100% cart abandonment for four days?

[dickbaker]

I've been having problems with my website for several weeks, including 500 errors and occasional slow load times. I'm moving to a new server to fix the problems.

Meanwhile, though, I've had four days with zero orders. There's been people going to checkout, but nobody has bought anything.

I've tested the checkout and it worked.

Is it possible for it to work for me but not others?

This should be the busy time of year for my site. Last month was pretty good.

[jsinger]

Now I understand! Maybe you can hedge your income by building an offsetting site that sells ... butter.

[akmac]

Or, become a widget/accessory manufacturer. DB, I think the run on your particular widget has seen it's peak in the near term, actually. When everyone who ever thought about owning one "someday" bought soon after the election, that's more of a spike than a trend.

I'd expect sales to be down pretty dramatically over last year in your niche. Maybe diversify into widget fuel and widget fuel storage accessories, widget stockpiling tips, etc.

Has the abandonment issue sorted itself?

[dickbaker]

Widget "fuel" is extremely hard to come by. If I could get my hands on the most popular sizes, I could sell everything.

Abandonment rates are improving and then not. Yesterday I had 19 people go to the cart, but only three complete their sales. I'm making major changes to address issues others have pointed out to me.

The widget market may have softened significantly, but I still have other income from the site. When the demand returns to normal, I hope to be in a better position.

In talking to widget retailers, most are seeing reduced sales for the past few months. While my sales so far this month are 60% for the same period last year, I should be grateful for that.

[HRoth]

I can see why people might be putting your widgets in the cart because of say, reading some scary threads on a forum or listening to someone rave on TV and then seeing that dollar sign in the cart and thinking "Hmm. Maybe I should save that money for MREs or gold." But if I were you, I would indeed create some for-sale content re your widgets, whether it is traditional booklets or ebooks or whatnot. Have you thought about putting up a forum about your widgets that you could monetize? I think that would actually be really a service for your customers. Yes, they already know about the widget, or they think they do, but from what I have seen, those folks also love to talk about the widget in question and most everyone who buys these widgets could benefit from an increased knowledge level on them.

[engine]

It was trader that reminded me of the problem I see very often. Sites that 'hide' the shipping cost until reaching the final stage in the process don't help themselves. I've often abandoned because the shipping cost is the last thing added to the cart and it is almost always prohibitively expensive. They are hiding it because of that. I'm sure that's not what you're doing, however, it's a solid reason for abandonment.
I know it's often difficult to specify the exact shipping cost until the cart is fulfilled, however, many get around this with free shipping on orders above a certain amount. Free shipping often makes the difference.

[joelgreen]

Try adding some clearly visible note on before checkout which would ask your customers to email/call you if there are issues with checkout.

I've often abandoned because the shipping cost is the last thing added to the cart

second. IMO sites which have shipping info page/section tend to have less abandoned carts

[netmeg]

I'd probably have a one day blowout sale (or allocate a small quantity of items for it - sale over when quantity runs out) with a price they can't resist - just to make sure that your cart *is* working and people *can* order. Maybe email that sale to my existing customers. And make sure you add that note about calling you with checkout issues. That will serve to test your cart, and also remind people that you're there.

Are you sure there are no issues with your payment processing?

[dickbaker]

Netmeg, my profit margins are 10% or less. It's hard to reduce prices further from that.

I've tested the shopping cart over and over, and using every browser and platform. It works. I'm getting orders now, but the abandonment rate is still very high. 16 out of 19 orders abandoned, 10 out of 13, etc.

As for shipping, I think I mentioned before that I have "free shipping" plastered everywhere. I think it's plastered too often, but I still have people call to ask how much shipping costs are.

[Digmen1]

Dickbaker
How can you run a business on a profit margin of 10% or less ?

Is that general in your industry ? Is that general online ? Is that general world-wide ?

Do you mean your gross profit margin or your nett profit margin ?

[netmeg]

Does your cart span multiple pages? Is everyone dropping out at the same point?

[James_WV]

My suggestion- get Clicktale on your site - it costs around $99 pm - it'll tell you if anyone experiences errors and what those errors were / what browser and OS they occurred in.

More importantly you get form analytics so you'll see exactly what field(s) people are having trouble with etc.

PS - I DON'T work Clicktale or have any association with them, I'm in Travel - just a very happy customer!

[coachm]

Our experience is the same. Sales down, shockingly for the first time. We sell to business people, executives, Hr, etc, and less to regular consumers. Last November was bad. The entire year was slow, but managed to do ok via diversified income streams.

