How do you reduce abandonment on e-commerce sites?

Grant Leboff: Graham, one of the biggest issues, I think people have when they are running an e-commerce platform, is of course; abandonment. People come on and, somewhere along the line in the customer journey, they just disappear. What are the techniques companies can start to employ to stop that happening?

Graham Jones: Three quarters of shopping carts are abandoned, and part of that is because people are price comparing lots of shopping carts at the same time and finding the cheapest. So one thing is not to surprise people. Tell them upfront what the delivery charge is going to be, better still, have no delivery charge. Make sure that if it’s got VAT that’s added on so they know that’s not going to be a surprise at the end. Don’t surprise people with your shopping cart.

But there are some other little techniques that you could use, for instance, the colour of the shopping cart turns out to be quite important. So you have to use the right colours in the buttons to make sure that people really want to click that final ‘buy now’ button.

Grant Leboff: How do you start to get these things right? Take colour as an example, and these little nuances that can make a big difference in the grand scheme of things, how do you start to make sure you are using the right colours, and everything else?

Graham Jones: One thing is to think about who your audience is. So for example, men click on red buttons more than they click on green or yellow buttons to ‘buy now’, and there are strong psychological reasons for that because red is a potent sexual symbol from men and they think that it is something that they need to click on straight away.

Women tend to click on red much less than men and so, therefore, what kind of products are you selling? If you’re selling to a mostly male audience then I would have a red button, but I would also test it – do split testing of my shopping cart to find out which colours work best.

Grant Leboff: You’ve worked in this field for a long time, so how big are the differences? When you look at the differences between men and women, but also different age groups and different demographics, how stark are those differences?

Graham Jones: I was talking to accompany the other day and when they changed the colour of their shopping cart they saw a 400% increase in sales. So yes, it can be substantial.

Grant Leboff: So what do you do if you don’t have a particular demographic? If you take, probably one of the most successful commerce sites in the world, like Amazon, obviously we all use Amazon – male, female, young and old and everything else – how do you start to tackle that when the audience is so diverse and so big?

Graham Jones: That’s because Amazon have not really bothered with that kind of stuff online. What they’ve done is to make sure they have targeted their customer off-line. All that branding, all that kind of ‘who is Amazon’ and ‘what kind of people shop there’, is determined by the kind of image they give off line. This means those things, like the colour, have much less impact online than they might otherwise have. Whereas, if they were highly focused and specific and they weren’t this big broad offering, then they would really have to make sure that there colours and wording and other things were absolutely correct.

Grant Leboff: That’s really interesting. When you start to get into these bigger brands what we are starting to say is, well actually; some of their success online is because of their success or ability to communicate off-line and in other places as well. So how big a deal is that and how do you start to look at getting that right?

Graham Jones: I think if you’re a small business, then you need to be off-line in your marketplace. So for example, if you are selling services to the accountancy sector, you need to be well-known in the accountancy sector off-line. That means that you need to be going to accountancy events, you need to be in accountancy magazines, you need to be a celebrity in that tiny marketplace, or at least your business needs to be a well-known brand in that marketplace.

It’s using the same principle, whether you are a big business or a small business or a highly niched business, you need to use that principle of making sure that people recognise you and know you. The influence of what you do online is going to have a small influence in that click, but the real big influence is that they really want to buy from you.

Grant Leboff: And then, of course, it’s more about targeting and defining your audience in the right way, which of course many people get wrong, and online is so important as you’ve highlighted. So how does a business start to make sure that they get that right, online as well?

Graham Jones: I think they need to think about it. I’m sure you meet businesses all the time, like I do, and when you ask them what they do, they are not really clear what they do and they are not really clear who is their marketplace. ‘We’ll we sell anything to anybody’ is the kind of approach that many businesses take, and that’s what they need to get right.

There is a business school philosophy which is, if you can’t describe what your business does in six words or less, you don’t know what your business does, and I think that’s what people need to focus on. What does your business do, and exactly who are your customers? When you get that right then actually, doing what you need to do online is really quite easy.

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