Posts filed under 'Website'
Written by Pat
It’s a cost of doing business and a headache for a lot of online sellers: accepting merchandise returns.
There are valid reasons that we get returned merchandise from our online customers, but there are some times that costly returns can be avoided or prevented.
According to a recent Distribution Center Operations Report from The Supply Chain Consortium and Reverse Logistics: Returns, Refunds and Recalls Hot Topic Report, the top six reasons for customer returns were:
1. The customer ordered incorrect product or size
2. The customer decided the product was not needed or wanted
3. No reason for return given
4. The product did not match the description on the Website or in the catalog
5. The product did not fit the customer’s expectations
6. The company shipped the incorrect product or size
So, as an e-commerce company, how can you stem the tide of product returns?
At first glance, it would seem that the merchant might be responsible for only #6:
The company shipped the incorrect product or size
This, of course, is generally a clerical error that might be avoided with improved systems and procedures and employee training.
However, there are quite a few steps an e-commerce seller can take to prevent returns based on some of the other reasons that were cited.
How about these reasons?
1. The customer ordered incorrect product or size
4. The product did not match the description on the Website or in the catalog
The number one reason is incorrect product or size and the fourth most popular reason is that the description was not accurate. How can you as an online seller prevent this?
Ask yourself:
How clear and accurate is my description?
How many pictures do I have for each product?
Do the pictures show the product from various angles?
Do the pictures show relative size with a ruler or other measurement of scale?
For clothing items, are there sizing charts available?
Do I link to the sizing charts from the respective product page?
Do I provide measurements?
Another way to avoid having customer returns is to allow customers to leave product reviews.
Besides providing descriptive language that will help the search engines better index your products, reviews left by past customers can help shoppers make the best decision based on their experience. Who better to know that a pair of shoes runs small and to order a half-size up? Or that the orange shown in the picture is just a little bit brighter than the actual color of the purse?
As an e-commerce website, we will always be susceptible to returns, but it is possible to greatly improve your company’s return rate by improvements to your site and product descriptions. These changes will not only lower your merchandise return rate, but provide a boost to your customer satisfaction rate as well.
January 25th, 2010
written by Cathy
I was talking to a friend tonight and she mentioned that she had a very high cart abandonment on her website. Experts say that ‘high’ is anything over 20% and if your shopping cart is higher, it would be to your financial interest to figure out why.
So I did a little research and found the reasons for consumer cart abandonment. But the number 1 reason is because of high shipping charges.
Other reasons consumers abandon e-commerce shopping carts are because they want to:
compare shopping with other internet shopping sites
lack of money to spend
research for coupons for your site
shop offline
you don’t offer their choice of payment
out of stock at checkout
you do not offer support
concern of credit card security
Because this is such a wide discussion, today I am only going to talk about high shipping charges. So how do you fix this issue? Well the obvious solution is to adjust your shipping charges. Can you revisit your costs and negotiate a better rate with your shipping company. Crunch your numbers folks, get your shipping charges in line with your competitors. This is a very important step to online selling.
Another idea is not to surprise your customer with the charges and have an ‘estimate your shipping charges’ program on your main site, so your customer does not go through the troubles of checking out and then realize that the shipping charges are to high. There are programs (or you can have one written), that shows you who left their shopping cart and you can see if you can save the sale with a phone call or email. Check your shopping cart software to see if they offer either option. I have also seen with companies that have pop up boxes that you can offer a % discount after they bail on your site, just to sway the possible customer come back and complete the sale.
Is FREE shipping expected to consumers? In this economy, it doesnt hurt. Online consumers are not expecting free shipping on every product but they are expecting reasonable shipping charges. You don’t have to offer free shipping for every sale, put a dollar value on it and watch your sales increase.
Because your e-commerce site is so important to you, have outsiders (family, IMA members, customers) go through your checkout process and let them be brutally honest with what their opinion is, as a consumer, and let them tell you what is wrong. It can only help.
