Here’s what to do about it…
E-commerce retailers are spending a lot of time polishing their shopping cart experience to minimise abandonment. Extensive analytics, A/B testing and optimisation is done to reduce consumer drop offs after they have added items to their shopping carts. It’s great that retailers appreciate the importance of optimising the customer experience. But there’s a problem.
While retailers are spending time focusing on the checkout flow, customers are dropping off – in large numbers – before they even get to that stage. In my experience working with merchants across Southeast Asia (SEA), the biggest turn-off for potential first time buyers is account registration at the beginning of the check out process. Spending time optimising the checkout flow without addressing this important roadblock is like rearranging a physical store to improve the shopper experience, but forgetting to unlock the front doors at the start of the day.
If you put an account registration roadblock at the beginning of your checkout experience, you are potentially missing out on a significant amount of potential revenue.
Why are consumers so allergic to account registration? Well, there are a number of reasons, which we’ll go through, but one of the biggest has to do with mobile e-commerce. In the SEA region, the mobile phone is fast becoming a primary device for all digital activities, including online shopping. In fact, 40% of all transactions in Southeast Asia1 are done through a mobile device. As you can imagine, entering email addresses and passwords multiple times on a mobile device is a showstopper for many.
Four arguments merchants make for putting registration up-front and why it’s not a good idea.
Here are some typical reasons I hear from merchants who want their consumers to create an account up-front provide:
1. I just want to make it easy for customers to buy from us next time without entering all their details.
If you made registration optional, fine. But making it compulsory makes it clear that you care more about your bottom line than giving the customer a good shopping experience. And that’s short-term thinking.
2. We need to get demographic info like gender and date of birth so we can market to customers later.
Permission to market to your customers is something you must earn. Customers need to know what value you can provide them. Provide a good experience and explain what they get in exchange for their data and they may just give you what you want.
3. We still need to get their shipping address, name and payment info, why not a password?
From the customer point of view, entering their email address and a password (usually twice) has nothing to do with the process of buying a product, so they are suspicious, annoyed or confused as why you would ask for this before the expected shipping / billing information. Solutions like PayPal will pass back the shipping address to the consumer or simply get the post code which
can get translated to address.
4. My shopping cart forces me to have account creation for consumers
Most shopping carts allow you to bypass this step and if not, perhaps it’s time to change your cart.
How to get what you need from account registration without scaring away your customers
1. Offer a guest checkout for first time buyers
A solution is to offer a guest checkout for first-time buyers as an alternative to account registration. This allows the customer to seamlessly complete his or her primary objective, namely to buy your product. There is no ask for extensive personal preferences, storing of payment details, account name, phone numbers,
permission to contact, etc.
2. Let customers use their PayPal account
With an existing PayPal account, your customers have all their details already stored and available to complete their shopping experience on your online store. No registration is required, and they just need their existing PayPal username and
password.
3. Use services like Facebook for ultra-low friction registration
You can turn a guest into a known customer with a few clicks of their mouse. Simply use Facebook Connect to allow them to log in. You’ll still need to collect shipping and billing info at your end, so do this step after the checkout flow so it’s not a barrier. This will give you authentication functionality that you can tie to their shipping and billing information as well as a validated email address. They can log in via Facebook Connect in the future to shop without re-entering their shipping and billing info.
As with everything in life, there are trade-offs… in this case the trade-off is between having complete customer information versus a significant loss in overall conversion. SMBs are losing far too many customers because of login page abandonment. To spend their hard-earned marketing money to get every additional new customer and then lose them at the login page is such a missed opportunity.
1 PayPal Internal Database, March 2014 – February 2015