Customers may be spending less these days, but when they DO buy, it’s more likely to be online. A stunning 36 percent of shoppers surveyed by Opinion Research Corp. 
(ORC) recently said they made more online purchases last year. And 22 percent plan to increase their online buying this year.
This means three things for your business: 1) If you aren’t currently selling online, you might want to reconsider your strategy; 2) Marketing your business online via yellow pages sites and others is critical; and 3) Eliminating customer pain points in the online buying process will improve your results.
Just because customers are doing more business online doesn’t mean they’re always happy about it. In fact, they are ticked off by a number of top frustrations. ORC’s latest “Ouch Point” survey names the top 8 things that irk customers the most when trying to buy something online. Look at the list and consider how you may be able to eliminate some of these “ouch points” for your online customers:
- Not being able to speak to anyone to answer questions (25%)
- Learning items are out of stock after they are in the cart (11%)
- Receiving an item that doesn’t look like it did online (11%)
- Websites that malfunction as the payment is being processed (9%)
- Not being able to find an item (8%)
- Unclear shipping information (5%)
- Unclear return policy (5%)
- Not receiving an order confirmation (2%)
It surprises me to discover that some business still use the old bait-and-switch technique of advertising one thing, when selling something else. I purchased a camera online recently, and was contacted by a customer support rep asking me if I wanted to pay the upgrade fee for an English version. Apparently, they only identify and sell the “New in box US model” as a standalone purchase, but substitute a Japanese language model with accessorized kits. At the same time, he also tried to upsell every accessory in the kit to something better, faster, lighter, shinier… more expensive. Unfortunately, they still offered the best value — even if their customer service rep made me angry — and I still purchased the camera.