eCommerce Websites - How to handle eCommerce problems and save your customers
US company Tealeaf recently released some interesting research related to errors on eCommerce websites.
“42% of online consumers abandon or switch after experiencing online transaction issues.”
http://www.tealeaf.com/news/press_releases/2007/0917.asp
It can be difficult to emulate the problems that your customers experience, so there’s a number of simple actions that you can take to give you a chance to keep your customers.
- Where possible make sure that your eCommerce system logs and reports on errors
- Make sure that your eCommerce system handles errors gracefully. There’s nothing worse than seeing an error something like this during a transaction… “Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to yourwebsite.net:80 (Connection timed out) in /a/dev-01.yourwebsite.com/system/libs/core/http-connection.class.php on line 73″
- Follow up on customer complaints quickly and systematically. Your customer’s help in resolving an error could save you many silently lost orders.
- Communicate with your customers and ask them for the information that you need to replicate their problem.
- Have your software team address technical issues as a priority.
Treating your customer with respect and addressing their issues will give you a chance to recover the situation and keep the customer. By ignoring complaints you will miss the opportunity to fix the problem and, according to Tealeaf’s data, probably lose the customer.
From the author: If you run an eCommerce website then you might wonder, “How do I know if I’m getting as many orders as I could through my website?” The answer to that question is in your website’s conversion rates.
We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your eCommerce website you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.
And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too!
Contact us on 1300 248 362 to find out how you could boost the conversion rates of your eCommerce website.
