Marketing Gem 3 - stunning statistic

Multi-color gem Today’s marketing gem is from "Call to Action", and it really bowled me over when I read it.

70% of your customers probably fail to buy, even when they try.

On page 47 of the book, in the chapter on planning, there is a sidebar by Jared Spool, who studies usability, and runs experiments. One experiment his company does is to take a customer who wants to buy something specific, give them the money to buy it, and send them to a site where they can buy it.
(condensed with […] and italics mine):

The average e-commerce website only manages to sell someone a product they really want, under these odd conditions, 30 percent of the time. 70 percent of the time, the customer who knows exactly what they want runs into some show-stopping obstacle that prevents the purchase.

Look at your annual revenue from your site. Assume that only represents the 30 percent who are successsfully purchasing. That means there is another 70% (more than twice your current revenue) who is trying to buy from you, but failing.
[…]
We’re not even considering the people who haven’t decided what they want yet.

At first I wanted to dismiss the statistics out of hand. "No way!" But, not even an hour after I read that gem, I was trying to find the wholesale prices for some clothing I was considering buying for a store I run, and I was completely blocked from doing so.

Try it yourself, go to www.bella.com, click on the "wholesaler" link (which is conveniently a different color background than all the other navigation links, so you don’t notice it at first), and try to figure it out. There are tabs with clothing, if I click on the tabs, are the clothes shown with the wholesaler price? It doesn’t look like it. Your customer is always one click from saying goodbye, and running into such a wall is a sure way to provoke that click.

Technorati Tags: marketing, usability, statistics, user interface

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One Response to “Marketing Gem 3 - stunning statistic”

Audible.com proves my point - Marketer’s Eye
March 20th, 2006 22:52
1

[…] In my stunning statistic post, I quoted Call To Action’s claim that 70% of the time customers are prevented from buying, even when they want to. […]