What are FUDDs? We’re not talking about wabbit-hunters or the beer of choice in Shelbyville. FUDDs are fears, uncertainties, doubts and deal breakers that influence consumers’ purchase decisions. How you address them can have a huge impact on your conversion rates.

PayPal and ComScore recently conducted a study on shopping cart abandonment and discovered customers’ top reasons were

• Shipping charges too high - 43%

• Total cost of purchase more expensive than anticipated - 36%
• Wanted to comparison shop at other Web sites before making a purchase - 27%
• Could not contact customer support to answer questions - 16%
• Forgot usernames and passwords for store accounts - 14%

Though it ranks third, I believe the key here is “wanted to comparison shop at other websites before making a purchase.” If a customer has true purchase intent (not just browsing or running out the clock at work), if you don’t ease the FUDDs, he or she is going to find a wabbit (e-store) that does.

Free Shipping - King of Counter-FUDDs

44% of shoppers surveyed by the e-Tailing Group’s research in late 2006 reported they typically compare 3 stores when making a decision, and 84% cited free shipping as “very to most influential” when buying gifts online. It could very well be a dealbreaker between buying from you or a competitor.

So online stores that offer free shipping have an advantage over stores that don’t, right? Not unless the free shipping message gets through to the customer.

Example: I Googled “Jack Lalanne juicer free shipping” and found several products:

I hate to say this is among the worst product pages I have ever seen. Aside from the large block of text and the absence of a buy button, this page actually ranked above the other examples in organic search. As a customer who typed in “jack lalanne juicer free shipping” I expect free shipping and I’m going to hunt for the free shipping information, which you might spot if you have a keen eye:

But what if I came through a comparison shopping engine and had 6 open tabs from different retailers and I was comparison shopping? Would I notice this value proposition? Why is it not in my face near the price and add to cart button?

GNC’s got it right. Free shipping is clearly placed between the price and cart button in a bold, red type. It even assures you the item is in stock.

Walgreens’ incentive is off to the side and easier to miss.

Wal-Mart’s is a bit closer to the call-to-action, but the text link is not as prominent. Again, easier to overlook when a comparison shopper is flipping between online stores.

Overstock has $2.95 shipping which is almost free, especially since it often has very low prices to begin with. Overstock shows the offer at the top of the page above the navigation but not in the content area is not optimal. It’s a good idea to have this value proposition in both areas.

Can you see Kohl’s free shipping offer? Wouldn’t it be easier to see under the price?

You could also include the free shipping offer mid-product description:

Free Shipping on Steroids

As more online retailers jump on the free shipping boat, “free overnight shipping” and “free return shipping” have become the value-added incentives. Again, the key is to flaunt the value proposition whenever possible.

Endless.com offers free overnight shipping and wisely communicates this on product category pages…

…but “drops the shoe” on the product page! Search engine or shopping engine traffic might land right on the product page. Now’s the time to shove your value proposition in the customer’s face. And if PPC ads mention “free overnight shipping,” this landing page has lost its scent.

Pre-Checkout Calculators - Queen of Counter-FUDDs

A customer who add an item to cart from a product page only to experience “sticker shock” in the checkout process likely wouldn’t have added to cart had the full price been shown pre-checkout. That’s why shipping estimator and tax tools are very effective for reducing cart abandonment and improving your site’s usability. Even if you offer free shipping, unless you offer it on everything (no purchase threshold or restrictions on international orders), you should have a pre-checkout tax and shipping calculator.

Know What You’re Up Against

A beneficial exercise is to search for a product you carry and check out competitors’ offers and compare them to yours. Or grab a few people off the street and do an old-fashioned usability test, asking them to pretend they need to buy a certain product, and show them you and 5 competitors (in open tabs). Ask them who they’d buy from and why. You may gain insight into how your shipping offers fare against others, or how effectively you’re communicating your value propositions.

This is a guest post from Justin Palmer of Palmer Web Marketing. We’re really excited to have him share his expertise with us here on Get Elastic, as his tips and tricks are always very valuable to online retailers. You’ll learn a thing or ten from his 25 Ways Series and more. If you subscribe to Get Elastic, you want to subscribe to Justin’s feed too.

Losing Customers at the Register: 12 Checkout Blunders

We’ve all heard the adage, “You’re only as strong as your weakest link.” For many e-tailers, both large and small, the weakest link lies in the checkout process. Mistakes at this critical juncture are costly and unnecessary. Below, I’ve gathered 12 of the most common mistakes I see with checkouts.

