Fixing Shopping Cart Abandonment Could Generate Millions in Revenue
This holiday season, shoppers are returning to the stores and to the Web. According to the National Retail Federation, the number of people who shop on Thanksgiving has doubled over the past five years, from 10.3 million in 2005 to 22.3 million in 2010, and the number of people shopping on Black Friday at midnight tripled this year from 3.3 percent last year to 9.5 percent this year. In fact, by 4 a.m. nearly one-fourth (24 percent) of Black Friday shoppers were already at the stores.
Cyber Monday was no exception, with the NRF reporting that 96.5 million Americans had planned to shop on Monday, up from 85 million in 2008. Not only can this be attributed to an improving economy, but also to the fact that nine out of 10 retailers ran special Cyber Monday promotions this year (87.1 percent, up from 83.7 percent last year).
While these statistics are promising, what's not encouraging is the customers' experience while shopping online. Geoff Galat, vice president, World Wide Marketing at Tealeaf, spoke to me yesterday about shoppers' continuous struggles while shopping online, saying that as a result of their struggles, 30 percent of shoppers abandon their shopping carts due to errors or other frustrations--the equivalent of $44 billion in revenue.
In order to benchmark their actual annoyances, this year Tealeaf turned to Twitter to listen to consumers' conversations about their holiday shopping experience. As a result, the company will be releasing a Holiday Shopping Struggle Index later this week, but shared some preliminary results with me. Galat said that:
• 24 percent of people who tweeted about the online shopping experience on Cyber Monday tweeted that it was negative.
• 3 percent of people who said it was negative said they don't like shopping online in the first place.
• 12 percent actually experienced things like the classic customer experience struggles (inability to check out, password issues, etc.).
• 4 percent of people said they had payment problems.
"The problem set honestly has not gotten any different--people are put into an endless loop--the kind of problems out there are the same." Galat said, who cited that growing layers of complexity complicate the experience and added that a spurt of mobile ecommerce adoption next year will make the situation even more complex.
His advice? The first step is for retailers to recognize that the challenges exist and then listen to what customers are saying and respond. "[Companies] either don't recognize that [problems] exist or they don't recognize there's a true business impact," Galat said. "Companies aren't actually looking at why people abandon. A lot of good can come from asking them that question."
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