Ecommerce is a tough world. As an e-merchant you will probably never meet a single customer in person and barely speak to a few of them (only true if your quality of service is good enough). On the other side, Ecommerce is an exponentially growing sector, there is just a few that offer such a sustainable growth rate year after year at a global scale.

UK is the 1st e-commerce market with 96€ billion above Germany (50b€) and France (45b€). And some emerging countries like Ukraine, Greece or Turkey have astonishing market growth rates, generally over 40% per year.

However, last year the average basket amount decreased (again) in Western Europe countries. As an example, the average transaction in France went down by 3.5% versus 2012, at 84,5€ per transaction. On average, european shoppers spend a little more than £1.000 online. But shopping cart abandonment rate stays very high, around 80 to 90% in Europe.

What makes people quit transactions when they already committed to your site by adding a product to the basket? What are the quickest alternatives?

Expensive shipping ?

Shipping fees are never a good surprise, never. Unless there are free of charge. When visitors consider shipping costs too expensive, they tend to reject the whole transaction including, the product and your website. Usually they will leave rapidly and never come back. In all countries across Europe, expensive shipping cost tend to reduce conversion rates. The solution : You can either absorb a small part of the shipping costs to stay competitive or work on the clarity of the information. What visitors hate most is the feeling of being fooled. If the same shipping amount is announced in advance, people will be more aware of it and not feeling like they felt in a trap. Ideally, you’ll want to do both.

Demanding customers :

E-shoppers tend to be more demanding over time. They get confident and experimented over online transactions and they have a tendancy to raise the bar of acceptable quality for an online purchase. On the other hand, multi-screens have stretched the decision-making time. Customers need more time to think about their purchase and look for the best offer. Price comparison sites and non-stop promotions play a role in this as well.

The solutions : to help you gain additional visibility, Lengow has developed a range of tools dedicated to your visibility on price comparison sites, marketplaces, etc. To do so, Lengow provides free-plugins for Magento & Prestashop. Also, you can implement a « products added to cart » memory with .php sessions, so that returning visitors still have their products saved in the basket.

Security :

One of the most common reason why a customer will not complete a payment is because he doesn’t feel secure enough about completing his payment details on your website. The solution is to offer different payment methods (including Paypal). This is more likely to suit your visitors and make your website trusted by new visitors.