From a humble beginning of being an online bookseller in the early ‘90s, Amazon has grown into one of the world’s largest and the most recognized retail and technology brand name that dominates all markets. Amazon along with e-Bay set the pace for the widespread e-commerce boom globally. In 2020, it is estimated that nearly 16% of all retail sales will be via e-commerce websites globally and by 2025 e-commerce alone will be a USD 5 trillion domain. And as it happens, these numbers were forecast way before the COVID 19 pandemic began taking a toll on the global economy. As the pandemic forced traditional businesses to pivot, e-commerce gained even more popularity in nearly every sector.
Hundreds of thousands of businesses took inspiration from Amazon’s success and launched eCommerce sites a while ago. Some of these sites have technically been in operation for a long time. But it’s fair to say that eCommerce was seen as a branding exercise rather than as a serious sales channel. This is changing now. In the aftermath of the pandemic, many businesses are trying to become profitable e-commerce businesses in their respective domains or area of specialization. The challenge for these businesses is that their eCommerce sites are inadequate, outdated, unusable, and incomplete. Not to put too fine a point on it, their customers hate their eCommerce sites.
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To succeed today, online retailers must know what makes a customer feel unhappy when they turn to an e-commerce website so that they can ensure that these challenges are addressed at the earliest.
Here are the top 5 things customers hate in an e-commerce website
Frustrating UI/UX
Complex workflows, bad choice of colors, illegible fonts and typefaces, lack of proper categorization of products, poor filtering options, and lack of proper study of user navigation trends are big turn-offs for customers. With over 43% of all online retail users heading out to the search bar in their first visit to an e-commerce site, your search UI too needs to be top-notch. If you leave customers feeling around in the dark for ways to navigate through your website to buy their desired product, then you are sure to lose the customer for good in a short while.
Lack of Mobile-First Experience
By 2021, nearly 72.9% of all retail e-commerce revenue is expected to be generated by shoppers using their mobile phones. Hence, a key element that e-commerce companies must focus on as a priority in their online shopping site is to have a mobile-friendly website. Shoppers expect a seamless experience when buying from their smartphones. Any delays, unwanted scrolls, or broken website layout on mobile phones will certainly be a mood killer and will prompt them to migrate to competitors who have a better mobile experience.
Invasive Marketing
While ads, personalized recommendations, and interactive product placements are among the best ways to promote up-selling and cross-selling in an online store, it should be noted that customers do not like to be railroaded into taking decisions. Too many pop-ups, repeatedly re-targeting emails and similar marketing initiatives should be limited and
should in no way be intrusive to the privacy of the user. Customer analytics is a must to drive personalization based on user data from your e-commerce website.
Difficult Post Cart Shopping
An e-commerce transaction ends only when a customer completes the check-out process and pays or schedules payment for items in their cart and not when they add an item into the cart. Once an item is added into the cart, customers may want to hover around on the website for more products or for better deals in the category of the item that was already added to the cart. But cart abandonment rates are at an all-time high now even during the COVID 19 pandemic. In March of 2020, nearly 88.5% of all online shopping orders were abandoned before moving into a purchase stage. Cart abandonment is a serious problem and mainly arises when e-commerce websites fail to offer seamless navigation options for continued shopping after a user has added items to his or her cart. Allowing a smooth continued shopping experience even without a checkout transaction can greatly influence buying decisions for the items
Limited Payment Options
Customers today have a plethora of financial instruments through which they conduct transactions and pay their bills. When indulging in online shopping, they expect these financial instruments to be available at the click of a button without having to jump page after page or be redirected to the payment provider’s page for further data entry to validate a transaction. Financial transactions need to be integrated and visibly secure. Customers want a unified experience when it comes to payments. Today, the failure to provide popular payment options such as wallets, bank cards, and other modern-day digital payment app support will result in customers clicking away from your online store without completing a purchase.
Also, customers are annoyed by poor performing eCommerce websites that are unable to handle seasonal peaks and troughs in users. They are extremely concerned about security and data privacy. All these come together to create a winning customer experience. In many ways, the challenge for these companies is to get their eCommerce initiative back on
track. The key strategic change they are exploring to do that is eCommerce replatforming.
The future of retail is likely to be driven by e-commerce as more people get used to the benefits of online shopping. While offering great shopping experiences makes for one part of the journey for a successful e-commerce strategy, brands will have to refresh their eCommerce strategies to remove the most common turn-offs for customers as outlined
here.