1. Unfriendly Credit Card Errors

Getting your credit card declined is always an embarrassing situation, even online. How gracefully does your checkout handle these errors? Unfortunately, website error messages tend to be written by programmers, who don’t always consider the needs of customers.

When handling these errors, suggest a probable solution. If the error is due to an invalid CVV code, show customers a picture of where the code can be found on the card. Is the error due to a billing address mismatch? Suggest having the customer check their credit card statement to ensure their billing address matches. Most importantly, display your customer service contact information where customers can get additional help.

2. Login

Many customers detest the thought of having to remember another username and password. In addition to this concern, you risk returning customers not being able to remember their login information on a subsequent purchase. Sure, you may have a password lookup feature, but what if their email isn’t working or is inaccessible at the moment? For these reasons, offer your customers a guest checkout option that doesn’t require account creation. After the order, you can always ask if they want to create an account for next time.

3. Default Credit Card Type Selected

This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Now I consider myself fairly experienced with placing online orders, since I work in the eCommerce industry. Yet I don’t know how many times I’ve entered my Mastercard number with the default Visa card option pre-selected, causing my card to be declined. In their hurry to complete a task, people tend to skip fields that are already populated with data. For this reason, require your customers to choose their credit card type. Better yet, automatically detect the credit card type based on the number (see Paypal’s checkout for an example of this).

4. Cancel Buttons

I always chuckle when I see a “Cancel” button juxtaposed next to the “Submit Order” button. Don’t make it too easy for your customers to abandon their order. A cancel button is the equivalent to asking “Are you really sure you want to buy it?”

5. Up-selling or Cross-selling

There’s a time and place for cross-selling, but it’s too risky at checkout. Too many options can send a customer into a paradox of choice, leading to an abandoned cart. In general, once someone has moved past the shopping cart, it’s time to stop marketing and close the sale.

6. Disclaimers, Explanations, and Warnings

Recently, I reviewed an eCommerce site for an online gift store. Right before clicking the “Finalize Order” button, I was casually informed my “IP address is being recorded for security purposes.” Now honestly, is that disclaimer really necessary? While it may deter fraudsters, (though I doubt it), such needless information will only raise red flags in minds of privacy conscious customers. Other needless disclaimers include “Clicking order button more than once will result in double charges” (maybe you should fix this issue rather than explain it!) or “Products subject to availability” (maybe you should display accurate inventory online!?) As a general rule, keep disclaimers on a need-to-know basis. If it causes visitors to second guess their purchase decision, remove it.

7. Insecure Page Errors

This is possibly one of the most preventable checkout mistakes that arises due to technical issues with secure pages (https://) containing non-secure elements (http:// images, javascript files, etc.). When this happens, some browsers such as Internet Explorer, love to warn customers that “this page contains insecure elements.” When you’re about to enter your personal payment info, this is not a comforting message. To prevent this, make sure you run through your own checkout frequently, with your browser set to display these warnings.

8. Only One Payment Type

Don’t you hate when you don’t have cash and a store doesn’t take credit cards? Many customers feel a similar frustration when a site only takes credit. Alternative payment forms have become almost an expectation these days, with Paypal, e-Checks, BillMeLater, and Google Checkout leading the way. Adding an additional payment method can go a long way in preventing abandoned shopping carts.

9. Dead End Receipt Pages

It’s a shame so many shopping sessions end on the receipt page. Rather than wasting your order confirmation page with a conclusive “Thanks for ordering!” message, why not continue to engage your customers? Consider adding a tell-a-friend form, displaying customer service FAQs, or asking customers to complete a survey.

10. Hiding Additional Charges

Nobody likes surprise charges at the last minute. Make sure that all shipping related charges and taxes are displayed early and often.

11. No Prominent 1-800 Number

People like buying from people, so customers always like to know someone is immediately reachable if they have a problem. While not every customer who sees your 1-800 number will call, just having one creates a sense of trust.

12. Product Stockouts

Oh by the way, it’s out of stock! Surprisingly, a disturbing amount of online checkouts wait until the customer has initiated the buying process before informing them about stockouts. Product availability should always be visible on the product pages and the shopping cart. Any later than that, you’re going to anger your customers.
Avoiding mistakes on your checkout is eCommerce 101. Don’t just take my word for it though, test these suggestions for yourself. With tools such as Google’s Website Optimizer, performing A/B tests on your checkout are surprisingly easy and inexpensive.

About Justin Palmer

Justin Palmer writes the Palmer Web Marketing blog, which covers topics such as eCommerce, SEO, and website usability. Palmer Web Marketing also offers personalized SEO recommendations and eCommerce Site Review services.

