Are You Ready for Cyber Monday?

It’s that time of the year again. If you had any doubts about the kind of money that’s spent every year between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, prepare to be overwhelmed by the following numbers:

Cyber Monday’s sales have increased around 16% every year since 2006, with an increase as high as 22% from 2010 to 2011. An IBM Report puts the total for 2012 Cyber Mondays sales at $1.98 billion. 2013 will be no different, with predictions for Cyber Monday coming in at nearly $2.3 billion.

And it’s not just Cyber Monday anymore, more and more customers are shopping earlier—Thanksgiving is the fastest growing online shopping day of the entire “Cyber Week”. In fact Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are all predicted to shatter records again this year.

So what does all this mean for your business? Well, for one thing, it means if you aren’t optimizing your e-commerce site ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you’re leaving money on the table. Even though it’s already November, there’s still time to optimize your site and take advantage of the increased holiday shopping, convert more visitors into customers, and improve your bottom line.

But where do you start? One KPI you shouldn’t ignore is cart abandonment, or the users who add items to their carts but never make it through the checkout process.

What Causes Cart Abandonment?

2 out of 3 people will abandon their shopping cart for one reason or another, including unexpected costs, security concerns, and poor page load times.

Joshua Bixby of Unbounce notes that “1 out of 5 of your customers will abandon their shopping cart if your pages are too slow,” which translates to around $3 billion lost each year to slow load times. Not sure if your cart is too slow? Check it out for yourself with Google Page Speed Insights. By just typing in your URL, you can get an overall score from Google and analyze the best possible routes of speeding up your pages.

If you find that speed is not the problem, that doesn’t necessarily mean all is well with your cart. 44% of carts are abandoned because of expensive shipping costs, according to David Callaway. Visitors could be abandoning for an array of reasons, but the key is to understand why before you make any changes. In 2012, Worldpay surveyed 19,000 consumers and identified  numerous reasons for cart abandonment. Luckily, most issues are easily corrected, including:

• unexpected costs — 56%

• website navigation — 25%

• website crashed — 24%

• processes taking too long — 21%

• excessive security checks — 18%

• concerns about security issues — 17%

Fixing Cart Abandonment

The easiest approach to reducing cart abandonment is to ask visitors why they’re leaving the cart in the first place. Qualaroo makes it easy to diagnose the issues that are hurting conversions by asking unobtrusive survey questions of shoppers right in the moment. You can ask people who are about to abandon their carts—as well as those who successfully completed their purchase—to gain the insights you need to improve conversion rates. Here’s how.

Survey Shoppers About to Abandon Their Cart

You can use Qualaroo’s exit intent detection to serve a Qualaroo Nudge to users who are about to browse away from your page or close the window. When a user goes to leave you can ask them a question about why they’re leaving without completing their purchase. Simply ask the following question:

You can use an open text field to capture their feedback. If you start to see some patterns emerging in the responses, you can later update your Nudge to offer pre-determined responses.

The answers you find might surprise you. One Qualaroo client learned that a code-level issue was preventing users from checking out on some browsers. That fix saved them approximately $60,000 in revenue this year alone.

Survey Shoppers Who Completed a Purchase

It might seem counterintuitive to survey people who made a purchase when you’re trying to understand why people don’t purchase; but your customers are a great source of insight for uncovering what almost kept them from buying.

On the order confirmation or Thank You page, simply run a Nudge that asks:

“What almost kept you from completing your purchase today?”

Again, use an open text field to find out what hesitation your customers had when deciding to complete their purchase. One shopper’s hesitation is another’s reason to abandon, so use this feedback to improve your site’s messaging, user experience or other elements to reduce abandonment.

Don’t Forget Mobile Users

Cyber Week mobile shopping will be up 40% from last year, a trend that will surely continue. Is your site ready to cater to the mobile shopper? If not, you’re missing out.

The good news is you can check your mobile commerce health with Qualaroo for Mobile Web. You can deploy the same checkout surveys to your mobile users to determine if there’s an issue getting in their way.

The best part of Qualaroo for Mobile Web is that it doesn’t take the visitor to another page and off-task to collect feedback. Questions are answered right on the page, ensuring that they’re able to quickly get back to what they were doing on your site.

Putting Feedback into Action

Once you have feedback from your surveys, you’ll want to implement changes to address user concerns and run some simple A/B tests to see what changes move the needle. Tools like Optimizely can help you get results quickly and easily. Be sure you establish a baseline conversion rate for your cart first, so you’ll be able to accurately measure improvements and gauge what works and what doesn’t.

When you find a winner, codify the change and move on to the next source of user hesitation and abandonment. With just a couple of weeks left, you still have time to get your cart into shape to make sure you capitalize on the biggest online shopping week of the year.

Even better? Qualaroo comes with a free 14-day trial. You can use it starting today to uncover hidden objections in time to make changes that will reduce hesitation and generate more profit for your online store.  So what are you waiting for? Take advantage of these last two weeks to get your online store geared up for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the biggest online shopping week of the year!