photo credit: avlxyz

PayPal have published the results of their second annual Checkout Abandonment Survey, looking at why website buyers don’t complete purchases. Just like last year’s survey, an excessive shipping fee was the number one reason for shoppers walking away. It’s clear that if sellers are able to offer shipping-inclusive prices, this is something that buyers like, however counter-intuitive that might be for those of us who typically sell more than one item at a time. And even if your site charges separate shipping, making that cost transparent at the beginning of the checkout flow – or earlier – is essential.

There’s some suggestion, though, that buyers are getting more savvy with their online shopping: the second most popular reason for abandonment was that buyers wanted to comparison shop, and 25% cited leaving the site to look for a coupon or discount voucher. Sellers should be using this behaviour to their advantage: if you’re not currently listing website coupons on voucher sites, you’re probably missing out on some valuable free advertising, and a fair number of sales.

But there’s some reassurance: a third of shoppers who abandoned their carts later returned to the same site to purchase. Sellers should consider:

• making it easy for shoppers to bookmark their site and specific items they’re interested in,
• using social bookmarking tools as well as traditional browser bookmarks/favourites
• extending the life of shopping cart cookies so that buyers who return later can find the items they’d already added to their cart,
• and offering a wish-list facility for longer-term use.

PayPal are running a video presentation later today to discuss their findings further.

This month I’m feeling mostly relief, tinged with a bit of sadness. After trading on eBay pretty much continuously over the last five years, it’s time now to move on and concentrate on the website side of my business. I don’t want to burn any bridges, there may well be a place for eBay in my sales channel portfolio at some point in the future, but right now I need a break from the constant change – of which, much more to come, as we heard from eBay Analyst Day last week.

One of the great things about eBay is the ease and speed with which it is possible to establish and build up a new business. Websites can take much longer to establish, a much more ‘slow burn’ process, but hang on in there, and it can be well worth your while in the end.

Building a website can be dispiriting in the early stages, a lot of work may have to go in before you see any return, and it can be tempting to give up at that stage. Don’t do it! The great thing about a website is that you lay a foundation and then build on it incrementally. The initial work may be harder, but ongoing maintenance is much easier – for example, you don’t have keep relisting everything every 30 days. Sometimes it’s difficult to appreciate actual progress made day by day or week by week – but when you start to look back year on year, you can really see how far you’ve come.

There are many ways to improve the profile of your website and drive traffic to it: flyers with orders; permissible links from other sales channels; mailing list; social networking; SEO; ad words; other forms of advertising and more. Some of these are very simple and straightforward, others take more work. I’m not an expert on any of this, there is still plenty of room for improvement on my own website and plenty on this list that I need to get stuck into. Again my message is, just get started!

Of course there is no reason why you can’t run a successful website alongside eBay, Amazon and/or any other sales channels of your choice. Personally, I’m happy as a sole trader and given the finite number of hours in a day, the decision to take a break from eBay and concentrate on the website right now is the right one for me.

I know too (before you tell me so, North!) that websites may not suit all market sectors and business models. I operate in a sector with a lot of repeat business, which has been a big help in growing my site.

If you’re at the stage where you are thinking about setting up your own website, I hope this has encouraged you to just take that first step. If you have the patience to see it through in the long run, your efforts may be well rewarded.

When was the last time you looked at your website’s home page? I don’t mean clicked through on the way to checking your new stock’s displaying correctly: I mean, really looked at it, through the eyes of someone arriving there for the first time ever.

The homepage’s role is two-fold: firstly, to show visitors at a glance what your site is about, and secondly, to get them to move on, into your site, quickly. You have maybe a couple of seconds to convince a first-time visitor that your site’s what they’re looking for. So make it easy for them to find that, and get rid of everything else.

Here are twenty ideas, each of which can be done in a minute or less, to tidy up your home page.