While preparing their upcoming report Customer Focus Study, 2007, Future Now observed “nearly half of the top online retailers still require people to register before they checkout.

The issue is not whether site registration itself is a bad idea, there are clearly benefits to both customer and seller which I will mention in a moment. The question is: Why are ecommerce websites still making registration a requirement, and asking for registration before the checkout process — especially when most of the user’s information will be entered in a standard checkout process anyhow?

How Registration Benefits the Customer

• Facilitates post purchase order tracking
• Allows visitors to bookmark products for later / add to wishlists and so on
• Enables one-click re-order convenience
• Makes for a quicker checkout process next visit
• Allows user to submit product reviews
• Registrants may be entitled to loyalty discounts and other creative membership perks (you gotta motivate ‘em!)
• Shipping and tax estimates are easier when the user’s zipcode is remembered
• Makes it easy for B2B customers to open and maintain accounts for scheduled orders

Continue Reading:
Required Registration: Top Etailers’ Favorite Usability Mistake »

View full screen via SlideShare

Elastic Path’s Jason Billingsley and Netconcepts‘ Stephan Spencer. (along with a cameo by EP’s Gord Janzen) presented this webinar to accompany the white paper and research series called The Ecommerce Checkout Report (free download).

The report inspected the Top 100 online retailers and reviewed for 23 tactics commonly used in Checkout. The results attempt to begin a dialog in order to answer questions like: Does a shorter checkout process really decrease shopping cart abandonment? Should you use an order confirmation screen? Does live chat improve conversions? Study samples included a variety of vertical market groups including apparel and accessories, computers and electronics, and both high and low ticket value product retailers.

See also:

nitobi’s Robot Replay

Jason’s post on travel “Stop the checkout to save the customer money?“

Everyone gets distracted when shopping online. That’s one of the nice things about shopping via the web - you can take a phone call, refill your coffee, walk the dog, quick nap in the hammock … then come back and your order is still there. The flip side of this scenario is the theme of sorts for Crazy, Messed-up World of Ecommerce video #7 “Abandoned.”

Video #7 - Abandoned

For online retailers though, abandoned carts are the root of endless worry and concern. These conversion killers piling up in your logs beg questions like: Why did they leave? Were they just comparing prices or features or is it something I did? Maybe there’s something wrong with my site’s usability! How can I make it better? How can I get them back? How can I raise my conversion rates? Would adding “wishlists” or “saved cart” features reduce cart abandonment? and so on …

Well for sure usability is important (check The Ecommerce Checkout Report for more on best practisesc) and certainly retailers loathe leaving money on the table, but sometimes, cart abandonment just happens. Just hope they come back, right?

Back in high school when I worked at a shoe store, I remember being trained on strategies to save a sale. Probing, offering a discount, encouraging the customer to take the shoes home to try out or offering to order a pair in from another store. It was easy to make these attempts face to face with a customer on my turf.

Online shoppers abandon shopping carts for a variety of reasons. They may balk at a shipping charge or total price of multiple items. They might encounter problems entering credit card information or perceive the checkout process as too long. In the online world, it’s not as easy to recover a sale when a customer interacts with a screen and can exit with a click of a mouse. But it’s not impossible. An interesting study by Marketing Experiments on using email follow ups to save sales from abandoned carts gives some insight on how.

By sending two follow up emails – one sent within an hour of cart abandonment, and the second 24 hours later, the experiment’s test etailer was able to recover $8,000 worth of revenue from saving 277 sales over a six month period.

Continue Reading:
Recovering Sales from Abandoned Shopping Carts With Email »

OK I really laughed out loud on this one. In Price Checked, Mark, as the clueless cashier, harasses the fetching customer “Jen” for personal info before he’ll tell her cart’s total. Mark really gets his cheese on for this one and emanates the tact and charm of a creepy small town used car salesman (apologies in advance to all smal town used car salesfolks).

Anyhow, this topic of ‘when should sites ask for personal info?’ touches on privacy, ID security, logistics, as well as, well … tact. Not knowing the final tally is a personal pet peeve for me when shopping online … I simply ask for the REAL GRAND TOTAL, with tax and shipping, before surrendering my name, rank and credit card number. Sheesh, is it so hard?

Certainly, some etailers want to capture this info in order to oblige you into making a purchase and also send you newsletters, coupons, offers, … but in reality, this lack of transparency is just annoying (and almost insulting) to increasingly sophisticated shoppers.

