Why People Shop on the Web
A recent study of users who have bought products on the Web has three important
findings with implications for Web design:
- Convenience and ease of use are the main reasons people buy at websites
- Shoppers only buy 5% of the time they visit e-commerce
sites: facilitate product research, cross-shopping, and other
non-buying tasks that account for 95% of visits
if you want to turn people into loyal users
- E-commerce is going international, with many users buying from foreign
sites (this latter conclusion is less true for American customers who
mainly buy from domestic sites, but it has profound implications for
American vendors who can sell a lot overseas if they bother to serve
international customers)
The results come from a survey sponsored by the
Danish E-Commerce Association. The survey was completed
by 2,929 Internet users in Denmark, of which 1,780 (61%) had actually bought
something on the Web. I am only reporting the answers from this latter
group of buying users.
Ease of Buying Attracts Customers
Respondents were asked to list the five most important reasons to shop on
the Web. Even though low prices definitely do attract customers,
pricing was only the third-most important issue for respondents. Most of
the answers were related to making it easy, pleasant, and efficient to
buy.
| Most Important Reasons People Shop on the Web |
| Easy to place an order | 83% |
| Large selection of products | 63% |
| Cheaper prices | 63% |
| Faster service and delivery | 52% |
| Detailed and clear information about what is being offered | 40% |
| No sales pressure | 39% |
| Easy payment procedures | 36% |
| What Information Do You Look For When Buying a Product on the
Web? |
| Detailed information about the product itself | 82% |
| Price comparisons | 62% |
| Detailed information about the vendor | 21% |
Not too surprising, except to note the huge difference in interest between
product info and vendor info. On the Web, people are very goal-driven and
care more about the specific product they are buying now and less
about abstract issues like the characteristics of the company that is
supplying that product.
Qualitative research bears this out. For example, the New York
Times quotes a
VP from a site that sells music CDs:
"When we ask customers what they want, they don't answer 'community feeling'
or 'shopping experience,'
they want more music samples, ease of use, speed, and low prices."
Support Research and Non-Buying Visits
| After You Have Deliberately Looked for Information About a Product or
Service, How Often Do You Buy It? |
| Almost always | 2% |
| About 3/4 of the time | 14% |
| About half the time | 30% |
| About 1/4 of the time | 45% |
| Almost never | 9% |
For this question, "buying" was defined to include purchases on the site as
well as purchases in physical stores. Note the difficulty of converting
even a motivated shopper
into a buyer. The average outcome is that people don't buy.
This result is even stronger when looking at users'average
behavior and not simply their behavior when deliberately looking for
product information. When asked why they visited one of the e-commerce sites that
sponsored the survey, respondents said:
| What Was the Reason for Your Most Recent Visit to [participating site]? |
| Looking for product information | 26% |
| Looking for other information | 32% |
| Buying goods or services | 5% |
| Entertainment value | 18% |
| Other reasons | 18% |
Remember, these are people who buy online. And yet only 5% of their visits
to e-commerce sites are to buy. It is important to support the remaining
95% of customer behavior so that they will turn into loyal users and
return to the site when they want to buy.
A site that emphasizes sales too much will turn away users (remember that
"no sales pressure" was listed by 39% of shoppers as an important benefit
of the Web). Most of the time, users want to research products
or find other specific information. So don't despair if your server
statistics show many more visits to your pages than actual sales. That's
natural and indicates that you are supporting customers' preferred behavior
by allowing them to cross-shop and research products before buying.
International Shopping
| Location of Websites Where Respondents Shop |
| Denmark | 45% |
| Rest of Europe | 17% |
| United States | 32% |
| Rest of World | 5% |
Much shopping is obviously local, but there is a good deal of
international shopping going on. In particular, American websites
are doing brisk business in Denmark and it is interesting to note
that the U.S. sells about twice as much as Europe. A clear indication of
the need to improve European e-commerce.
American e-commerce strategists should not use this survey as an excuse to
rest on their laurels, however. Europe will improve and become more
of a competitor in the future. Also, Denmark is somewhat atypical in several
ways: it is a very small country with a particularly well-educated
population, meaning that Danes are probably more likely than many others
to shop at American sites. People in bigger countries
will demand local service; people with less foreign-language education
will be less likely to shop at English-only sites.
Related Report: E-Commerce User Experience
(Update) See also my report with 207 design guidelines for e-commerce usability. In usability testing of twenty e-commerce websites reported in this publication, we found that users were only capable of buying in 56% of the cases where they attempted a purchase.
Consider the three numbers discussed here:
- 5% of visitors are interested in buying something during the current visit
- About half the people who have an interest in buying attempt to do so during the current visit
- 56% of the people who attempt to buy are capable of struggling through the website's design to a successful completion of their purchase
The result of combining these three numbers is a conversion rate of about 1%, which is indeed a commonly observed number. The biggest long-term potential for increasing the conversion rate would come from motivating visitors to move from lookers to shoppers. However, the Web is notoriously bad at changing users' goals and desires. It is much better at fulfilling existing desires than at creating new ones. Thus, the short-term focus should be on changing shoppers to buyers and on making it possible for users to complete the transaction once they have decided to buy. Fix these two problems and you can quadruple your sal
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