Robert Beerworth Team : Web Strategy Tags : e-commerce
15May2012

Improving the performance of your eCommerce website (and some cool stats)

Robert Beerworth Team : Web Strategy Tags : e-commerce

This is one of those blogs littered with awesome eCommerce and web stats.

Admittedly, they are taken from an infographic produced by an A/B Split Testing company who have some incentive in pushing the numbers, though the stats come from credible sources and are universally applicable to anyone building or operating an eCommerce website.

Well, when I say applicable, I mean interesting.

Certainly the takeout – and it was the point of the author – is that knowing what is happening on your website and knowing how to improve it – and indeed, improving it – is utterly vital.

Improved website performance can double, triple and more, the commercial outcomes from your eCommerce website.

And all for a fraction of the cost of driving traffic to the website.

Here are the stats that stand out: 

  1. According to Forrester Research, companies spend $1 on converting visitors to customers per every $80 they spend on driving traffic to their website.
  2. The ‘industry average’ bounce rate for a website is 50%. Anything below 40% is ‘good’ and anything below 25% is ‘very good’. (Most of us knew that anyway, though nice to have a second opinion).
  3. According to Forrester Research, the top 6 reasons customers abandon shopping carts:

 

  • 44% said shipping and handling costs were too high.
  • 41% said they were not ready to purchase.
  • 27% said they wanted to compare prices on other websites.
  • 25% said the product price was higher than they were prepared to pay.
  • 24% said they wanted to save products in the cart for later consideration.
  • And a staggering 22% said that shipping and handling costs were listed too late in the checkout process. (In relation to this point, I can attest this as entirely accurate based on the work I have done on client carts: get the shipping costs (as well as the voucher redemption field) right up the front – it is key to customers).

 

4. 66% of Amazon’s total sales are credited to repeat purchases. The industry average is 7%.

I’ve written a dozen blogs on the importance of ongoing testing and improvement.

It isn’t hard and the benefits can be enormous.

Get to it.