September 29th, 2009
The Internet Merchants Association has announced their conference agenda for 2009 in Las Vegas, NV in conjunction with the ASD/AMD Trade Show. There is still plenty of time to register, so be sure to go to www.imalasvegas.com right now and get signed up. You do not want to miss this conference packed full of information for increasing your online sales!
AGENDA: Updated 3/11/09
NOTE – The IMA is still adding more speakers, so times and speakers are subject to change. In addition to the agenda below, there will be a Networking Suite open at Bally’s on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights where you can meet the speakers and ask more questions!
March 16-18 Internet Merchants Assn. Las Vegas register @ , www.imamerchant.org & www.imalasvegas.com Don’t miss out – Register TODAY!
Continue Reading March 5th, 2009
Written by Cyn
With the launch of Checkout by Amazon I have to ask myself – is there such a thing as too many payment options? When a buyer comes to my site, what are they looking for as far as payment options? Currently I offer Paypal, Google Checkout and a merchant account. 50% of my shoppers choose the merchant account, 25% Paypal and 25% Google Checkout.
Would I not be shooting myself in the foot by adding another payment option? Considering each payment processor offers reduced fees based on volume, by having too many options, and spreading that volume among 3 processors, I am paying higher processing costs.
When I only offered Paypal, I had a lot of abandoned shopping carts and even a few potential customers email me that they canceled their order because they couldn’t use their credit card directly. So I’ve added a merchant account and have had no more abandoned carts. I may even experiment with deleting Paypal and Google Checkout for a month. See if I get any requests for them, or if my abandoned carts return. If I were to process all payments through my merchant account, I could save quite a bit of money on processing fees with the reduced percentages.
So for me, Amazon Checkout is a non-event. Too many hands in the pie.
August 10th, 2008
The Internet Merchants Association recently announced the launch of their new website – LeavingFeedback.com.
This new website is a Public Service Initiative to give all eBay sellers a one stop link to include in their correspondence with eBay buyers in order to help educate buyers on the effects of eBay’s new feedback system, including DSR’s and neutral feedback.
From what I can tell, the only education eBay has done to help buyers understand the new feedback system is to include a pop-up when a buyer leaves feedback, that encourages them to leave negative feedback by pointing out the seller can no longer retailiate in kind. That’s eBay’s kind of buyer education.
The Internet Merchants Association felt that more education was needed and took the initiative to publish the LeavingFeedback.com site which has been received very positively in the seller community. IMA is encouraging sellers to include the link in their correspondence with buyers and post it on various sites in order to get it out to the public at large.
Auctionbytes has picked up on the leavingfeedback.com site and Ina’s blog post can be read here.
After the site was posted on various eBay boards, IMA was asked permission to have it reposted in Dutch, French and other languages. Several eBay Certified Education Specialists have requested permission to print the site and use it in their classes. We are pleased to oblige!
July 10th, 2008
Wouldn’t it be nice to be automatically notified when your website has a new page indexed in Google, or when someone links to your site? Well this is very easy to do using the Google Alerts Beta! Here are the instructions for setting up a site wide Google index update Alert and a site wide link alert.
Create an alert for when a page on your site gets indexed:
- Go to www.google.com/alerts.
- For search terms enter (without quotes) “site:yourdomain.com”.
- Make sure you do not use a www or other subdomain.
- Select Web as the type.
- For “How often” we will select “as-it-happens”. I like this because this tells you exactly when Google is crawling your site!
- Enter the email you want the alert sent to.
- Click “Create Alert”.
- Confirm the alert from the email Google send you and you are set!
Create an alert that notifies you when another website links to your website:
- Go to www.google.com/alerts.
- For search terms enter (without quotes) “link:yourdomain.com”.
- Make sure you do not use a www or other subdomain.
- Select Comprehensive as the type. This will allow you to be notified with links in Blogs and groups as well as other websites in general.
- For “How often” we will select “once a week”. If you start noticing a lot of entries you can go to the once a day and then as-it-happens settings.
- Enter the email you want the alert sent to.
- Click “Create Alert”.
- Confirm the alert from the email Google send you and you are set!
Now you will know WHO is linking to you and WHEN!
Chuck
March 17th, 2008
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