Introduction
Imagine walking into a store you’ve never visited before. You take a shopping cart and
peruse the aisles, occasionally picking up an item and dropping it into your cart. Looking at
your watch, you realize you need to get home, so you quickly make your way toward the
checkout counter. But wait – you can’t find it. You aimlessly walk around in circles without
any luck. Where are the signs? Finally, relieved and a bit flustered, you spot the way out.
You enter a long line and inch your way toward the front. Eventually, you make it to the
cashier and place your items on the conveyer belt, watching carefully as your purchases are
scanned and the total amount is tallied on a screen in front of you.
As one of your more expensive purchases glides down the belt, you realize that you may
not want it. You ask the cashier what the store’s return policy is – since it doesn’t seem to
be displayed anywhere. She looks at you blankly, then turns around, preparing to holler to
one of her colleagues. But the store is jammed with customers and you can’t be bothered
to wait for an answer. You want to get out of there. So you tell the cashier you don’t want
the item, and she drops it into a bucket of other discarded items beside the cash register.
When the total amount of your purchase lights up on the cashier’s screen, you’re taken
aback. Why do only a few items cost so much? You had forgotten about the sales taxes,
and you don’t have enough money with you.
You instruct the clerk to delete a couple of items from your purchase, until the final tally
drops to an acceptable amount. Unhappy about the last-minute surprises and anxious to
get home, you whip out your credit card, only to be told by the unsympathetic clerk that
the store doesn’t accept the card you have. You’re livid. You’ve just spent five minutes in
line and another five minutes watching the cashier bag your purchases, slowly, and now
you find out the store can’t accept your credit card?
Having lost your patience for the last time, you throw your hands up into the air and
make a beeline for the exit, leaving the stunned cashier behind, along with at least $100
in purchases.
Though you may not realize it, thousands of frazzled Internet shoppers experience a similar
type of frustration every hour and every day of the week. Angry and often bewildered, they
abandon millions of dollars in purchases they were fully intending to buy.
Despite the e-commerce industry’s knowledge of the problem, not much has changed over
the last decade to curtail these losses. Online merchants make the same mistakes they
did 10 years ago, and customers continue to flee online stores, taking their wallets and
hard-earned money with them. And they may never come back. Over 80% of respondents
surveyed by software vendor Allurent
1
say they are less likely to revisit an online merchant
where they’ve had a negative shopping experience. And can you blame them?
3
27 Steps to a Better Checkout... and More Profits
Prepared by PayPal Inc. ©2006 Rick Broadhead & Associates
评论0