Why tracking place order failures is important
As an eCommerce manager I want to ask you a question, and I want you to be very honest…
When is the last time you’ve taken a look at the failed Place Order calls of your online store? The sort of calls that happen to your customers everyday like “Insufficient funds” or “Credit Card number does not match Zip code” etc…
These are failed calls that are happening at the Point of Sale at the most crucial point of the buying process where the customer has already committed and is now ready to convert and buy, but for some reason or not, the credit card did not go through…
Some of you are right now moving uncomfortably in your seat thinking we should probably check this, but then you convince yourself and say, “well even if I knew about these failed calls, what could I do? It fails so probably the credit card was wrong and my fraud protection is helping me identify these bad players trying to make an order on my site, so what if there are a few false positives…”
While there is some truth in this matter, there are actually things that you can take action on when tracking Place Order failed calls:
- Confront your payment processor – If you have data showing false positives it is important that you share this data with the payment processor so they can add rules to remove such false positives to happen to your customers in the future. Also it would be an interesting conversation as you might be able to get better rates from the payment processor moving forward which would be a huge win.
- Trigger an apology note to such customers – If the problem occurred due to outage or some unexpected Ajax failure and you are able to track such event you can actively reach out to these customers who experienced such frustration and have them try again. Apology emails work great!
- Create a process where customer service can reach out to such customers and help them complete the order over the phone.
Many customers of Webeyez experience an ‘Aha Moment’ the first time we show them their Place Order failed calls errors. Some are surprised at the amount of these failed calls and immediately reach out to their payment processors for explanations, showing them the error messages that there customers are getting.
So I would definitely recommend keeping an eye out for all those false positive failed place order calls your customer are experiencing. This could make a big difference especially now right before the holiday season.