Declutter

• Cut the hyperbole, and take in the welcome mat the UK’s best!, Europe’s biggest! Right. I saw someone recently claiming to be “the biggest online book shop in the UK”. They weren’t Jeff Bezos, so I didn’t believe them. Don’t make nonsensical claims just to fill up space. As for welcome to our website, do you need to say this? I don’t think so. You have crucial seconds to get your message across, so make all text meaningful.
• Cut out the homepage link If people are already on the home page, they don’t need a link to the home page: it’s confusing, and it’s clutter. Declutter.
• Get rid of the date If you have a news site, having the date visible is justifiable. If you have an ecommerce shop, it’s just clutter. Declutter.
• Get rid of hit counters Your buyers don’t care how many thousand other people hit your site, though they might have a good laugh if your hit counter is resolutely stuck in double figures. Hit counters, whether your own or built into your ecommerce software (OSCommerce has a particularly annoying version), just look amateur. At least make them invisible; better still, sign up for Google Analytics: it’s free.
• Get rid of credit card symbols Time was, you needed to put Visa and Mastercard symbols on the front of your website to show that you took online payments and people wouldn’t have to post you a cheque. Those days are gone, my friend; credit card symbols are just clutter. Declutter.

I just haven’t found what I’m looking for…

• Contact details visibility Make it easy for buyers and potential buyers to contact you. A phone number on the front page is great; if you can’t manage that, a prominant link to a ‘contact us’ form, email address or other details, gives your customers confidence you’ll be there for them.
• About us link Who are you? Where are you? What’s your VAT registration number? You have to give your customers all this information, so make it easy for them to find. If you don’t, you just look like you have something to hide.
• Link the shopping cart Make it easy for people to checkout. (Better still, show them what’s in their cart… though that might take more than a minute to organise.)
• Get your search box ‘above the fold’, that is, visible on the page without scrolling down. One of the first things many users do when they arrive on your site is to look for a search box: they want to go where *they* choose, not where your navigation wants to send them. Make it easy for them to search. And make that search box big enough too: usability expert Jakob Nielsen recommends a box at least 27 characters wide, to accomodate multiple-word searches.
• Link payment and shipping methods I want to pay with PayPal and I want to be able to select next day delivery: don’t make me wait until the end of the checkout process to find out if it’s possible. Make this information easy to find.

Textual healing

• Rationalise text formatting If you do a lot of home page tweaks over a period of time, it’s easy to end up with ten different fonts using seventeen different colours. Tidy this up: you should have no more than two or three of each. And pick your colours carefully: people have a tendency to ignore big red text.
• Consistent capitalisation Welcome to Widgets R Us, your One Stop Shop for Wonderful widgets. Our Widgets are the best in the World. We know you’ll love our wonderful Widgets No. If you’re capitalising your brand names, be consistent about it. Resist the temptation to capitalise everything else.
• Get rid of exclamation marks Hello! Welcome to our website!! We hope you’ll have a great time shopping here!!!! Unless you’re a 14 year old writing on Livejournal, get rid of the exclamation marks. They make you look like – well, a 14 year old.
• Edit your text for human readers You already thought about search engines, right? You’ve got keywords in there, lots of them… so does your home page look like a list of keywords? Make it meaningful for people too. also linkage

Really saying something

• Make the title meaningful One of the most important things you can do to help search engines find and index your site is to get the title of the home page right. Many ecommerce applications, however, will just spew out the “name” of your shop. Take another look at this, and get your crucial keywords in there in a way that search engines can recognise, but more importantly, that human beings will want to click on.
• Write a meaningful tagline Instead of beginning with the ubiquitous “welcome to our website”, write a one sentence tagline that expresses what your site is about, or what your company does. Any first-time visitor should be able to suss you out from this.
• Organise your shop categories by what your buyers might be looking for You know (or you ought to) how your buyers will want to browse: match your shop categories to that, not to how you organise your stock. I’ve seen a lot of sellers recently who categorise by manufacturer: this might be useful as an additional filter if you sell a lot of designer names, but – say – organising frilly knickers by whether they’re made by Ann Summers or Leg Avenue is not helpful to the buyer who just wants to browse your knickers. And check that the order in which your category list appears has some kind of logic to it: alphabetical is good, the order in which you created the categories is probably not.
• Sense-check You already spell-checked, right? Read your text again, or get someone else to do it for you: spell-checkers won’t spot missing words, or correctly-spelt howlers like the one I saw recently: “gift wear”.
• Make images meaningful Product images should never be just illustration. If it’s something you sell, make it clickable, and buyable. If it’s not something you sell, then replace it with a picture of something you do sell. Why waste space enticing potential customers with a luscious image of something you’re not selling?

photo credit: Omar Omar

A PayPal survey of online shoppers reveals the reasons that buyers abandon their shopping carts. Nearly half blamed too-high shipping costs, whereas – unsurprisingly in a survey commissioned by PayPal – a fifth said that their preferred method of payment wasn’t available and they couldn’t be bothered to go and find a card to pay.

