability to find information with basic keyword search and inconsistent information across customer touch points.

While there are many factors that cause website bounces, being able to find what you are looking for – quickly and easily – plays a big role.

We’ve all been there, not knowing where to search or what to type in for the best result. For example, should I search for skin cream in the “personal care”, “health” or the “pharmacy” section? Recently, when I searched for a “glow-in-the dark analog watch” on a leading online store, I got pages and pages of T-shirts with “glow-in-the-dark” logos on them before anything related to watches. Frustrating to say the least!

Like in my ‘glow-in-the-dark’ hunt, keyword searches are rarely able to decipher the intent of the consumer. This results in hundreds of irrelevant hits (called “search overload”) or in a dead-end (i.e., the dreaded “no results found”) and consumers simply head elsewhere. Shoppers expect a website to do more than just “dump” irrelevant information on them today, they want purchase guidance – a GPS and not a raw map.

Decide

Once the consumer finds some options, they’d like to _decide_what they want to buy. In order to make a decision, they need product information including features and independent reviews, as well as how they compare to alternatives. Many web sites don’t offer this and consumers have to go elsewhere, abandoning the purchase in the process.

Moreover, web sites often compound the problem by making unintelligent offers that don’t help move the purchase decision forward. One example is dumb proactive chat, often called “attack chat,” where visitors get ambushed the minute they reach a website and continue to get pestered with such offers – so much so that the shopper simply leaves the site.

Another example is presenting irrelevant offers during the decision process. Most offers tend to be discount vouchers that are irrelevant to where the shopper is in the purchase process, what information the consumer might be looking for, what might already be in the shopping basket, etc. that could help the consumer decide to make or expand the purchase.

Buy

According to a recent research, 75% of consumers abandon online forms and a Forrester study found that online shopping basket abandonment was as high as 88% in 2010.

When the customer is ready to buy, they put things in the basket and start the checkout process. Shoppers often quit at this stage for various reasons – the checkout process being complex, shipping or sales tax sticker shock, persistent surveys, inability to find that one last but important item, second thoughts, etc.

In industries like financial services and insurance, customers often need to fill out onerous online forms to “buy”. These forms tend to be complex, and there’s no real-time, in-process help. The customer simply gives up filling the forms and goes elsewhere – and after all that hard work, might tweet about the experience, too!

Websites need to make it easier for the customer to buy, by making it easier for them to find, decide and complete their purchase. By applying the right technology and best practices at the right stage of the consumer purchase process, pure-play ecommerce sites have a great opportunity to reduce shopping abandonment and deliver extraordinary customer experiences that keep shoppers coming back for more.

Take the find stage; wouldn’t it be great if the web site had a virtual concierge that helped customersfindthings? A leading European online retailer we work with is doing just that. These chatbots never take time off, they work 24×7 and are even multilingual! Moreover, they are designed to align with the brand, thereby reinforcing the brand through shoppers’ digital experiences.

The website could also leverage intent-driven search technology and even guided help based on AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies like Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) to advise the shopper and help them find exactly what they need. Helping customers like me to find glow-in-the-dark watches by guiding them to what they need through a natural language dialogue or step-by-step guided help – just like a competent sales person in a retail store would.

When it comes to helping shoppers decide or select among alternatives, some of our clients aggregate search results from independent product review and customer support forums – all in one place – making it easy for the customer to make an informed decision, without ever having to leave the web site. A premier insurance client in the US use co-browse simultaneously with a phone conversation to help customers fill out forms in their acquisition and onboarding process, increasing conversion from 25% to 75%! Retail clients are starting to adopt this approach as well to help the shopper “buy” and close the sale.

As consumers continue to embrace the digital age, web retailers that help shoppers find, decide and buy on their websites through engaging and innovative technologies, while leveraging best practices, will stand to boost their topline and expand market share.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Anand Subramaniam .