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At GoVets, we are very passionate about continuously improving our customer experience and look at every way to help our customers understand what they are buying so the customer is happy with their purchase, experience and they keep coming back for more to satisfy their Government, Business and/or Personal needs. As part of this process, we want to maximize how many customers are converting when they come to our website. There are many industry statistics and studies that try to look at buyer behavior. For example, Investpcro.com provides the following reasons why web buyers abandon shopping carts:
Infographic by – Conversion Optimization Company Invesp
Common Best practices for most online stores include:
Within the context of these best practices, GoVets describes how we address each of the 14 reasons why customers abandon your website!
Customers never want to be surprised when they get to the checkout page and they see that shipping for a given item is more, sometimes significantly more than the price of the item that got their attention to begin with. Many sites even require customers to go through long registration process in the hopes that they will just "cave-in" when they see the crazy shipping costs after investing so much time gundersoing through the registration and checkout process.
At GoVets, we understand our customers and our goal is to provide a clear and concise "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" (WYSIWYG) approach to shopping from the time customers see our products in search results to the time they place their order with us. So for this reason, GoVets can be considered the WYSIWY of Online Shopping! 100% Free Shipping is how we differentiate ourselves from our competitors. We don't want to trick our customers throughout the buying process, particularly registered Government and Business customers that are have requested a Quote and obtain an approved budget allocation for the quoted amount. We never want to have the "Oh, we forgot to quote you on shipping" discussion or "Well, the amount you requested requires more expensive Freight/LTL shipping instead of Parcel, so the new cost is this...". These statements or similar are never good discussions to have with your customer. We would rather focus our conversations and communication with customers on more important acquisition questions such as availability and shipping timelines, but even these issues are addressed on GoVets and should be addressed on yours.
Strive to become your own WYSIWYG for Online Shopping! If you are not big enough to offer FREE SHIPPING, provide better ways to set expectations with customers. Avoid using USPS/UPS Shipping Calculators on your Checkout Page. This slows down the Checkout process and gives customers a Bad Taste in their mouth knowing that they have to pay so much more just because they live across the country from your Warehouse instead of being in the same state. If needed, do a little homework and forecast what your sales can be an take a risk by determining what your shipping costs might be on average for sales to all locations and come up with fixed amount. Customers do not really care that your warehouse is in Washington State, Florida or Vermont but they do care if they have to pay for shipping something from your warehouse. As you expand your business, expand your warehouse footprint across the country - there may be cost involved, but the savings on shipping may be significant depending what your product assortment may be. Speaking of product assortment and size, figure out what product mix may be best suited for the most optimal shipping options from UPS, FEDEX, USPS or others. These shipping companies are always coming up with new programs, such as the Fedex One Rate. Optimize your packaging, quantities, and pricing around these shipping options to get the best bang for your buck as well as your customer's buck!
What Not To Do: Do Not Annoy Your Customers
Customers are not always interested in making purchases on your website and are often just trying to discover who you are, what you offer, and compare to other offerings out there. When customers are ready and/or interested in what you have to offer, they will know. Do not spend your effort trying to become the "used-car-salesman" to get a sale or two by using improper selling techniques, aggressive calling, chatting, or promotions on your site that either confuse customers or simply upsets them to the point where they leave your site.
How GoVets Does it: We Learn What Works Best for our Best Customers
At GoVets, we try to use a WYSIWYG approach to our audiences and refine the WYS (What-You-See) part! This is much easier said than done, but our goal is to truly understand who our audience is, and we're always trying to understand where they are coming from, how they are making their purchases, what works and what doesn't via continuous A/B Testing. We are constantly pivoting our efforts, content and product mix to benefit our ideal audience based on these factors and more. Given our large customer base, we never want to make any major enhancements, but it's important to continuously refine who our audience is and update our messaging, content, and marketing to either target customers that are ready to purchase from us or give them sufficient information and as little friction as possible (i.e. WYSIWYG Shopping) throughout their journey on GoVets, so they can make the right purchase decision. We never cold-call customers to harass or annoy them - However, if some of our customers are truly not ready to purchase, we try to gather their information (if we don't already have it) so we can remind them about: (1) their item(s) of interest, (2) about GoVets and (3) the value we can offer them when they are truly ready to make that purchase. From time-to-time, we may even sweeten the deal with a special offer or promo code.
