Imagine
walking into your local supermarket to discover the aisles blocked with
abandoned trolleys and the checkouts hidden behind piles of dumped shopping
baskets. It never happens. Customers would find somewhere else to shop and the
store manager would soon be out of job. The worst scenario is that the store
could shut down.
But
most people will be surprised to learn that in online stores, half of all
shopping baskets are being abandoned before checkout. This is a
staggering-statistic and Nigerian e-commerce businesses are potentially leaving
billions of pounds a year on the table by not improving the shopping experience
for customers.
This
can partly be explained by the fact that bricks-and-mortar shops have had
hundreds of years worth of experience on which to base decisions about how they
set up their stores, how to encourage people to move through the shops and how
best to display products. E-commerce, however, is a relatively recent
phenomenon; particularly in Nigeria. Online stores have often been seen as a
separate arm of a high street chain's business, rather than its single biggest
store, and as such the website might have been somewhat neglected in terms of
the constant analysis and improvement it craves.
Despite
the tough climate on the high streets on the country today, it is the
businesses that have adapted to this online revolution that are winning. Those
that reacted fastest to rapidly changing consumer behaviour have invested in
their websites. They test and tune their pages and make regular changes to
their sites based on scientific data.
Any
business can use online applications to understand which parts of its site
work, and which need fixing. Imagine if a typical high street store could
change its shop front to one of a number of designs for every person that
walked past the shop, and measure which shop front design worked best. Or that
the same store could understand how every single customer moved around the shop
floor in real-time to discover exactly which parts of the shop people
liked and those they didn't. It's hard to understand just how powerful this
information and testing would be in the offline world - but it's available
online every day.
Leading
UK footwear provider, Schuh, for example, managed to more than double its
conversion rate - the amount of people that actually made a purchase - across
its website by running multiple tests across different parts of the site. Tests
included making small changes to the image sizes on their shoe category pages -
showing larger images and less overall products per page increased conversion
by six per cent.
But
these tools to help businesses are by no means exclusive to the big players.
Small and medium-sized businesses can also use free tools like Google Analytics
to understand what customers are doing on their websites, and applications like
Website Optimiser to fix pages or discover blockages in the buying process.
Businesses can carry out A/B or multivariate tests on their web pages - i.e.
showing different versions of a page to different customers to discover which
versions of a page worked best for them.
As
the economic activities continue to rise across the country, the most
successful e-commerce sites will rise to the top by winning new customers
online. The winners will not be those that have the prettiest designs, or the
flashiest images or videos, but those that understand what their customers
really want by looking at cold, hard numbers. Nigeria is already one of
Africa's leaders in e-commerce, but the position could be consolidated if every
business realised the true power of the data at their fingertips.
SOURCE: THE PUNCH.