Every customer that visits an ecommerce website for the first time did not have buying as their primary purpose, says the 2018 Reimagining Commerce study from Episerver.
The purpose of the first visit always varies. The report showed that only 17 percent of customers say they planned to buy something the first time they visited the ecommerce website.
Half of shoppers (50%) see a product they want to buy and immediately do so. The rest of the half start by browsing sections including sales items (19%), shipping information (payment information) (8%), payment information (6%), and featured product recommendations (5%).
Ed Kennedy, director of Digital Commerce Strategy, Episerver explained that majority of consumers come for something other than buying a product.
“They come to browse, look at prices and compare. There is all these other journeys that, as retailers, we have sort of forgotten about,” Kennedy said.
Most people (95%) abandon an ecommerce website without completing their purchase because of weak product, store or brand information.
Expensive shipping turned off as much as 60 percent customers while being unable to find the exact product on the online store put off 54 percent. Price concerns dissuaded 46 percent of customers.
Ed Kennedy also noted the strong correlation between the total amount of traffic you have and the amount of traffic that gets to a product page.
“If you are a retailer with a large product assortment, search is going to be key. How you set up search and how you set up navigation is going to be a very critical part of the buying journey,” Kennedy said.
The report recommended that ecommerce owners need to focus more on personalisation. For instance, as many as 22 percent of shoppers have received ads for products they would never purchase, while 16 percent have received similarly misguided product recommendations.
“We are at the point where optimised recommendations are standard across most ecommerce websites, so those automated product recommendations are usually where the problem comes in. The algorithms are set up in a very rudimentary way, showing me what I recently viewed or what I recently purchased. Those are very basic algorithms that make a very poor customer experience,” Kennedy said.
