Where the purchase process is breaking down
As much as online retailers focus on driving visitors to the shopping cart, the reality is the majority of consumers don’t visit websites with the clear objective of making a purchase. Study after study done has shown that over 80% of visitors to retail and e-commerce websites are not onsite to buy. Instead, they’re onsite to browse, learn, research, comparison shop, check prices, or complete a plethora of other tasks.
So in the quest to boost conversion, maybe it’s time to do something counter-intuitive: stop focusing on the shopping cart. Instead, you need to start figuring out exactly what your visitors are on your site to do, so you can deliver what they want, when they want it, and thereby nudge them down the purchase consideration funnel.
How do you find out what visitors hope to accomplish on your site? Ask them. Simple online surveys are the best way to find out the real intent of your customers. No amount of behavioral analysis, click tracking, or user-generated content monitoring is going to deliver the same level of insight as pure voice of customer feedback.
What’s Your Intent?
In today’s economy, when consumers are worried about their jobs, their homes, and their credit, visitors are understandably reluctant to hit the “buy” button. Their buying cycles are longer; whereas, in the past they may have bought on their first visit to your website, now it’s taking two, three, or maybe even four visits to persuade them to part with their hard-earned cash. Using surveys to capture visitor intent will allow you to pinpoint exactly where they are in their decision making process. Are they mystified by your shipping policy? Are they hung up on features and functions? Are they worried they can get your product cheaper elsewhere? By measuring intent, you can deliver the exact information or service visitors are looking for at that time, which means that they will be much more likely to come back to your site or visit one of your stores to complete a purchase.
To clearly understand visitor intent, online retailers really only need to ask visitors one main question: “What is the purpose of your visit today?” You can offer answer choices such as: browse product information, compare prices, look up a store location, get a customer service phone number, or read customer product reviews.
Beyond Measuring Conversion
Online retailers get so hung up on conversion that they fail to measure the impact of all the brand interactions that lead up to the buying event. While surveys can do a great job in telling you why buyers abandoned the shopping cart, most of your visitors are not actually onsite to buy. Obsessing about conversion means that you will be turning a dangerously blind eye to all the pre-buying tasks that your visitors are setting out to accomplish.
Rather than making assumptions about why your visitors are onsite, use survey-powered metrics like visitor intent and task completion to find out for sure. Then you can optimize your website for every stage in the buying cycle, from product descriptions all the way through to the shopping cart. There is simply no better way to find out where the purchase process is breaking down, and how to fix it.
Jonathan Levitt