But THIS November downright scary. Abandonment so high I decided to use another system completely for processing sales. Doesn't appear to make a difference.

It's like speaking into a microphone (Is this thing on?)

My guess, at least for us, is that in tough times, as xmas approaches many people are really examining purchases, even to the last minute, less impulse buying compared to other years. I think many of our customers (individuals ones) are thinking about xmas presents for the family, and not about our stuff.

I don't have many more rabbits to pull out of hats, except to get back into non-Internet related income.

[scotland]

Dickbaker

I have a friend who phoned me today to say he has had no US based sales for 3 days, UK sales being OK.

He uses Paypal and RBS Worldpay payment gateways and his website is UK based.

Richard

[cfx211]

It is very hard to effectively diagnose checkout when you have such a low number of people adding items to your cart. If you get a decent conversion from the site to the shopping cart, why not pump up your traffic via advertising for a day or two? Given the softness in your market, maybe you need to be more aggressive about online spend. If you bring in 50% more traffic and find you still have no sales, then you can focus on the checkout process. If you get some sales, then maybe you need to focus on marketing.

Finally, I don't see any mention of whether you have failed charges in checkout. Are you getting orders turned down from your merchant or no attempts at all?

[duyu0505]

Our experience is the same too.

[incrediBILL]

Dick,

Let's go thru a quick top 10 checklist of why some people abandon carts:

1. Lack of shipping information, do you show shipping costs before purchase?
2. Lack of phone #s present on site, no personal contact method
3. Lack of payment symbols (Visa/MC/etc.)
4. Lack of payment options such as Paypal
5. Lack of security shield for SSL
6. Lack of plainly displayed return policy
7. Lack of plainly displayed privacy policy
8. Requires customer registration (I'm gone)
9. Lack of BBB membership
10. Lack of money ;)

If you're missing a few of these I'd fix them ASAP.

Several are quite useless items, such as BBB symbols.

Merchants know this, but consumers don't and take comfort in seeing them present.

[engine]

I know you said you'd asked a few folks to check it out for you, but, perhaps you ought to consider extending the useability test to a larger audience.

[Korrd]

Hi dickbaker

I live in a woody hilly area where I can imagine your widgets being very popular in the month of November.

I know the economy is bad, but I don't understand why people didn't feel that way a week and a half ago.

I don't know how it is everywhere but locally after the economy being basically status quo with even a few employers adding on during the first ten months of the year and people slowly starting to feel a bit better, suddenly here in November three large employers have announced they are closing after the first of the year. Ouch.

But overall I just don't think people have been in much of a buying mood. My clients have all seen a new wave of downswings in online sales this fall. We haven't seen an increase in cart abandonments but there has been a big decrease in the number of people starting carts.

Traffic on all the sites is up, but the incoming search queries are more for information while proven conversion queries are down. The sites are all at the top of the SERPs and rankings on their proven queries is if anything better than ever, so my conclusion is that people just aren't searching with an inclination to spend money the way they used too.

[Gomvents]

Keep an old computer with old version of IE around! I test my sites myself using a VM to run older browsers like IE6, and my site displayed fine. BUT then I found out the javascript I used causes 100% CPU utilization in IE6 or FF2 on older (Under 2GHZ single-core CPUs) machines. This represents about 2.3% of our sales I found out. Amazingly, people without javascript enabled bear with our crappy java-disabled backup but if the site crashes their browser you'll lose them every time.

[jsinger]

1. Lack of shipping information, do you show shipping costs before purchase?
2. Lack of phone #s present on site, no personal contact method
3. Lack of payment symbols (Visa/MC/etc.)
4. Lack of payment options such as Paypal
5. Lack of security shield for SSL
6. Lack of plainly displayed return policy
7. Lack of plainly displayed privacy policy
8. Requires customer registration (I'm gone)
9. Lack of BBB membership
10. Lack of money ;)

Some of these ten are clearly wrong. Like most commerce sites we don't take PP. Had one request in past 10 years! Makes site look like eBay home based store. Have a link to your privacy policy but NO ONE will ever click on it. Almost no major sites display BBB Online Membership. Probably isn't worth high cost for most sites. Never had anyone ask why we're not a BBB member. I'd worry about customer clicking on BBB logo, getting lost, and never coming back to our site. Like Pay Pal, BBB logo smacks of a "small time" operation.

