Indulge us for a moment, and let’s take a quick trip to the supermarket. Imagine walking in to find ten shoppers filling their carts with grocery staples. But, as they near the check-out, seven of these shoppers walk away from their carts and head out the door, while the remaining three proceed to purchase. In a real-life scenario, like a grocery store, this is implausible, but it’s a reality for online retailers across all industries. Only three out of ten shoppers will hit the Buy Button, and cart abandonment rates are a major drain on the bottom line for most online businesses.
What causes cart abandonment?
At its core, cart abandonment happens because savvy shoppers lose confidence in the purchase by the time they arrive at your digital cash register—the Buy Button. Whether it’s due to the checkout process, shipping costs, or an unclear picture of the true product performance, shoppers aren’t committing, even though they’re interested in purchasing what’s in their cart. As an online retailer, each time a customer swipes or clicks away from your site, you’re losing revenue. In fact, a Forrester report shows that brands can lose up to $18 billion a year in revenue as purchases fall by the wayside. Again, if your customers aren’t hitting the Buy Button, your eCommerce site isn’t making any money. And, to put it bluntly, that sucks.
Consider this—if you transformed your conversion rates from an average of 3% to 6%, your revenue gains could be a business game-changer. And, the good news is that this is easy to do. You can increase conversion rates and instill confidence in your buyers by providing transparency, right at the Buy Button. Get ready for it—we’re here to tell you how.
Turning reviews into revenue
Along with shipping rates, product pricing, and overall site speed and performance considerations, checkout design is crucial in driving conversion rates—and can actually result in a 35% increase. Shoppers are smarter than ever, and fostering a culture of transparency on your site—and, in turn, throughout your brand—can instill confidence in your customers. We know that shoppers read reviews—we rely on them ourselves—and that this consumer-to-consumer feedback can be a purchase tipping point. And, for a lot of brands, this is where you lose your customers as they head from your site to other sources to learn more about the product they’re after. And, as a consumer yourself, you are probably well aware of the frustration this brings. Scrolling through review after review, weeding through the obvious fakes and sponsored reviews, only to have to mentally tally the score to figure out where the item lands. It’s easy to see why items remain in carts and shoppers never return to sites—because it’s so hard to get a true picture of product performance…until now.
We designed the C2C Score to help brands boost their bottom lines without having to redesign their sites. As a true picture of product performance—an aggregated score of real consumer feedback, including ratings and comments—the C2C Score is embedded on your site, right beside the Buy Button. As your customer gets ready to purchase, they get a clear, visual picture of the product’s rating—from green (Buy With Confidence) through yellow (Mediocre) and red (Reconsider). For buyers, this speeds the path to purchase immensely. They now have a trusted rating to rely on that channels millions of reviews from across the internet into a single, consistent metric. At the same time, brands can get a comprehensive window into product performance. As a counterpart to the C2C Score, our Brand Experience Platform aggregates customer reviews on a daily basis to deliver cleaned data that’s normalized down to the product title. Easily get a view of your top and bottom-performing products (and everything in between) to definitively understand consumer intent and adapt product performance, customer service, shipping times/rates, etc., as necessary. While we can’t deliver real-world supermarket conversion rates, the C2C Score and Brand Experience Platform bring true value by maximizing your Buy Button and delivering results. A huge step forward when every dollar counts.
See it in action.