My (radical) opinion is: if you show a running total (with tax/shipping estimates) shoppers will abandon less and buy more since the mystery is removed. Of course I might be totally wrong - anyone have a study on this?

P.S. Remember, … ambitious bloggers can win online shopping goodness and, if you haven’t seen it already seen it, check out Darren Barefoot’s Iphatigue.com parody.

Video #5 - Price Checked

All my bags are packed
I’m ready to go
But the dawn is breakin’
Its early morn
The taxis waitin’
He’s blowin’ his horn
Already I’m so lonesome
I could …

OK enough with the John Denver lyrics but suffice to say I am here in London, (UK not Ontario for you fellow Canadians) after a whirlwind trade show trip to NYC for Book Expo America and San Jose for Internet Retailer show.

Amidst the travel chaos, I managed to record several compelling interviews with PR Web, Blogads, Website Magazine, Sitebrand and the hilarious Ted Demopoulous and a few more. I’m editing as fast as i can … whew.

Anyhow, I’m now podcasting from eTail UK at a schmancy hotel and chuckling heavily at our new “Crazy Messed World of E-commerce” videos freshly baked and posted at the (appropriately named) Crazy, Messed Up World of Ecommerce page.

Here’s the gist of the video project:

What if offline shopping were as cruel and difficult as buying online? What does that world look like?

That’s the question that prompted our series of videos, ‘The Crazy, Messed Up World of Ecommerce”. Each video brings the story of a common online complaint–browser crashes, silly search results, irritating cross-selling–into the real world.

The videos were conceptualized by Jason (who was a hit at the eTail Search Day yesterday before chunnelling off to Paris with Mrs. Billingsley) and feature resident mad-cap actor (and Sales Director) Mark Williams. Three of the short films produced by Malta-based marketing geeks Capulet Communications are online for your perusal and there is even a contest for online retail bloggers.

You will laugh, you might commiserate and you could win something cool. It’s a beauty.

In a recent thread over at the High Rankings forum, a forum member shares that his shopping cart abandonment rate is 60%, with 50% of these exits leaving on the first step of the checkout process (view cart). After doing some informal consumer research (asking real people - both experienced and inexperienced web shoppers), “Ignoramus” discovered that some people use the shopping cart as a way to bookmark products for comparison.

High Rankings Administrator Jill Whalen commented:

“The reason I might put items in a cart but never continue is that I sort of just use it as a holding place while I’m still researching which store has the best price.

So if I’m comparing prices, I’ll visit some store, add the item to the cart, keep that window open and do the same at some other stores (usually if the price is lower).

Not sure if that’s common, but it is for me!”

If this is typical user behavior, adding a wishlist to your goodie bag of e-commerce functionality could reduce your abandoned shopping cart rate.

I quickly hopped over to a few of the top e-tailers of 2006 to give you some examples of who’s using wishlists:

Whether a button or a text link, these e-tailers demonstrate good usability by A) placing the wishlist button or text link near the shopping cart button so it’s easy for the user to find if he or she is used to just “Adding to Cart,” and B) making the wishlist button or text link less prominent than the shopping cart button.

Placement is important. Although not exactly a wishlist button, The Sharper Image’s “Add to Registry” button is stowed away below the fold.

It would be better to have call-to-action items grouped together for best visibility and usability, like Target.com.

Of course, social wishlisting services could fill the void here as an alternative way for users to bookmark products for future consideration or comparison. Unfortunately the majority of your visitors have never heard of them. So for now, you may consider adding a wishlist feature to your website to potentially reduce shopping cart abandonment rates. As with anything, you’ll have to test it for yourself to draw your own conclusions.

RIS News (subtitled, “the most influential retail technology publication”) ran an article about a critical topic to online retailers, the scourge of shopping cart abandonment. Why do shoppers go through the process of visting a site, choosing products, adding to cart, entering personal data to then just ditch the whole deal?

Certainly, smart e-tailers wanna know why carts are dumped so close to conversion and then do what they can to prevent abandonment. Reasons can be as simple as the customer wanting to see the grand total - including tax and shipping - while comparison shopping, or maybe the shopper felt uncomfortable entering personal info prior to seeing that total, or maybe they just got cold feet before committing to the purchase because there was some small reason for mistrust.

Debbie Hauss’ article Techsplanation: Beefing Up Online Sales rounds-up a variety of tools - including Elastic Path’s One Page check out system - which are all designed to track and prevent cart abandonment with the aim of increasing conversions.

More after the break …

Continue Reading:
RIS News Article - Reducing Cart Abandonment »