The Secret to Increasing Your E-Commerce Sales by 42%
With more and more consumers preferring to shop online, internet retailers are witnessing exceptional growth. Industry analysts are expecting this upward trend to continue. And it’s not just the domestic e-commerce market that’s growing; the global market shows huge potential as well. According to eMarketer, global e-commerce is poised to more than double by 2019 to $3.6 trillion.
Yet, while e-commerce growth has been impressive, it could be a lot better. After analyzing 650 websites, representing 75 percent of all U.S. e-commerce spending, it was revealed that very few merchants are optimizing their sites for checkout or mobile devices. This is accounting for a dramatic but largely unrealized affect: up to 42 percent of e-commerce sales are being left on the table — i.e., in the abandoned carts of shoppers. Forty-two percent!
42% of Sales Are Lost at Checkout
Here's how the situation typically goes: You, the merchant does all the hard work of attracting the shopper and selling them on your products or services. The shopper has added items to their cart and is now ready to check out. All they have to do is hit the buy button. And then their card declines and they leave. The shopper abandons their cart and goes elsewhere before taking that last and final step — taking their business to a competitor, which has optimized its site to offer a better checkout experience.
Today, the internet offers consumers a plethora of options. If a shopper has a bad experience on your site, there's likely another merchant only a click away that will offer them the same product with a potentially better customer experience or offer.
So how do you compete and cash in on the 42 percent of sales being overlooked? By creating a seamless checkout and payment process that eliminates friction, minimizes payment declines and requires minimal effort on behalf of the customer.
How to Optimize Your E-Commerce Site for Checkout and Reclaim Lost Revenue
The two leading causes of cart abandonment are checkout friction and payment processing declines.
Checkout friction includes such things as:
- too many steps and fields;
- no coupons;
- failure to display the local language and currency; and
- limited payment choices (i.e., lack of wallets or alternative payment types).
Payment processing declines are caused by:
- large transactions, such as annual subscriptions;
- currency mismatch;
- failovers;
- limited acquiring bank connections; and
- aggressive fraud rules.
Together checkout friction and payment processing declines combine to create what’s known as "The Conversion Problem." The conversion problem is affecting the vast majority of merchants without them even realizing it (causing that 42 percent of lost sales).
Yet, if you’re a merchant, by identifying the friction and payment decline triggers on your checkout pages you'll be able to implement steps towards remediation and begin to capitalize on the huge, largely ignored, opportunity in e-commerce: reclaiming sales lost to checkout and payment friction. These lost sales could come close to doubling your revenue. Fortunately, there's a new tool that's been created specifically for merchants who want to do just this.
The Checkout Conversion Calculator
The checkout conversion calculator was created to determine how friction is affecting your checkout process and why payments are being declined. With this information, you're able to see the specific areas that need improvement and receive strategies for doing so. Furthermore, you can compare your scores against industry averages by referencing the Checkout Conversion Index, a benchmark created by analyzing over 650 U.S. based e-commerce sites across 14 merchant categories.
Want to see if friction and payment declines are causing your e-commerce site to lose potential sales? Try out the checkout conversion calculator and be on your way to 42 percent higher sales volume.
Ralph Dangelmaier is CEO of BlueSnap, a global payments technology company.