It's critical for online store owners to understand your customers. You must continuously refine your messaging, content and product offerings to align with your customers' wants and needs over time. Without understanding your audience, too many of your customers will not be ready to purchase products or services from you because your messaging will not sufficiently address what they ultimately are looking for, such as certain product features, better descriptions, details about your customers support, website security, etc. Find ways to collect information about your customers. This process can begin with online registration forms with specific details of interest to your business such as shopping categories, customer preferences and over time, it may evolve to include customer surveys, feedback forms, etc. It may be possible to obtain other details about your customers based on their shopping behavior or what they are searching for. Using Google Analytics will help you understand the most popular pages, search terms and similar data that you can use to build upon to understand what your customers are most often visiting on your site so you can build richer content about these pages and search terms. Through the same tools and forms, you should be able to collect data about what customers are converting and which ones are not... Next, find ways to reach out to your non-converting customers. Abandoned Email or SMS campaigns work well, or you can use other online Advertisement Tools such as Google/Bing Ads or marketing from Social Media platforms to further target your specific audience. If you have sufficient information about your target audience, these tools also help expand your marketing efforts to other similar customers.
Focus on attracting customers that are ready to purchase but study and continue taking care of the ones that are not quite ready yet. You may need to spend more time and effort to do this, but it ultimately does pay off over time as you begin to waste less and less money on non-converting customers, non-converting products and non-converting marketing campaigns.
What Not To Do: Don't Waste Your Time on Non-Converting Products & Services.
If you have a large product set, as you get to know your audience and customers, spend less time on less popular products. In today's market, the faster you can learn what you're good at selling, the better you're off because you can spend more time optimizing pricing strategies, pricing models, and less time on distractions. Get rid of non-performing products or find ways to set them aside so you can focus on the revenue generating product areas.
How GoVets Does it: Continuously Finding Gold Nuggets Out of Millions of Products
GoVets is constantly evolving our product mix. Our world class automation and technology allow us to continously stay on top of our hot sellers and most popular products so we can dedicate more resources to make those product successful. Similarly, we are quickly able to find the family members of these hot selling items and start putting resources those family members. From our perspective, a family member is a product that is in the same Category and Brand as a Hot Seller. We believe that family members are often more likely to convert that products that we have no history or orders. When managing a portfolio of millions of products, it's important to know how to quickly focus and fail fast. When we start spending resources on products but don't see as much success for those products within a period of time, we begin to throttle back resources on those products until they prove themselves. We believe in the concept of the MOB Effect when it comes to selling products - This means that if we are not careful, there are part of our portfolio that start taking up too many resources will little to no upside, so it's up to us and our automation to quickly find those products and set them aside so we can let the more popular "Gold Nuggets" bubble up to the top of the list of hot sellers. This strategy has proven to be successful, but it could NOT be done without the appropriate technology in place.
As an online store, you want to sell as many items as possible so you can take advantage of economies of scale within your manufacturing facility, warehouse and/or with your suppliers. There are times when you may need to buy your way into your market but selling products at a lower price, understand where your demand is coming from and then expand margins overtime as you grow to understand your customer(s) and product offerings.
What Not To Do: Don't Make It Difficult for Customers to Save Their Wishlists!
Wishlists or Shopping lists are becoming more and more popular on online stores, but many stores do not make it easy enough for customers to save their lists.
How GoVets Does it:
GoVets allows customers to save products in their Cart, allows customers to create Wishlists, Comparison Lists, and allows customers to submit Quote Requests for products that they are interested in.
Creating lists is a way for you to understand what customers are looking at on your website. Understanding this data helps inform who your audience is and what product mix you should be focusing on.
What Not To Do: Avoid Bait-and-Switch Shipping Cost Tactics
As mentioned above, avoid waiting until the last step (or later steps) in the checkout process to communicate shipping details to customers. If you are doing this by accident or on purpose, it will likely lead to a lower overall conversion rate for your customers.
How GoVets Does it: Communicate 100% Free Shipping Everywhere
We like to remind customers that shipping is free as often and as early as possible throughout the buying Journey, in our marketing, and when customers are communicating with our support team. It's part of who we are and our product offering.
Come up with a simple shipping strategy that you can communicate consistently throughout your website and the buyer's journey. This includes adding details to your policy or shipping guidelines on your product page, shipping policy page, and as early on in the checkout process as possible. Minimize steps, clicks or actions that customers need to take before they can find out about shipping costs as many of them will likely leave your site before even going through the process. Understanding shipping is another buying decision for your customer and the sooner and easier you can help them make that decision, the higher your conversion rate will be!
What Not To Do: Too much friction in the sign-up process
Allow customers to checkout without signing in. If they are in a rush, allow them to sign-up later. Find ways in your ecommerce system to associate their orders with their email / phone number / zip code, so if they have concerns or issues, your customer support team can easily identify the customer.
How GoVets Does it: Minimize Checkout Friction
At GoVets, our goal is to minimize friction throughout the buying process. If customers really do not want to create an account for various reasons, we do not require them to do so on the checkout page. We have sufficient information to help returning customers with order issues or if they want to sign-up in the future. Again, if customers decide to sign up and submit future orders on our platform, we can automatically associate all historical orders with their "guest" email address with the account created.
