As an ecommerce seller who pays attention to analytics, you’ve no doubt come across the heart-thumper that is fewer customers. It happens to everyone, but why? RepricerExpress gives you the top 5 reasons buyers have suddenly stopped going to your site.
1. Something Worked Out Horribly Lousy Last Time
Think of every shop you’ve ever boycotted before, and why. The answer, more often than not, is bad customer service. And while this can encompass many things, it generally points to the merchant not making things right for the customer.
As the manager of your website, you can’t exactly interact with your consumers face-to-face, but it’s still incumbent on you to make the buying experience a positive one, like:
- Having live chat support (or, at the very least, a great FAQ section and contact info easily visible).
- Put a return process in place where buyers can track the details of the process.
- Take previous negative feedback to heart and try and change what your consumers are telling you doesn’t work.
- Just pre-emptively avoid the hassle and make things right in the first place.
You can build live chat and self-help into your online store by using a helpdesk like eDesk or ReplyManager.
2. Your Website Sucks
Sorry, but sometimes people just don’t come back because you’ve made it so gosh darn difficult to navigate. Do you leave breadcrumb trails for buyers to know where they started and how they got to where they are? Are there multiple images and product reviews for each item? And when it comes to the checkout process, are there so many steps that consumers don’t even know what they’re doing anymore?
The simplest answer is to streamline, streamline, streamline. Make site navigation as quick, easy and simple as possible, starting with the homepage and ending with the checkout process.
3. Someone Else Beat You to the Ideal
Closely related to the above point is that sometimes, your competitors just did a better job than you did. Maybe their site design is slicker, they offer better deals or there’s free shipping and returns on every single purchase. Whatever it is, they’re doing a better job than you are and it’s one of the reasons customers stop buying from your website. Remedying this means taking a close look at what they’re doing, aggregating the results into a common pool, and applying the best ones to your site.
4. You Forgot to Ask
Some of the most successful people are the ones who don’t give up and stick with it in a non-pestering way. A simple email reminder can make consumers say, ‘Oh hey, I did shop at this store and they actually did have some pretty cool stuff, nice to hear from them again.’
You never know until you try, so persuade your customers a little bit harder than you were before and remind them of the awesome experiences they were missing.
5. They Forgot
And sometimes the shoe’s on the other foot and you didn’t really do anything wrong, it’s just that they don’t shop at your store that often and may have forgotten about you. This tends to happen most often in speciality stores where experiences are of low frequency, as opposed to stores where buyers need items on a more regular basis (think clothes, books — that sort of thing).
Actually, in this case, what you can improve on is your methods of communications. Do you have a solid email campaign in place? Spot-on advertising that really targets the demographic you’re after? Brand recognition that makes your store easy to remember? If you don’t, then it might be time to get moving on that right away.
