07.18
Our webshop is doing ok. However, to reach our sales goals this year we have to drastically improve our conversion rate by making more customers out of the users in our webshop. What we’re looking for is at least a 0.5% increase, and while that may not sound like much, we have some steep cliffs to climb before the numbers start nudging in the right direction.
We’re a telecom company, and most of our revenues comes from subscriptions. Selling mobile phones in our webshop is, put quite simply, just another way of selling more subscriptions.
The mobile phones we sell are locked to our subscriptions for 18 months, which is sort of an industry standard in this country. In return for cheap a mobile phone, we’re guaranteed income from our customer for a year and a half when a sale is closed.
What we see from our statistics is that a large portion of our users turn around and walk the other way after entering our webshop, and while that may not be very uncommon, we’re trying to find the reasons behind that.
The other day I sat down with the man in charge for our webshop sales to see if we could come up with some great ideas. A reasonable place to start would be asking the users what they were looking for, so we figured we’d arrange a survey for our users, and perhaps combine that with interviews or a full scale user test.
In order to know what kind of questions to ask, we wrote down a set of theories that could explain why a user would not convert into a paying customer:
- Unable to find the product he is looking for. This could be either missing metacategories (camera phones, phones ranging from $200-$500), or if its too hard to navigate or if the product just isn’t listed
- The price is wrong. When price matters, and it often does, customers won’t buy if it feels too high, or if the customer knows he can get it cheaper somewhere else
- Just window shopping. One of the great features of the web is that its so fast and easy to compare prices and view avaliable products. A lot are doing research preparing for a purchase later on
- Unable to make up his mind. Many people need to feel the product in their hands or try it to see if it matches their expectations and needs
- The customer has returned from an earlier purchase, and is in need of support or more information on the product. It could also be a case of cognitive dissonance where the customer returns to confirm the purchase was right for him
- No clear information on payment. If the right payment method is not available, credit card payment or pay by invoice, the customer may be forced to shop elsewhere. Lack of brand credibility can also be an issue (I don’t trust you with my Visa)
- Not clear wether the product is in stock. If information on delivery is missing, or if its impossible to know wether the item is in stock or not, the customer will go somewhere else
- Unable to meet needs for ordering large quantities of the same product. You’d think this was mainly an issue for customers buying large quantities only, but if placing an order takes a long time to complete, doing the same job more than once becomes an tedious chore
- Too difficult to order. If the ordering procedure is too complicated and requires too much of an effort to go through, we’ve lost
The list goes on…
This excercise proved to be very rewarding. With these theories we will be able to create scenarios giving us insight that can help us understand the reasons why the customers are not buying and do adjustments in the webshop to accomodate for increased sales.
With these scenarios we can create intelligent questions for our survey revealing key issues in user behaviour. In addition, our scenarios will help us:
- Define tasks for a usability test session
- Explore specific issues in a user interview
- Use them with our personas
- Create user stories
Our next step now is creating the survey questions and implement the survey on our webshop. Hopefully, we’ll gain perspective on our users that will help us increase our conversion rate. Keep watching this spot, I’ll keep you posted on our progress.
