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What happens when you spend every waking moment tweaking your site, adding content, categorizing products, etc? You become intimately connected to your site but you can simultaneously lose sight of how first time shoppers are experiencing it. This perspective is vital to creating a shopping experience that leads customers from the home page through the checkout page.

Use the Customers’ Eyes

How do you obtain the beginners mind necessary to view your site from a fresh perspective? Follow the guidelines below to evaluate your site as a brand new customer might.

What Causes Customers to leave your site?

The first step to evaluating your site from a customer perspective begins with understanding the disease of Site Abandonment. As with any disease, there are usually multiple factors at work. MarketingExperiments.com has found that most visitors jump ship for the following 3 reasons:

1. Lack of Relevance

2. Points of Friction

3. Creation of Anxiety

Lack of Relevance:

If a customer comes to your site from the keyword “green cleaning products” and they land on a page for “Comet” you can be sure that they will leave without buying a thing. It is your job to provide a logical connection between the keywords used to navigate to your site and the landing page you are presenting to visitors. If the keyword “scent” does not follow through from the advertisement (or search result) to the landing page on the site and then onto the product page, you will lose that valuable customer to a competitor.

Points of Friction:

In addition, if a customer is unable to navigate your site to find the product they are looking for, they will leave. This friction caused by poor navigation is the number one reason why shoppers leave a site without buying. A prime example of friction is if a customer searches for the product they came to buy and irrelevant search results come up. This disparity is enough of a roadblock to send the visitor packing. Your goal as the experience creator is to remove all roadblocks between the landing page where a visitor arrives and the checkout page.

Creation of Anxiety

The final trigger for increased bounce rates are the elements of your site that cause anxiety in the mind of the visitor. When a customer comes to the shopping cart and is presented paragraphs of warnings about shipping, he or she will abandon the cart. The reason is that there are twenty other competitors who probably offer the same product and who don’t scare customers while they are in the checkout process. Avoid creating points of anxiety at all costs. However, if you do have to explain a negative element of your site, do so in a positive way. Utilize fonts that are positive and write in a tone that is friendly and explanatory. The last thing that you want to do is have a paragraph of bold red text listing all the places where you don’t ship.

Summing Up

Take a step back, examine your site and ask yourself these questions: Is my site relevant to my target market? Are their any roadblocks preventing my visitors from finding the products they desire? Are there any warnings, broken links, or confusing policies that will cause anxiety in the visitors minds? If you are able to find any issues with your site, take the time and effort necessary to fix each one.

In today’s e-commerce world there are too many competitors waiting just a click away. Once you have a customer on your site, try to do everything possible to keep them. This doesn’t mean trapping them in Kafkaesque navigation scheme, it means providing a simple, intuitive, positive shopping experience that will convert a majority of fist time visitors into sales.

Take the time now to examine the issues customers are facing on your site. It may be hard, it may create more work for you in the present, but in the long term it will lead to a successful, profitable e-commerce website.

By Jeff Petrosillo
jeffp@ebizinsider.com

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