What makes Web shoppers click “Buy” or “Bye”?

There’s big money being spent in the Internet marketplace. Last year, more than $175 billion passed through the Internet in the form of airline tickets, insurance premiums, online bill payments and paperback books, among thousands of other items. But for many consumers, at some point in the process, the online transaction came to a screeching halt. Perhaps, the customer became frustrated with the typing in their shipping information. Maybe the person got cold feet just as it came time to type in a credit card number. Maybe the customer was never able to find the right product in a vast catalog of products.

TeaLeaf, a San Francisco startup that analyzes online consumer behavior, has released a study that looks closely at e-commerce stop points - the place in the online process where a potential customer “walks away” from the sale. Clearly, TeaLeaf has reason to commission such a study - but it was interesting that the company looked beyond the stop-points of a sale - which is its sweet spot of data. Instead, it broadened its research to dive deeper into behavioral patterns - not just why they stopped but what they did after the lost sale. The survey found that 58 percent of consumers who experienced a problem with an online transaction said they would be less likely to buy from the company offline.


That’s a big number but an even bigger - and scarier - number is the 84 percent who have problems with a transaction are likely to share that experience with someone - think Yelp, Yahoo message boards, Facebook and Epinions.

This is valuable information, right? After all, if you’re running an e-commerce business, you probably want to know that, after Web site security, ease of completing the transaction is what’s most important to customers, followed by ease of navigation. According to TeaLeaf, the biggest problem experienced by customers


is difficulty with navigation.

The company ought to know - it tracks consumer behavior for some of the biggest names in online sales: walmart.com, hotels.com, esurance, priceline.com and others.

But more important than knowing what’s important to customers, isn’t is just as important to know what’s wrong with your e-commerce site? It might be time for a re-design.




The actual article appeared here