Some abandonment is perfectly normal, even to be desired. ie Customer enters stuff in cart as shopping list and then phones or mails in order.

Don't worry about abandonment if improving things requires:
1) selling at prices too low to turn a profit
2) shipping too cheaply
3) and the latest fad courtesy of the shoe industry, offering free returns

[rachel123]

Some of these ten are clearly wrong.

What would you replace them with? I've never had anyone ask why we don't have a BBB membership logo on our site, but then, one person over five years asked why we didn't take paypal - but when added PayPal option (still have the normal merchant acct) sales increased 14%.

I agree, though, in the end, efforts to improve conversions have to make sense in terms of ROI. Some people might leave if you don't have the extended validation green bar cert. Is it enough people to make buying the cert worthwhile?

The top three (shipping, contact info, payment acceptance) I think are big players. Although, I'd move "lack of money" into either spot 1 or spot 2. ;) Unfortunately, that one is out of my control...

In terms of BBB/PayPal screaming "small-time"...I respectfully disagree. I'm not Amazon or Target but I don't pretend to be, and anything that increases customer trust is a positive in my eyes. To behave as if I have a universal brand when I do not would be, IMHO, self-defeating.

These are the things that scream "small-time" to me: formmail orderforms, no SSL, only takes off-site payment service, unprofessional/garish web design, misspellings, no 800 number, default shopping cart installations...

although maybe I'm reading you wrong. "small-time" to me is kinda like the real life "you might be a redneck if..." ;)

[jsinger]

I don't want to totally bash redneck retailing. I visited (research only, thank God!) our nearby Goodwill Thrift Store. It was jammed with customers, many looking pretty affluent. Many cars on the lot were nicer than mine. Meanwhile in the regional mall down the road 30% of the stores are empty. The atmosphere was grim and depressing to an old retailer like me.

Maybe we need to take our cues from sites like dollargeneral.com, goodwill.com or aldis.com

---------------
I am **thinking*** of getting the BBB logo for our site but only because we qualify for an A+ which I think would be impressive to customers. (A+ usually means you have a good long record AND are a member)

[rachel123]

I am **thinking*** of getting the BBB logo for our site

I am having the same conversation in my head. :) I'll admit though, that sometimes I go to sites that have TrustE, BuySafe, Authorize.Net, BBB, you name it - 10 seals splashed across the header, and I think "someone doth protest too much"...it's a fine line to walk I think, between too little and too much.

[MrHard]

I am **thinking*** of getting the BBB logo for our site

Remember, BBB only lists complaints and not praise. This makes it a risky proposition. In addition, disgruntled customers are much more likely to complain, then satisfied ones are to write positive reviews.

[blend27]

your competitor has a better Deal?

[dickbaker]

Whew! Lots of questions.

10% or less is very common in my niche, even in brick and mortar stores.

I have "free shipping" all over any product pages, at the checkout and anywhere else I can think of.

I have a toll-free number and I'm at the phone every day. People use the 800 number.

I state that I take credit cards. I also have a PayPal button. About 20% of buyers use PayPal.

Checkout is simple: shopping cart contents, click checkout, fill out shipping information, click continue, fill out credit card information, click checkout, then get thank you page. No registration necessary (I hate that, too).

No BBB, but I rarely see that anywhere else. Security seal prominently displayed. Links for return policy and privacy policy pages prominently displayed (although nobody reads them).

Orders are picking up, but not like last year, which I now think was an anomaly because of the election.

After asking for reviews, I'm certain that I need to make the shopping experience look more professional, so I'm redesigning pages. Maybe the whole site.

[jsinger]

Yep, I worry that showing an A+ makes us a target for extortion-like complaints. OTOH, I know some A+ rated firms that get plenty of online complaints. You can get some complaints and keep a top rating if you deal with the customers properly,

I also see year-old firms with A+ ratings. To me, such a superb grade should be reserved for those who have provided excellent service over decades, during good times and bad. Only "C" ratings I've found go to companies that are out of business, shut down.

I'm told BBB gives extra "reliability" score credit to paid members and while it is possible to get an A+ purely on merit, almost every A+ business I've seen was also a member.

We've been in business for decades, NEVER had one BBB complaint and yet were only rated B+. A few months ago I contacted our local BBB when I discovered that. They said we hadn't supplied current info. Within a week we moved up to an "A".

To see a site's BBB score, a shopper has to click the logo to to go to the BBB site and click thru another link or two. I don't believe a seller site is simply allowed to say the are "BBB A+ Rated," although I've seen one or two do that.