With more and more eBay sellers every day starting up their own websites, it’s essential to get your shopping cart right. Estimates are that two-thirds of shoppers abandon their carts with goods in them but unpaid for; more cheeringly, one third of shoppers may return to complete the transaction later. Here are some things to avoid if you want your customers to have a heavenly checkout experience.

1. Greed : “I’ll charge what I like for postage”

According to PayPal, 43% of abandoned carts are due to shipping charges being too high. 36% of those surveyed said that the total cost was too high, so we might guess that shipping charges played a part in this too. I’m very surprised not to see “no postage fees specified” on PayPal’s list too, because for me, having to go look elsewhere to find what shipping is going to cost me, is my number one reason for abandoning my own carts.

So be upfront about your shipping. If you have a complicated tariff and lots of international customers, consider at least putting in a link to shipping prices from the cart. Better still, show UK shipping by default and allow customers to alter that to their own country, so that they can see as they shop what extras they’re going to be charged.

2. Sloth : “it’ll be delivered when I feel like it”

We all know if you’re buying from the internet, you should allow plenty of time for delivery. We all know that doesn’t happen. Offering next day or other super-quick shipping, with details of how (courier, Special Delivery, etc.) and when (“order in the next 30 minutes for delivery tomorrow”) delivery will take place can clinch you those desperate last-minute orders. Displaying this as part of the shopping cart encourages buyers to check out sooner rather than later.

3. Wrath : “I hate PayPal!”

As merchants, some of us don’t like it, but PayPal’s reach into the ecommerce world grows ever longer and stronger. Your buyers like PayPal: they’ve been sold on the security aspect, but more importantly, they like not having to get off their bottoms and find their credit card. You like that too: PayPal keeps them at the computer, paying you, instead of wandering off and getting distracted. Other shoppers, of course, don’t or won’t have a PayPal account. Offer both PayPal and a direct credit card payment options; that way, you keep everyone happy.

4. Lust : “I want your email address”

Though you might have good reasons for it, don’t force your shoppers to create an account before they can check out. The more steps you introduce into your checkout flow, the more chance your shoppers have to quit. Don’t take them out of that flow to create an account. Worse still, don’t create an account for them, and then require them to remember the details next time they shop: 14% of PayPal’s survey respondants stopped shopping because they couldn’t remember their user names and passwords on the merchant’s site.

5. Gluttony : “my shopping cart ate your shopping”

French clothing site La Redoute is the worst sinner I know here; if you’re not signed into your account, their shopping cart forgets its contents within the hour. When I go shopping, I’m not thinking about signing into my account; I’m thinking about shoes. So have your shopping cart remember what’s put into it. With a third of shoppers returning hours or even days later to complete their purchase, it pays to allow shoppers to leave items in their carts.

6. Envy : “I’ll keep my information to myself”

According to PayPal, 16% of shoppers abandoned their shopping because they couldn’t contact customer support. Be reassuring. Your shopping cart page should have links to FAQs, shipping details (tariffs and details of services used) and most importantly, how to contact you in case of a question: a phone number as well as email contact could make all the difference here.

7. Pride : sometimes, you have to let it go

A couple of wholesalers I use have an annoying new feature on their shopping carts: they email you if you’ve abandoned them. If that isn’t bad enough, I once had a phonecall, from India, “did you know you haven’t paid for what’s in your shopping cart?” Er, yes, and I doubt I will do now. Make it easy for your customers to pay, but for goodness’ sake, don’t try and annoy them into buying.

What have you done with the shopping cart on your website to make sure your customers complete their purchase? Leave us a comment.