At the LemonStand offices, we use Slack so that our team can share Youtube videos increase productivity. We even created a separate channel just for funny videos. Earlier today, our CEO posted this hilarious one –
The video was created by Blue Snap, and is a parody of how eCommerce stores frustrate their customers during checkout and make them abandon their carts. It’s centred around two little kids who have an ‘e-lemonade’ stand where they sell, you guessed it, lemonade for 50 cents. During the video we see customers come up to them and try to purchase a cup of lemonade, only to be flummoxed by silly payment policies.
What happens in the video might seem silly, but the sad part is it actually does happen in real life. Many eCommerce stores have rigid checkouts created from ‘best practices’ that stemmed from the previous decade. What they don’t realize is, technology has caught up and then gone past them, rendering their checkouts archaic and unusable.
The video, therefore, is only funny because it’s true.
In this post, we’ll have a look at the issues that the video highlights and why they cause customers to abandon their carts.
Accept Only One Form Of Payment
The first issue we come across in the video is payment method. The lemonade costs only half a dollar, but when a kind gentleman hands over $1 in cash, our young shop owner shakes his head and says that he only accepts credit card.
Of course, as an online store, you can’t accept hard cash. But today, there are other alternatives that represent digital cash, like Paypal. In the video, you see the young girl ask if they accept Bitcoin, and the boy firmly shakes his head.
Technology will keep moving forward, and we’re already at the stage where credit cards aren’t the preferred payment method for many people. Consumers want to pay using Bitcoins or whatever new currency is out there. They’re just more comfortable doing that than entering their credit card information again and again.
Yet, many eCommerce stores aren’t willing to add additional methods. Some don’t think it’s worth it, some don’t know how to, and some just use eCommerce platforms that aren’t flexible enough to give them that choice.
Sticking with only one payment method limits how many people you can sell to. What’s worse, if they reach the checkout and find that you don’t accept their preferred payment method after all the time they spent on your site, they’re going to be a little irritated.
Force Customers To Fill Out Long Forms
Forms are inevitable in eCommerce. Customer have to fill out a shipping address and contact information. There are certain fields that are just non-negotiable.
That doesn’t mean you can go ahead and start asking for information that you don’t really need to fulfil the order. In the video we see the young entrepreneur asking his customers to fill out pages and pages of information, including social security numbers. Of course, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but there are many retailers who ask for unnecessary information.
It might just be one extra field, but it takes a little extra time on the customer’s part and it irritates them just that bit more. They want to get through the checkout process as fast as possible, and you want to ensure there are no hoops they have to jump through to do that.
The worst part is when a customer misses a field, or chooses not to fill it in, and is asked to fill in the whole form again. In the video, the boy takes the form, crumples it up, throws it away, and asks the customer to refill the entire thing. It looks ludicrous, but it actually does happen many times online!
To stop this from happening, the first thing you need to do is ensure that the customer knows which fields are mandatory. Add in an asterisk, or a color highlight, next to the field so that it stands out.
If the customer still doesn’t fill it in when submitting the form, don’t refresh the whole page. Instead, keep all the other values in there and direct the customer’s attention to the missing field. A smart strategy is to auto-scroll the page back to where the empty field is and highlight the field.
Finally, don’t make customers re-enter all their information if they’ve already bought from you. If it’s still the same session, you can temporarily store the information. This makes it easier to add on additional items in case they forgot to purchase something. For a more permanent solution, ask customers if they’d like to create a login for when they come back again.
Ignore foreign customers
The point of eCommerce is to transcend physical boundaries and reach more people. When you start selling on the internet, the whole world can see your site and buy from you.
So doesn’t it defeat the purpose of having an online store if you ignore customers from outside your country? In the video we see a man trying to purchase lemonade with a foreign card, but the young boy simply says he won’t accept it and tells the man he doesn’t speak his language.
Did you know that English is actually not the most spoken language on Earth. It’s not even in second place. In most other countries, English is not the first language, so if you have people buying from these places you should offer language translations and you should accept foreign payment methods.
What other things piss you off most when you checkout on an eCommerce site?
