E-commerce

7 major turnoffs for online shoppers and how to fix them

Brian McGlynn, general manager of e-commerce at Coveo, lists out seven e-commerce turnoffs and why and how retailers need to eliminate them to improve the online experience and keep shoppers on your site.

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July 30, 2021 by Brian McGlynn

After three negative experiences, 73% of consumers will abandon a brand. With Google and Amazon as competition, smaller retailers are running out of time to fulfill their shoppers' expectations of personalized digital experiences.

In fact, our research and experience has found seven major turnoffs that drive online shoppers away. Here's what they are and how to fix them.

1. Companies aren't Google-like
Google has turned into an answers engine. People expect when they type something into the search box, they'll get an immediate, relevant response to their queries. For instance, if a shopper searches for "desk" they don't want "desk fans" showing up first or even second. However, type "desk" into many e-commerce websites, and "desk fans" or the equivalent still pops up.

While this seems logical, this is non-trivial unless you embrace AI. In using AI, companies can provide a similar experience providing a type-ahead function in your search can help shoppers narrow in on whether they want "desk" within the "furniture" category or within the "appliances" category. You could also update your product rankings so "desk fans" shows up at the bottom of the "desk" search.

2. Narrow terminology
Someone who is searching for "pants" and someone searching for "trousers" are probably looking for the same thing — depending on location. Or maybe someone's looking for a "wine fridge" on your site, but you classify them as "wine cellars." It might not seem like a big disconnect, but I've seen it take shoppers away from sites. It's important to understand the language of your shopper so you can show them the full spectrum of relevant products.

Oftentimes, you can add substitute keywords to your search engine to help with this disconnect or consider renaming a product if it's consistently searched for under a different name. If you have very specific products and few users, you can manage this. If you have thousands of products and thousands of users, you need something that self-learns otherwise you'll be playing merchandising whack-a-mole.

3. Confusing filters
Too many choices overwhelm the shopper. This includes the endless options website product filters can have. Only include the most important and relevant categories. For instance, if you're selling dining room tables, it probably makes sense to include an option to filter by wood or finish. You likely don't need to provide an option for shoppers to filter through the kinds of fabric like you would a couch.

Complex filters create a higher interaction "cost," which is the sum of a shopper's mental energy to deal with a feature. The more an interaction costs, the more vigilant the shopper becomes and the lower the conversion rate goes. That's why it's important to have streamlined, focused filters to remove buyer fatigue and focus on getting the customer relevant controls to fine-tune their browsing activities.

4. Poor sorting relevance
Let's pretend we have a shopper looking for a budget computer. If they were to filter on price -from low to high - it often brings all the low-end accessories and stands related to computers to the top. This erases the relevance of the search.The shopper wanted to look at cheap computers, not computer stands.

This is an example of poor sorting relevance and can lead to shoppers clicking off your site. One way to prevent this is by redirecting shoppers from a search page to product listing pages that are relevant to what they searched on. That way, you have full control over the results and know only the appropriate items will show up on the page.

5. Random recommendations
Research has found that 90% of shoppers expect an online experience similar to or better than their in-store one. One of the great things about in-store shopping is similar products are grouped together. So if you don't like a TV you see initially, there's another one right next to it.

However, often, e-commerce sites don't provide such a seamless experience. Instead of showing a shopper another TV in product recommendations, maybe the site shows them TV accessories. Now, instead of continuing to browse your site, the shopper goes to another to look at more TV options.

It's important to make sure your product recommendations make sense to the shopper and that you only offer relevant items. Once a shopper puts the TV in their cart, that's the time to recommend TV accessories, from wall mounts to HDMI cables—not before.

6. Lack of personalization
Everyone knows having a personalized experience will help a company drive more conversions. However, it's hard to bridge that gap when shoppers don't log into websites — which is the vast majority of shopping traffic for consumer shopping experiences. Cookies were a way to try to address this, although recent technology changes from Google and others to follow suit will be putting an expiration on cookies in general.

This is once again where AI is a necessity. Using AI and machine learning, you can train your website to leverage the interactions you see on your website. Like the above example of the TV, once a cold shopper adds a TV to the cart, it's time to start showing them something other than TVs, not before.

7. A product-only focus
The final turnoff we've seen is when there's no one to help the online shopper. One example that comes to mind is pet supplies. Imagine a first-time dog owner is looking for nail clippers. If they went into the store, someone would be able to give them options for nail clippers, discuss the pros and cons of each, show how-to videos, and recommend any additional products they might need. It's a great upselling opportunity and builds brand trust with the shopper.

There's two main ways to replicate that. The first is you could add a chat function to the page. Or a less time-intensive approach is to make sure you have relevant content on the search page. Maybe the search also pulls up a blog post about the best clippers to get or tips for clipping dogs' nails — maybe that content also recommends getting another product to make nail clipping easier. Without going deeper around the experience and utility of the product, it's hard to differentiate your brand from a phone book.

Shoppers continue to expect more and more from their e-commerce experiences. By addressing these common seven issues, you can improve your online experience, keep shoppers on your site — and stay relevant. Incremental improvements on the conversion funnel add up significantly.

Brian McGlynn is general manager of e-commerce at Coveo.

About Brian McGlynn

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Brian has held roles in sales, consulting, and general management. Brian’s experience spans from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies like HP and IBM. Most recently, as General Manager of Intershop’s North American business, Brian led the organization’s recent growth in entering new market segments with B2C and B2B commerce offerings. At Coveo, Brian gets to converge his background in search, content management, customer analytics, and e-commerce into Coveo’s Commerce business.

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