Is Your Site STOPPING Customers From Buying?

March 27, 2007

Shortly before my wedding, when I was still working, I attended a web conference put on by Marketing Experiments. They put on these conferences every few weeks and they are always pretty insightful. The subject of that particular conference was how technology can affect your online conversions. In other words, is your website getting in its own way of you making money? Interesting concept. Well, I took some notes as I went and I thought I would share them with you today.

“Submit” is NOT a good marketing word, so having buttons on your site that simply say “Submit” can be highly ineffective.
What they did to test this was to do a traditional A/B split test on an e-commerce site. One site was your typical database-enabled site and the other site was completely static. The two sites looked the same, however the second site simply collected the order information and the staff manually ran the orders in order to see how the site responded. What they found was that about 22% of customers could not buy due to some technology-related issue with the site. It was not a matter of programming bugs. Instead, it was problems with the built-in technical and business features that were part of the website. Therefore, the traditionally assumed business rules built into the technology were acting as friction to the buying process.
The most common problems were (1) invalid credit card where the customer was not clearly presented a solution for getting around it, (2) Potential customer had previously registered for a free newsletter on the same site but could not remember their username and/or password, (3) Potential customer had taken a free trial already and was thus ineligible for the offer without any clear next step for them.
One potential solution to lost orders is to simply call the customer and see if you can rescue the order through personal contact.

The top 7 solutions to making your site not drop your customers under it’s own weight are:

Place an order every now and then in your own store as if you were your own customer. Take note of any and all confusions.
Call your own customer service line (or have a “secret shopper” do it).
Make use of your “forgot your password” feature. Is it easy to use?
Post an 800 number to your store. This can be a rescue line when your customers run into problems with your store.
Monitor your conversion funnel and find where people are dropping out.
Monitor the credit card errors from your credit processor. Does your site clearly outline the next steps for customers whose cards are denied?
Temporarily remove form validation and credit card address verification. Does your conversion improve?

This overall motto here is that we can build in all kinds of great features into an ecommerce store, but sometimes it is those built-in features that can present barriers to your customers. And face it, most customers are not loyal enough to spend much of their time trying to get around any barrier. So, test your site and make any barriers provide clear solutions. Have people test your site (other than you) and you will find where your bottlenecks are.