Then you have the real sleazeball sellers who don't worry about membership or customer service and its costs and just stick the BBB logo on their site. I emailed a complaint about a competitor doing that last week and got a nice email response from our local chapter (which hasn't stopped the site from displaying the logo, so far!)

For our size company joining the local chapter and the Online Reliability Program (you have to do both) is a 4-figure cost. Still thinking about it...

Displaying an A+ probably wouldn't improve our conversion rate measurably. It would be more of an ego thing. Nice for employees, competitors and suppliers to see that. And in bad financial times a strong rating means a little more.

[incrediBILL]

Some of these ten are clearly wrong. Like most commerce sites we don't take PP. Had one request in past 10 years! Makes site look like eBay home based store. Have a link to your privacy policy but NO ONE will ever click on it. Almost no major sites display BBB Online Membership. Probably isn't worth high cost for most sites. Never had anyone ask why we're not a BBB member. I'd worry about customer clicking on BBB logo, getting lost, and never coming back to our site. Like Pay Pal, BBB logo smacks of a "small time" operation.

I didn't just make this list up.

I authored ecommerce software and hosted thousands of customers for 10 years and still run some myself and these came from my customers, not me. I pay attention when people tell me what increases their sales and don't casually disregard the information because although it may not be for me, it may help others like my customers.

Personally, I won't put BBB on any of my current sites but if I were selling baby products or some other consumer goods I'd have BBB splattered all over it.

You have to understand your audience and BBB doesn't smack of small time, to me it smacks of giving the consumer a false sense of security as the BBB is toothless, but it still gives the customer a warm and fuzzy feeling that you're trustworthy which is the important part.

However, some stores selling certain products fare better with it than without, and if your competitors have it you'll probably do worse without.

You're right, *almost* nobody will every reads your legal notice, terms of service or privacy policy but they also may panic when handing over confidential credit card data and don't see a link to a privacy policy.

From Visa's website:

Shopping online? Read the merchant's privacy policy and make sure they have reliable security in place.

So if Visa is telling the consumers to do this, the merchant had better have one handy.

I'm not talking about anything here more than making the consumer feel comfortable and confident with forking over money which is what it's all about.

Lastly, I didn't offer PayPal until this year and my sales increased.

PayPal is actually more about privacy and security than anything else, just like Google Checkout, where the only company that has access to your credit card data is PayPal themselves so the consumer is less likely to be defrauded by unscrupulous (or hacked) merchants that can no longer gain access to that information.

[jsinger]

Bill, there reaches a point where features become clutter and too many choices slow buying and --worse--induce errors.

Why stop with BBB? Some sites don't and plaster their pages with obscure seals. (remember all those website awards of the 1990s!)

Mastercard, Visa, Amex, Discover (possibly) and checks suffice for 99.8% of Americans. (those with some money, anyway). Ask your office people whether they want to deal with statements from Diners Club, Cart Blanche, and ten more like that each month. Then there are customers who will hit "Diners Club" by mistake when they mean "Visa".

We too encourage customer comments from our non-techie but highly educated clientele. Most have postgraduate degrees. We shaped our site from their comments. If I were Goodwill, I'd do things differently.

Our Clientele values speed. In many case that's their sole motivation for shopping online. Cost savings are secondary. At least once a year I go thru the site searching for products, verbiage and features to remove.

Do we need that Wishlist? Or Tell-a-Friend? Or frequent shopper "Rewards."

Or cryptic "online help"?

Or suggestive selling clutter? (often very annoying)

Do multiple reviews help more than they clutter a page?

Do we need the web's bazillioneth "we won't sell your name" link? (that advice dates back 10 years)

Why offer ten shipping options when two work for 99.9% of our customer (USA only)

If we feel that less than 1/10th of a percent of our customers value an element on our site, we remove it. Because I know that most of our customers (and our employees) put a high value on simplicity and speed.

[WebWalla]

>Our Clientele values speed

I know you weren't referring to load time, but this comment triggered a thought - could your shopping cart process be considered slow in any way?

Google's Matt Cutts has just mentioned this will become important (a ranking factor?) in 2010, and there's a discussion around this here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Tedstar's comment on page 2 of that thread (#:4026925) seems to me quite relevant to this topic since he says that in a test Google did ...

"they were surprised that even fractions of a second were making a statistically significant difference in user abandonment rates"

Something to check?