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Written by Uri
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The hidden roadblocks of today’s customer journey and how to fix them

Webeyez Co-Founder and CEO Uri Strauss recently presented his thoughts at the Meet Magento 2022 conference on how retail leaders can win at the modern customer journey. This blog post expands on his presentation to include real Webeyez customer success stories.

Today’s e-commerce environment is a very challenging one. Customer expectations are changing as their supply options expand. Privacy regulations are making it even harder to capture and understand customer actions. Rising advertising costs mean acquisition costs are going up, ROAS is decreasing, and dollars aren’t going as far as they once did. 

Plus, with inflation through the roof, consumers are focused on buying necessities and staples like gas and groceries. Discretionary spending is way down, and it’s even harder to entice customers to shop for things like homegoods, toys, and electronics. 

In this rapidly evolving environment, retail leaders know one thing for certain: to acquire and retain customers, the onsite experience has to be perfect. 

The challenge to keep customers satisfied

Consumer expectations for a seamless and frictionless online experience have never been higher. Brands have to get it right the first time or they risk never getting a second chance: 88% of users are unlikely to return after a bad experience on a website, and nearly 70% of shopping carts are abandoned across all sites. 

The worst part? Customers are much more likely to simply jump ship to a competitor’s site rather than ever share why they abandoned a purchase mid-way through the funnel. Unfortunately, pinpointing where your site is leaking revenue and quantifying the impact of each site issue is hard, meaning teams regularly miss out on quick-win fixes and prioritize website errors that don’t impact the bottom line.

Uncovering lost revenue drivers

We’re very invested in finding and fixing site friction and measuring website usability since it’s what we do every day. As a byproduct, we’ve been able to measure data from over 1 billion site sessions, and we’ve been able to uncover many issues that cause user friction and directly impact capturable revenue.

When analyzing the data from those billion site sessions, we broke the issues down into 2 categories:

#1 Business Issuesthese include place order error, login and registration error, outdated or broken discount codes, abandoned shopping carts, misconfigured search results, and checkout page errors.

#2 Technical issuesthese include JS errors, failed calls, and slow page load time.

Ok, so now you know what some of the most common site errors are – but how are they actually impacting e-commerce site performance? Let’s break down some real stories from real brands.

Customer story: Diane Von Furstenberg

In 2021, fashion brand Diane Von Furstenberg replatformed to Shopify Plus and saw their conversion metrics drop. Using Google and Shopify Plus, they knew exactly where in the funnel their shoppers were dropping off, but their analytics team couldn’t always recreate the issues or come to a conclusion after hours – or even days – of painstaking analysis.

After implementing Webeyez’ Google Tag Manager integration, DVF figured out that 3 major website issues were causing friction for their customers:

  • PLP (category) page load times were slow and not optimized
  • Failing customer promotional codes were consistently leading to abandoned carts
  • Multiple news articles that featured links to past seasons’ clothing caused customers to reach 404 pages

By tracking real time customer failure points, DVF was able to quickly analyze the conversion and lost revenue impact of each goal failure and quantify the total impact to online conversions and revenue. This empowered the DVF team to prioritize issues based on their overall impact and better allocate internal resources to solve them – reducing their MTTR by 30%.

Customer story: EQ3

When we first talked with furniture brand EQ3, they had relatively high traffic and long browsing sessions but were struggling with abandonment. Most of their tools required dedicated teams to analyze their data, creating a huge time-to-insights-ratio that wasn’t feasible for EQ3’s four-person team to tackle. 

Like DVF, EQ3’s current tools could help them identify where in the funnel people were abandoning their site, but the specific errors and how they related to abandonment weren’t exposed. This meant the team wasted costly hours digging through sessions without a clear answer as to the root cause. 

After partnering with Webeyez, EQ3 was able to surface a significant number of goal failures due to out-of-stocks. Once fixed, the number of shoppers who got an out-of-stock message dropped from 60% to only 10%.

By being able to pinpoint a key source of abandonment and quantify the volume of sales lost to out-of-stock challenges, EQ3’s leadership team was able to transform their buying strategy. This led to 83% higher shopper conversion for journeys with no OOS products – over $3M in recovered lost revenue in just 6 months.

The Bottom Line

Figuring out where your business is leaking revenue and how to patch those leaks requires a nuanced strategy, and includes things like implementing tracking to surface goal failures, measuring the revenue loss associated with each issue, and creating alerts to stay proactive rather than reactive.
One of the best parts about working with a digital experience analytics partner like Webeyez is we’re there with you every step of the way, providing expert guidance and insights on the depth of each issue and which ones to prioritize. Book a demo with our experts to learn more and start recovering revenue instantly.