Make the buying process as streamlined as possible. Focusing too much on Sign-ups will likely decrease your conversion rate. Give customers other incentives to sign-up at a future date once they have made the purchase and you have PROVEN yourself worth their time and effort to sign-up and return as a customer.
What Not To Do: Stop asking too many questions during sign-up or checkout process.
How GoVets Does it: Minimize overall Form Fields and Required Fieds
At GoVets, it's all about minimizing friction. During the sign-up process, there are only a couple fields that are really required, otherwise, customers have the option to provide as little information as they like based on privacy concerns.
Stop asking customers for too much data that will only benefit your database and never provide value to the customer. Customers are sick of providing every level of detail possible to websites, so if you want to maximize sign-ups, minimize the amount of data that you ask customers to fill out. If possible, earn their trust and ask for it over time... but only once you're proven yourself.
What Not To Do: Avoid Multiple Pages, Steps, or complicated workflows,
How GoVets Does it: One-Page Checkout
We have a one-page checkout that allows customers to add all of their information on one simple page. In many cases, shipping and billing are the same, making it much easier for customers.
Avoid multiple checkout pages and asking for too much information. Allow guest checkout if needed. Consider allowing customers to use Social logins such as Google or Yahoo if it keeps your workflow simple. Consider using One-page checkout add-ons to your Wordpress or Shopify websites. Use tools such as Bolt or Stripe's One-Page checkout.
What Not To Do: Never Ignore How Slow your Website is...
We are consistently testing our our site speeds and ensuring that every component on every product page is performing as efficiently as possible. We are obsessed about improving site performance, about Google Page Speed Insights scores, along with our own internal IP and AI tools to maximize the performance of each of our millions of webpages.
Make each of your pages as fast as possible. Minimize using complex Add-ons / Extensions for your Wordpress or Shopify sites. Use external tools to give you objective guidance on how your website is performing. Have friends or family navigate your site and give you honest feedback. Hire the right technical team to make sure this is always a top priority when making updates to any component of your website.
What Not To Do: Never Avoid Paying your Sales Taxes. Only allow Zero-Tax purchases for qualified Tax Exempt Buyers.
How GoVets Does it: 100% Tax Compliance
We make absolutely sure that we are compliant in all states when it comes to charging Sales taxes for customer ordres. We use best-of-breed Sales Tax Compliance and Reporting software. We make absolutely sure that any of our Tax Exempt buyers provide their Tax Exempt Certificates / Documents and that any expired documents are renewed each year.
Do not mess around with Uncle Sam.
What Not To Do: Never limit how you can receive money from your customers..
How GoVets Does it: Payment Options that our Customers Want
At GoVets, we know that our customers want a simple checkout process, Net30 Terms, and in some cases the ability to pay via Check, ACH, PayPal or using their own Government or Enterprise Invoicing System. We support all of these options and will further expand these options over time.
Know your customers and what they want. Listen to their requests. As you add payment options, find out if the cost to add a new payment option is worth the effort to maintain it.
What Not To Do: Avoid not including enough shipping details on your product pages. Avoid bait-and-switch shipping tactics.
How GoVets Does it: Transparency on our Product Pages
At GoVets, we show customers when products are expected to be delivered and in most cases, customers even have the option to provide a zip code, where we quickly determine any changes to shipping timelines based on their location.
If you say something will be delivered within 2 days, make sure that happens. Make sure to clearly indicate if an item is either expected to be "delivered" within a certain timeframe or if it's expected to be "shipped" within a certain timeframe. If you are not 100% certain, you may want to give a range, but know that this causes additional uncertainty and may reduce conversions.
What Not To Do: Avoid too many Ads or offerse on your website
How GoVets Does it: Keep it simple
At GoVets, we have a promotions page, but do not have any external ads or unnecessary offers on any of our pages. If we show additional details or products on any given page, they are very similar to anything you're currently searching or evaluating.
Never annoy shoppers on your site. Having too many pop-ups, ads (that primarily benefit you, not them), or other unnecessary offers that are completely different from what they are looking for will definitely decrease your sign-up and conversion rates. Keep it simple, earn their trust, and then consider offering them more items over time.
What Not To Do: Never assume your site is always functional...
How GoVets Does it: Continuous monitoring and redundancy
At GoVets, we have automation in place that is continuously monitoring all aspects of our system (front end and back end) for performance issues related to traffics, DDOS attacks, orders, clicks, etc and we are always optimizing our site to provide the best possible experience. If anything happens, our systems notify us. If our site goes down, we have backups to immediately recover 100% of our data.
Have ever possible contingency plan in place related to hackers, growth, bottlenecks, redundancy, data privacy, etc. Always have someone or something monitoring your system 24/7.
