Image
Written by Uri
FacebookLinkedInTwitter

Five Hidden Pitfalls in the E-Commerce Customer Journey (And How to Solve Them)

Don’t worry, it’s not just you. It’s hard out there for all e-commerce brands these days. 

In a post-COVID era, consumer expectations for a seamless and frictionless online experience have never been higher. Brands rarely get a second chance to deliver: research suggests that 88% of users are unlikely to return after a bad experience on a website. 

The worst part? When faced with funnel friction, consumers simply abandon and go to a competitor site.  They rarely share (explicitly) why they abandon the purchase funnel or leave for a competitor’s site.

But despite the proliferation of site analytics, retailers still struggle to learn the real reasons for site abandonment. That’s why goal-based insights are so crucial. Goal-based insights help product, digital, and e-commerce managers (along with technical leaders) pinpoint and fix issues in the onsite experience…fast!.  

Here are a few common pitfalls for e-commerce brands to avoid and our recommendations on what to do instead.

LONG PAGE LOAD TIME

  • The challenge: Time is money. If a page takes too long to load, it can lead to lost conversions. The industry standard is that 1 second of page load = 10% drop in online conversion success. 
  • Our recommendation: Keep a close watch on Core Web Vitals, which compare the performance of your site with industry standards. Core Vitals provide a view on Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Display (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). For example, Google recommends an LCP (the time it takes for the largest content element in the viewport to become visible) of less than 2.5 seconds.

LACK OF MOBILE RENDERING

  • The challenge: Even before the pandemic, nearly 90% of shopping started on a mobile device. This means that a mobile version of your shopping experience must perform with the same quality as your original desktop site. 
  • Our recommendation: Monitor image resolution and sizing and double check impact on site performance.  Adjust the resolution and sizing for tiny screens navigated with fingers and adjust the content with the assumption of loading without Wi-Fi. It is also a good idea to periodically check up on the impact that  your third-party tools have on site performance.

POOR OUT OF STOCK COMMUNICATION

  • The challenge: One of the greatest frustrations for an online shopper is finally finding a product you love on a site, clicking to get to the product page only to find that the product is out of stock. Shopping a site becomes a game of “go fish,” where shoppers have to continuously click on products to see their availability. 
  • Our recommendation: 
    • Don’t offer out of stock items on your Product Listing Ads on Google, Facebook, and others
    • If customers do arrive on a Product page that is out of stock. change the “Add to Cart” button into a “Notify Me” button that will allow customers to get a notification once the item is back in stock. 
    • If the item will be back in stock soon, give your customers the option to Pre-Order the item.
    • Notify shoppers of which sizes/colors are out of stock in the Product Page.
    • Allow shoppers to quickly filter by size and other parameters. This saves your customers time and frustration from sifting through items which will ultimately not be available because they are out of stock.
    • Don’t remove items that are out of stock from your site completely. (This will help avoid driving traffic to a “page not found” – the worst landing page experience possible.)

CHECKOUT WOES

  • The challenge: Time kills all deals. Every field or window where a shopper needs to supply information or navigate through is driving more opportunity for cart abandonment.  A recent study from the Baymard Institute stated that 24% of shoppers abandoned their cart because they had to create an account, and 17% because the checkout process itself was too long/complicated. 
  • Our recommendation: We recommend giving the shopper as many payment method options as possible, and even using multiple PSP’s to ensure there is backup for transaction authorization. In addition, always allow “checkout as guest” and enable an intelligent street address search.

BROKEN LINKS

  • The challenge: Clicking on a search result on Google and getting a “404 Page Not Found” message instead of the item they were excited to find is a surefire way to drive consumers into the arms of your competitors. Besides emotionally taking your brand out of someone’s consideration set, broken links can also harm Google search results and overall SEO. Unresolved broken links can register as an abandoned or neglected site, pushing your site lower and even (gasp) to the second page. 
  • Our recommendation: Check details of your 404 pages: How often they occur and the source.   Make sure to  regularly audit your website to ensure that all links are accurate and up-to-date.

WHAT’S MEASURED IS MANAGED

Luckily, all of these issues can be quickly identified with Webeyez. 

Webeyez is the e-commerce intelligence platform that identifies the issues impacting the online behavior of your visitors and disrupting your conversion funnel. Our AI-powered algorithms identify all goal failures from your website and quantify resulting lost revenues. This empowers your teams with the right analytics to quickly prioritize and solve issues- immediately improving site performance, abandonment and user satisfaction. This means your brand can spend less time and resources playing detective or making updates with only marginal returns, and your shoppers feel like they can always count on you to give them a great experience. In this new world of e-commerce, brands need every competitive advantage they can get.

Get in touch with us for a free consultation on how you can make broken customer journeys a thing of the past.