E-commerce is the way forward
With the recession hammering high-street sales, a lot of retail businesses are looking more seriously at e-commerce as their foremost revenue producer. In fact, the Office for National Statistics in March 2011, reported that the weekly value of Internet retail sales in February 2011 was £474 million, approximately 9.0 % of the entire retail sales.
This percentage looks ready to quickly rise to over 10 % by 2014. This rise would strongly establish the UK online retail market as one of the biggest in the world.
With online retail sales now becoming really important to numerous high-street brands, it has never been more imperative to construct an efficient website. When a site is badly built and planned it radically diminishes the customer experience. Numerous customers fail to complete the buying procedure, not because they don’t want to buy a product but because they are basically unable to.
Research firm; Marketing Sherpa has of late said that as much as 59 % of customers who begin the checkout procedure online fail to finish it. The basis for this large number of unfinished dealings is because online retailers continually make barriers. Customers are asked for information they don’t have to give, don’t wish to give or merely don’t see why they ought to give.
Websites are inclined to ask users to generate yet one more username and password. It will ask them for a telephone number – which a sales assistant would certainly not ask for in a high-street store, and ask for a billing address and delivery address as if it is normal for these to be different. Customers don’t want this bother. They just want to check out and pay money.
Vendors do not have to look at imaginatively re-designing the site’s buying processes; merely make it work effectively. Remember – online customers should be treated in just the same way as actual customers off the street.