Mobile shopping

Consumers are eager to discover mobile shopping possibilities. Independent research sponsored by ATG unveals how and why customers shop with their mobile devices (m-commerce).

The research shows that 14% of consumers already tried to shop online with their mobile phone. However, most of them (11%) found this to be hard. ATG concludes that retailers and manufacturers need to address the bottlenecks in the mobile shopping process in order to boost mobile shopping.

40 percent of European companies integrate customer satisfaction as a Key Performance Indicator for rating their management, which is almost twice as much as the rest of the world. Companies that establish a customer orientation to enable a focus on the customer experience realize benefits in the short-term, but also position the company for enhanced long-term success.

Below you see the Customer Experience Maturity Model, which shows how companies progress in the maturation of their customer experience excellence along a continuum ranging from product centricity, to customer focus, to experiential mastery.

The top reasons for abandoning shopping carts found in a Paypal survey last July shows similar concerns. 21% of buyers reported that they had stopped shopping on a site because of worries about the security of their credit card data.

McAfee recommends three interesting strategies to combat abandoned shopping carts:

• Make consumers feel safe on every page: use transparent privacy policies and security seals throughout the entire shopping experience.
• Be patient, don’t panic: there is a risk in approaching shopping cart abandoners too soon. Merchants should factor in realistic timetables for shoppers to complete their transaction.
• Optimize the entire site: retailers should not neglect a larger site abandonment and focus only on optimizing check-out.

The combination of focal points of the different genders is key for today’s webshop development. Special attention for the female approach requires more focus on inspiration and ‘the experience’ during product visualization.

“Merchants who don’t welcome back abandoners with open arms are leaving hundreds of dollars per shopper on the table,” says Eddie Davis, senior director of services for small and midsized businesses at PayPal. “Merchants need to remember the items that customers abandon and make it easy for them to buy when they return. Sweetening the deal with free shipping, coupons and special discounts is also a great way to encourage online shoppers to complete their purchases.”

Here are the top reasons survey respondents give for abandoning shopping carts:

However, there are examples of size determination in architecture and product photography. As illustrated above, product photographers use other common products like coins, rulers or pencils to give the viewer an idea of the product’s size.

Architects use scaled models, maquettes or renderings to visualize and test shapes and ideas. In architecture, size comparison is often achieved by placing models of people or cars next to buildings and structures. The above image shows a rendering of The bird’s nest (Beijing, China) designed by Herzog & de Meuron with people as references.

Using references is a simple way to let viewers determine the size of products. An important thing to remember is to always use common reference objects like coins, credit cards and people.

The illustration above shows a rubber ducky without any reference in the first image. The second and third image show how a person as a reference can influence the perception of the size of a product.

Forrester asked more than 1.000 Dutch consumers about their satisfaction with Dutch websites on thirteen large retail websites. 69 percent reported that they were satisfied or very satisfied with their experiences.

Bol.com (86 percent) has the highest satisfaction rates, followed by Wehkamp.nl (76 percent) and Neckermann.com (75 percent). Bruna.nl (58 percent) came in last.

Dutch consumers were mainly frustrated by sites that made it hard to find - or didn’t have - the products they wanted. Another pain point for Dutch consumers was lack of/not enough pictures of products. Forrester recommends retail websites to prove that fixing usability problems is good for their business.

Especially the small, simple improvements can cause a fast improvement of the ROI. A good starting point is to show the board how other companies make changes which lead to improvement of the conversion, more and larger orders, better churn and online sales.