March 05, 2010
By the ZippyCart Ecommerce Software Content Team
There are numerous reasons why someone may abandon an ecommerce site, many of which seem like common sense, but most online retailers do not take these issues seriously. These common reasons are what makes UK consumers frustrated enough to leave an ecommerce site before they checkout of their shopping cart. Recent data from Hostway and Zeus Technology, gives online retailers insight into what they may be doing that is causing consumers to abandon their sites. As in the U.S., the number number one thing that forces a UK consumer to abandon their transaction is slow load times. Roughly 46% of the 2,033 consumers surveyed cite page load speed as their top complaint, which they want to see change. Slow load time is such a major issues across the world with consumers, that Google has suggested making significant changes to their algorithm that generates their search results to factor in page load times. Google is primarily making these changes to improve the overall usability for their consumers, but these changes will also force online retailers to step up their game. Therefore consumers will have a vastly improved landscape of product based search results to browse through in the future when they go to shop online.
In general the online shopping experience is still vastly superior to most in-store shopping experiences, however improving page speed will not only make your customers happy, but it should also make you more money. If your website has a good foundation in SEO, and is making the necessary steps to improve page speed, then Google will likely recognize that later this year and start to improve the rankings of your ecommerce site.
There are also a couple other key reasons why consumers in the UK were choosing to abandon their online transaction, most of which revolve around advertisements and poor navigation. The number one goal of any ecommerce site should be to help people easily find what they want, and the related products that go with what they want to purchase. Inferior navigation on a website can make a consumer very frustrated, as they have become accustom to user friendly ecommerce search engines like Amazon. While a consumer is navigating through your site, they should have little distractions so that they can focus on the purchase at hand. Utilizing tacky online ads to try and make extra revenue, is only hurting your conversion rates as consumers will abandon your site if they are annoyed with the ads.
Although this data from Hostway and Zeus Technology is based on the UK consumer, the information is applicable to anyone with an ecommerce site who is looking to improve the rate at which consumers abandon their websites. If you have invested the time to build up ranking for your ecommerce site in Google, then you should make sure you defend it to ensure you maintain your search position and traffic to your site. Each user that arrives at your site is extremely valuable, so take the proper steps to improve their online shopping experience so you can increase your online sales.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
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