Don’t let the wheels fall off your e-commerce shopping cart

Don’t let the wheels fall off your e-commerce shopping cart The majority of UK web sites are guilty of leaving e-consumers stranded at the checkout empty handed, once they have already spent valuable time browsing and selecting goods to purchase. This is due to erratic functionality within shopping carts, at a critical step in the online purchasing process.

The majority of shopping carts provide consumers with an unpredictable and unsatisfactory experience, making Web shopping a lottery. 80 per cent of web sites perform inconsistently with widely varying response times, timeouts and errors - leaving consumers at best wondering what to do next and at worst unable to complete their purchase successfully. This is potentially costing e-retailers millions in lost sales from consumer frustrations.

These were the key findings of the Ecommerce Performance Study 2004, by web testing specialist SciVisum, which carried out 24/7 monitoring of the online buying process on over 50 leading UK retail web sites over a period of one month.

On average UK shopping carts in the study were out of action for more than ten times the accepted industry standard. 1 in 5 carts did not function for 12 or more hours a month and over three quarters failed to meet the standard service level of availability of 99.9 per cent equating to a maximum 43 minutes of accumulated failures a month. A leading DIY chain had shopping carts that failed to work for more than four days during the study, making it the worst performer.

20 million UK shoppers are expected to spend £17 billion online this year.

In ecommerce every transaction counts. It’s the sporadic and unpredictable performance of web sites that is the most worrying to users. Web sites are not coping with the heavier loads that occur day by day, failing through inconsistency to support consumer-buying habits and completely missing the boat when it comes giving e-consumers a satisfactory, reliable experience.

Don’t let the wheels fall off your e-commerce shopping cart

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