

especially privacy and security information," said Ladd.

"Ideally, during the checkout process, firms should provide access to customer service information. in Lincoln, Mass., said the problems identified in the study shouldn't amount to a disaster for retailers this holiday season. If e-commerce sites improve the checkout process, they could gain an additional $6 billion this season from what otherwise would be unrealized sales, according to the report.īarrett Ladd, an analyst at Gomez Advisors Inc. The smaller ones that don't have an off-line presence are even more likely to fail." So we tested some of the best sites and found that they have a 43% failure rate. "These sites generally have a lot of problems.
CHECKOUT COUNTER HOW TO
"The checkout process needs to make it clear to customers what they need to do and how to proceed to the next step," he said. "We believe that the Web is too hard to use," said Rehman. The study instructs sites to design checkouts for new customers and use cookies to remember return customers.Īamir Rehman, senior analyst at Creative Good and the principal author of the study, said if users are experiencing these difficulties at major sites like the ones included in this study, then there are a lot of smaller dot-com companies that may not be in business next year due to an inability to convert shoppers to buyers. The problem, according to the study, is that the existence of two equally prominent checkout paths confuses new customers. For example, as a means to speed up the checkout process, some sites offer separate navigation paths for users who already have an account with the site. "It was as if these customers made it to the cash register but the store would not let them pay," the study concluded.Ĭonsumers said they also found it difficult to differentiate between new and existing customer accounts, according to the study.
CHECKOUT COUNTER REGISTRATION
Although some shoppers managed to find a product and add it to their electronic shopping carts, many became frustrated by confusing account registration requirements, vague error messages that offered little or no help on how to proceed and an inability to order a specific quantity of items. Problems with electronic checkout accounted for 40% of all failed purchases, according to the study. Creative Good selected these sites based on their maturity and popularity in the online apparel, toys, books and electronics retail markets. The eight sites tested, some of the giants of the online shopping world, were, , Buy.com, eToys,, , Gap.com and. Online retail sales are projected to surpass the $9 billion mark this holiday season, but almost half of all Web shoppers could abandon their virtual shopping carts at the checkout counter if Web stores fail to simplify the online buying process.Ī study of eight of the Web's most popular retail sites released yesterday by Creative Good Inc., an e-commerce consulting firm in New York, found that 43% of all purchases failed because consumers either had trouble finding products or problems occurred with the electronic checkout process that made completing the purchase too difficult.Ĭreative Good conducted more than 50 consumer tests on each site using experienced online shoppers to generate data for the report.
