Member News: WHAT IS ONLINE ABANDONMENT?
Article Date: 1st Feb 2010
When a customer visits a website and begins to fill out a form or adds products to a shopping cart, they are required to provide information like name, e-mail address and phone number. This information is not normally captured until the submit, next or buy button is pressed. Traditionally this is necessary in order for a company to fulfill an order, or to make contact with the customer. However, when the visitor aborts prematurely, either by closing their browser session, or by hitting the back button, or their session times out from being left idle, this is called ‘abandonment.’
With e-tail sites, many explanations are given for abandonment and most of the reasons are similar to the ones in the traditional bricks and mortar shopping process. Indecision being the most common. However in the online space the issues of impatience, confusion, and caution tend to be heightened too. Often potential customers are initially window-shopping, to test prices and add shipping fees, using social media to find comparative deals or voucher codes to compare various e-tailers and ultimately find themselves the best deal. It is therefore possible that a customer may return to a site later on and make a purchase, but until that happens, the sales process is stalled and the website abandoned.
In most of these abandonment cases, both valuable CRM data and valuable sales are immediately lost because the customer’s transient information is not saved. The loss of potential online revenues in these instances has been independently identified as one of the biggest problems that website owners face, since average abandonment rates across the web are currently 65% of all commenced transactions. As per the Telegraph.co.uk, Monday December 7, 2009 (‘Cyber Monday’), became the ‘busiest online shopping day ever.’ ‘Between the hours of 1pm and 2pm alone, Brits spent a combined total of £33 million, a year-on-year increase of 21 per cent, with 1.43 pm the peak minute with £1.4 million spent.’ Lost revenues from abandonment are therefore huge.
However, to date many companies have struggled to find simple easy to integrate solutions which they can incorporate into their existing web technology. Ve Interactive's VeCapture software provides those tools to allow site owners/administrators to generate code that is easily integrated into any website and which will retain all data entered so they can then initiate contact with the customer, regardless of abandonment, instantly increasing the value of each website visitor. This also creates a more personal service-relationship and helps build loyalty, brand distinction and an enhanced customer experience.
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